“The recent burst of fictional resurrections of the Seventies — the most acclaimed novels of recent years among them — doesn’t just represent the establishment of a new consumer market. The novelists who have lately returned to the Seventies seem to be making a stronger claim: that there is something uniquely vital to the decade, and in fact uniquely to be missed.”
Tag: Winter 2014
Loss, Betrayal, and Inaccuracy: A Translator’s Handbook
“If this much loss comes with the translation of a single word, it’s hard to imagine the worlds that are lost with the rendering of an entire novel. But the crucial thing to remember – I often tell myself – is that it doesn’t matter. Loss is invisible; it is what makes it through the net that matters.”
When James Met Jean-Jacques: How Rousseau Cured Boswell of Calvinism
“Boswell had been raised in the dour Church of Scotland, where the worst of Scottish weather and Scottish Calvinism met to form a perfect storm of fear and trembling.” And so, while on the Grand Tour, the young man turned to the author of Emile and The Social Contract, who had “succeeded in the redoubtable task of uniting, if only on the subject of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Catholics and Protestants, monarchic France and republican Geneva.”