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Photo of New York City by Kevin / Stock.adobe.com
What is lost when a language dies? Our columnist considers the loss of languages across time and wonders what it would look like to re-Babel th…
Veronica Esposito
December 11, 2024The Christie Archive Trust, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Who is the world’s most translated author? Agatha Christie? Antoine de Saint-Exupéry? Lewis Carroll? It depends on how you coun…
Illustration by William Wallace Denslow from The Wizard of Oz, 1900 / Wikimedia Our columnist looks at the smallest language on earth—both deliberately simple and full of ambiguity—and…
Photo of Dust Breeding, by Man Ray, ca. 1920, by Liquid Liquid / Flickr.com Our columnist looks back through the centuries to rekindle our fascination with dust. Using the word itself as…
Pages from the Voynich Manuscript by IanDagnall Computing / Alamy.com What does it say about our society that we are so fascinated by an object that seems to retain a meaning that nobody on earth…
August 13, 2024Can translation make us mentally healthier? Can adding new words to the English language somehow increase the amount of positive emotions that we experience on earth? This, in short, is the argument…
Photo by Karolina Grabowska / Pexels.com From the missing work of Sappho to Lucy Ellmann’s thousand-page, stream-of-consciousness novel Ducks, Newburyport, our columnist considers the linguistic,…
Photo by ink drop / Stock.adobe.com Going back to the medieval period, the word besa is a small word with large implications throughout Albanian society, from law to literature to history. And in…
April 3, 2024Photo by Katie Barrett / Unsplash In her ongoing column about untranslatable words, Veronica Esposito here considers the Dutch concept of niksen—to do nothing. But is niksen real…
Photos of Handley Cellars Painted Mural at the AV Historical Museum courtesy of Courtney DeGraff / Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association / avwines.com In her column for this issue, Veronica…
February 6, 2024Photo by New Africa / Adobestock.com In her column Untranslatable, Veronica Esposito considers why various words are so difficult to translate. Here, she considers how hygge pres…
Photo of Kim Yuna, courtesy of UPI / Alamy Stock Photo / Molly Riley Is this idea of mass frustration distinctly Korean, or is it more international in scope? In her ongoing column on untranslata…
October 19, 2023Photo by Enrique / stock.adobe.com In her ongoing column of untranslatable words, Veronica Esposito considers the Japanese art of wabi-sabi and how its iconic image of an aged, cracke…
Photo courtesy of Castle Rock Entertainment / RGR Collection / Alamy Stock Photo From the Middle Ages to Seinfeld, schlemiel and schlimazel characters enjoy an interesting history. Veronica Esposi…
September 5, 2023In her column Untranslatable, Veronica Esposito considers why various words are so difficult to translate. Here, she looks at the famously difficult Tshilubà word ilunga and wonders wha…
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1817), oil on canvas, 119.5 x 99.5 x 9 cm bpk Bildagentur / Hamburger Kunsthalle, SHK / Elke Walford / Art Resource, NY What is sehns…
In her new, ongoing column, Veronica Esposito highlights an untranslatable word—its history, its contemporary usage, and why it’s so hard to translate. To begin this new project, Esposito delves into…
Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and other Latin American women writers are responding to themes that particularly speak to a younger, female audience—bodily autonomy, redefiniti…
Still from Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Lilies Films / Arte / Hold Up Films, 2019) What to make of the arrival of an LGBT period drama from the time of Louis XV into the twenty-fi…
January 11, 2021Barbara Epler started working at New Directions after graduating from college in 1984, and she has been its president and publisher since 2011. In 2015 Poets & Writers…
December 6, 2020Since 2003, Jessica Cohen has published over twenty books translated from Hebrew to English. Among other honors, she shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for…
October 27, 2020Ari Larissa Heinrich / Photo by Tara Pixley Ari Larissa Heinrich is the translator of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre (New York Review Books) and Chi Ta-wei’s The M…
Margaret Jull Costa is one of the most accomplished and decorated translators currently at work. A translator for over thirty years, she debuted with a translation of The Hero of the Big Ho…
August 31, 2020Yasmine Seale is a writer and literary translator living in Istanbul. Her essays, poetry, visual art, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely, including in Harper’…
June 22, 2020Photo by Camila Valdés Megan McDowell has translated many contemporary authors from Latin America and Spain, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin…
December 19, 2024
December 02, 2024
