Italiani in traduzione

I have never been honest with myself. It’s an attribute that has always disturbed me. I can’t accept even the most basic truths. What I am good at is coming up with excuses; it’s easy for me to invent excuses. And Giuseppe Trevisani, wonderful guy, is my favorite excuse of all. Many years ago, Trevisani, a translator, wrote an ending to a short story that, when I read it at the age of sixteen, led me to believe that the evil I felt inside me might actually be the mark of an exceptional character. Domenico Starnonte, "Tortoiseshell," The New Yorker

 

I read “Perfection” in a single hypnotized sitting. Time disappeared, as it does for Anna and Tom. In the following days, I described the book to myself with words like “flat” and “clinical” and “affectless.” I thought of it as a “case study” or a “kind of ethnography.” Reading it again a week later, I had the impression of meeting a beautiful, well-dressed person for the second time and realizing only then, with some embarrassment, that they were smart and funny and sensitive. “Perfection” is dense with ideas, feelings, political insights, beautiful turns of phrase, unexpected observations about ordinary occurrences—all the qualities I look for (and appreciate in real time) when reading fiction but which had, in this case, been obscured by proper nouns and mimetic precision. This is intentional, of course. Alice Gregory, The New Yorker 

il romanzo di Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection è stato pubblicato da Fitzcarraldo Editions e tradotto da Sophie Hughes

The Most Beautiful Words in the English Language

If you were to ask 100 different people to pick the most beautiful word in the English language, you’d probably get 100 different answers. There’s a seemingly endless list to choose from, as some words evoke pleasant memories, while others sound mellifluous to the ear. While there’s no way to reach a universal consensus, many esteemed linguists have favorites of their own. These are a few of them.

Ailurophile

Accomplished linguist Dr. Robert Beard compiled a list of what he personally considers to be the 100 most beautiful English words. Up first — at least alphabetically — is “ailurophile,” which appropriately sounds quite alluring. The word, which essentially means “cat lover,” is derived from the Greek ailuros, meaning “cat,” and phile, meaning “lover.” Its origins date back to the 1910s, though the word continues to make the hearts of linguists purr today. Not only does it sound pleasant, but it also evokes the beautiful connection that humans have with their beloved pets.

più sorprendente, secondo me:

Cellar Door

We’d be remiss if we left off what some consider to be the most beautiful pairing of words in the English language: “cellar door.” Many have praised this combo for its euphonious sound. Journalist H. L. Mencken called it “intrinsically musical, in clang-tint and rhythm,” while Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien was a noted fan of its beauty. In 1963, author C. S. Lewis admitted his astonishment when he saw the phrase written as “Selladore,” which he found an “enchanting proper name.” Bennett Kleinma, Word Smarts

 

A Comma in the Blood

The Italian author Natalia Ginzburg examined a wide range of topics, but it was not until the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics that she chose to write about her Jewishness. Her piece, bluntly titled “The Jews” (“Gli Ebrei”), appeared in the daily La Stampa on Sept. 14, 1972, nine days after the killings, and has recently been translated into English for the first time. Its perspective on the tensions surrounding the relationship between Jews and the state of Israel is acutely relevant in the wake of Oct. 7. We also now have the immediate responses to her provocative essay from fellow Italian intellectuals and authors, including the likes of Alberto Moravia and Primo Levi. These can be found, translated into English and with commentary by the literary critic Domenico Scarpa, in the collection Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies. Kenneth Sherman, Tablet

la compassione universale, schierarsi con i perdenti, è morale?

Is Careerism Ruining College?

The fundamental questions: Have the scales of academia—weighed down by soaring tuition and the expensive real world that awaits Gen Z college grads—tipped too far toward pre-professionalism, a term for careerism on steroids? And are students too focused on getting into the right campus clubs and nabbing the perfect internships to reap the advantages of a diverse, liberal-arts education? 

For Sangeeta Bhatia ’90, liberal arts and high-level career success are not contradictory concepts—they’re directly related. While Bhatia says her parents told her she could choose from three careers, doctor, engineer, or entrepreneur (she became all three, with a PhD to boot), she feels her coursework in humanities was key to her ultimate success as a biomedical entrepreneur.  [...]

