Proust’s Jewish Question

At some point in his later years, Marcel Proust wrote to a friend that he had stopped visiting the graves of his maternal ancestors:

There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.

This enigmatic sentence has been cited by dozens of scholars as evidence of something essential about Proust’s relationship to his Jewishness. But what exactly does it indicate? Does it reveal his desire to sever connections with his family’s Jewish past? Or does it show a nostalgia for Jewish ritual and a regret about the factors—illness, assimilation, the passage of time—that led to its loss? Maurice Samuels, The New York Review of Books

Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries

Il titolo completo di questo articolo è "What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now" e il sottotilo, ‘Romantasy’ novels are booming when romance in general is in decline.

Riusciranno elfi sexy, cavalcatori di draghi scatenati e fate vogliose a salvare l’editoria? Il romantasy oggi genera 20 milioni di copie all’anno. Anna Louie Sussman, The Wall Street Journal

The many Machiavellis

Up to a point, to understand him [Machiavelli, n.d.r.] is to understand the Renaissance. But understanding Machiavelli has never been easy. Philosophers as different as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci all claimed him as a predecessor, but each seemed to embrace a different Machiavelli. To Rousseau, he was a republican; to Schmitt, a realist; to Gramsci, a guide for revolutionaries. All agreed, however, that his searching investigations of human agency had launched a new epoch in political thought. Julianne Werlin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

recensione al libro di Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, uscito di recente per University of Chicago Press 

Edmund White

After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction. Neil Bartlett, The Guardian

ci piace ricordarlo in questa foto, davanti ai suoi libri 

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