I wrote last week about how languages are presented in other languages in novels and wandered into thinking about translation and philosophies of. As it turns out Michael Hofmann, the translator of some of Swiss…
I’ve been reading some fiction in translation lately and it’s got me thinking about how authors present and represent other languages in the language they’re writing in. I’m thinking in the vein of Cormac McCarthy…
Unlike the annual delivery of hay for my mother’s horse, which it took me years to realize was not coincidentally falling at the same (goddamn) time as my visit home every summer but in fact…
Although I don’t travel so often, in my years of occasional blogging I’ve developed a bad habit of stockpiling material for mammoth “My Trip” posts and then never quite finishing them. This one’s a messy…
In the way of books talking to one another it seems entirely appropriate that the book I gave up on this past week was mentioned in the opening pages of the book I picked up…
I realized the other day that I had been back in BC for one whole year. This also means most of my books (and some assorted other flotsam) have now been lurking in a dark…
I had some things I was going to say about dialogue today, but in thinking about talking, I got distracted by this question: Why couldn’t I have chosen work that would allow me to listen…
When we were growing up our Vancouver cousins used to spend a month each summer in the Gulf Islands, and for a few summers running we got to join them for a week. Once they…
It’s been so long since we got home from our trip to Arizona and California (and a tiny impromptu bit of Death Valley, Nevada), but there were great bookstores and not all the books bought…
A few years ago my partner and I spent a couple of months in Argentina. The idea before we left was that we would spend the first month in Buenos Aires and in addition to…