“I describe the process of invention as a bit like writing a song,” Bhatia says. “You start in one direction and make it up as you go. You form collabs with others. You riff. Creating something out of nothing and imagining the future requires inspiration—and to be inspired, students need to be exposed to as much outside of their field as in it.” Will Bunch, Brown Alumni Magazine

leggi anche The Gender Q, sempre sul Brown Alumni Magazine, 

 

How Indo-European languages went global

How did the language you’re reading this in come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian plateau, northern India and parts of Asia. Its members are spoken by almost half of all living people, and they all stem from a common source. English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse and many others (more than 400 still exist) can all be traced back to this starting point: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Laura Spinney’s new book tells the story of how a language that may initially have been spoken as a kind of lingua franca by only a few dozen people evolved into the mother tongues of billions. Henry Oliver, The Guardian

il libro di cui si parla è Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global di Laura Spinney pubblicato da William Collins

Epic win: why the Odyssey is having a moment

We live in an Odyssey time. The Greek epic about Odysseus’s tortuous, adventure-filled journey home after the end of the Trojan war, composed probably between the late eighth and late seventh century BC, is surfacing in our culture right now. Great artworks from the past, ones that are read and reread across centuries, have a way of doing that. You examine them on a particular day, and their intricacies look suddenly singular, different from how they seemed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, yesterday; they offer something new, something that illuminates the world afresh. It is the Odyssey’s moment to catch the light. Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian 

in particolare segnaliamo la nuova traduzione in inglese dell'Odissea di Daniel Mendelsohn, in uscita alla fine di aprile presso Penguin Classics

Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168

Executive Order 14168, issued on 20 January, is titled ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. In the book I published last year, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I noted that the campaign against ‘gender ideology’ was very late to gain ground in the US. The term itself was coined by the Vatican back in the 1990s. It was circulated in Latin America by both Catholic and evangelical churches (thus helping to mend a rift between them), and taken up by the World Congress of Families, especially in 2017, when Trump representatives were in attendance. It was an incendiary topic in presidential campaigns in Costa Rica, Uganda, South Korea, Taiwan, France, Italy, Argentina and Brazil, to name a few, though the US press hardly noticed. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán effectively allied with the Russian Orthodox Church in condemning ‘gender ideology’; in turn, Putin declared his fidelity to J.K. Rowling’s critique of trans rights, asserting that the ‘gender freedoms’ associated with ‘the West’ were a threat to Russia’s spiritual essence and national security. The last two popes have both taken a position against gender ideology; Pope Francis, despite his occasional progressivism, has accelerated the discourse, insisting that gender is a threat to men and women, to civilisation, the family and the natural order of human relations. Judith Butler, lrb

Judith Butler è una filosofa americana, insegna a Berkeley.

George Orwell and me

Richard Blair didn’t have the easiest start in life. At three weeks old, he was adopted. Nine months later, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died at 39, after an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic she was given for a hysterectomy. Family and friends expected Blair’s father, Eric, to un-adopt him. Fortunately, Eric, better known as George Orwell, was an unusually hands-on dad for the 1940s.

Orwell and Eileen had wanted children for years, but he was sterile and it is likely that she was infertile as a result of uterine cancer. Having finally agreed to adopt after their struggle, Orwell was not going to give up on his son. “The thing he wanted most in life was to have children,” says Blair. “And now I was his family.” Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian

il figlio adottivo di George Orwell parla del suo avventuroso e fragile padre

Buone Pasque

 

Buone Pasque!

The CIA Book Club

In, I think, November 1978, I got a call from a rather grand British journalist who’d heard that I was about to go to Moscow. “A Russian friend of mine would dearly like the latest volume of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. I don’t suppose you’d smuggle it in for him?” I did, of course, disguising it rather feebly by wrapping it in the dust jacket of the most boring book I owned: Lebanon, A Country in Transition. A customs official at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport flicked through it briefly, but even though the text was in Russian he didn’t spot what it was about. Two nights later, near the entrance to Gorky Park, I handed over the book to a shifty character who seemed to be a supplier of forbidden goods to the dissident community. He gave me a small 18th-century icon in exchange for it. 

It’s only now, all these years later, that I’ve realised I was almost certainly a rather naive mule for a CIA scheme to smuggle subversive books through the iron curtain. John Simpson, The Guardian

recensione a: The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War, Charlie English (William Collins), l'affascinante storia di come la CIA faceva passare libri clandestini oltre la Cortina di Ferro.