Discover Top Posts Tagged with #susan bernofsky

Great writers use language in really weird ways, but if it’s a great writer, the work absorbs the linguistic strangeness. . .

#books #reading #writing #language #susan bernofsky #paul celan #translation

In fact, Briggs’s book, in its elegance, humility and foregrounding of intellectual curiosity, effectively encourages just the sort of subtly nuanced thought that is surprisingly absent from Moser’s reductive and misrepresentative review, which only compounds the prevalent general misunderstanding of translation as a “concrete art” and aids in the vilification and dismissal not only of Briggs but of translation itself along with translators, in a way that has consequences for what and how we read.

Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis, Katrina Dodson, Karen Emmerich, John Keene, Duncan Large, Karen Van Dyck, Lawrence Venuti, and Emily Wilson in a letter to The New York Times re. Kate Briggs’s book “This Little Art”

#Susan Bernofsky #lydia davis #katrina dodson #karen emmerich #john keene #duncan large #karen van dyck #lawrence venuti #Emily Wilson #kate briggs #this little art #benjamin moser #womenintranslation #new york times

From the inside

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions, $16.95).

Yoko Tawada, a Japanese-German author, gets inside the furry bodies of our fuzzy friends in a three-part novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear—and it’s not exactly a Coca-Cola commercial.

The ursine clan’s unnamed forebear writes a memoir of life as a circus bear: She is defrauded by a sea lion and immigrates to Canada. Her daughter, Tosca, narrates the life of her trainer, as if the trainer’s life was more worthy of the telling than her own.

Finally, Tosca bears Knut—yes, the famous German polar bear—and his tale revolves around his surrogate parent, the human Matthias, and his ownrole as the representative of a vanishing species.

It’s an inventive contemporary fable that takes us where we wish we could go—but can’t. Even the polar bears won’t be able to go there for much longer.

#fiction #German #translation #Yoko Tawada #Susan Bernofsky #New Directions