MEMBER BLOG TAG: identity
| Sunday, May 2, 2010 8:48AM | | | | New European Fiction | Tags: European literature, translation, European languages
| | | This event in part was a celebration of Best European Fiction 2010, the newly launched anthology. Aleksandar Hemon, who edited the volume, moderated this panel and did a generous job of it. He and Colum McCann began by talking about the fact that only 3% of literary work in this country is translated from other languages and that work seldom finds a mainstream audience here. European governments have helped fund this new enterprise published by Dalkey.
What follows is a very imperfect attempt to render some of the conversation that took place. Apologies to speakers for inaccuracies.
Hemon said he'd never met a writer who reads books only in his/her own language. That the project of translation is inherent in literature.... | | | | | | | Tuesday, July 28, 2009 11:54AM | | | | Identity | Tags: Ravens, Outer Hebrides, Identity, Scotland
| | | | Nationalism is a sort of fantasy, one that may be either beautiful or vicious but is really an illusion in the end. By birth I am Jewish on one side and Scottish on the other. The Jewish side, despite or because of being completely secular, was always entirely dominant. With my brother and sister, I always called myself "Jewish," but for us, as for many families where I was growing up, "Jew" meant essentially a romantic renegade (a "Commie" as they said, which was very much an epithet of pride). After growing to maturity, I realized that stereotype was every bit as limiting as any other, and resigned myself to the rather bland identity of an "American." I doubt it had ever crossed... | | | | | | | Sunday, December 21, 2008 1:43PM | | | | Learning to Speak, Part Four | Tags: Xiaolu Guo, the novel, the dictionary, learning a new language, language and identity, 2008 PEN World Voices Festival, panel moderated by Sam Tanenhaus
| | | Learning to Speak, Part Four
IV.
Xiaolu Guo's linguistic marriage of two tongues and their temperaments corresponds, in her novel, to the mating of a British man and a Chinese woman. Her book, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, might be called mongrel, but is it promiscuous in the Johnsonian sense? Maybe not. Eventually, her lovers part, after Z. has an abortion and after her application for an extension of her visa to stay in England is denied by the Chinese government. This was never to be a sunnily post-romantic, twenty-first-century tale of girl-meets-boy, nor a serene account of language-meets-language. Instead, the mergers are difficult, fractious, violent, incomplete, short-term, as notable for their conflicts and contradictions as for anything shared harmoniously in common.
Like the... | | | | | | | Saturday, December 1, 2007 12:52PM | | | | The Yau Identity | Tags: John Yau, The Bourne Identity,
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He was affable, and stared into space when he wasn’t drinking coffee, but when I saw him from only a few feet away I realized what an effort you had to make--blindly, so to speak, in the darkness of the body--in order to look always the same to others and to yourself. Jean Genet
No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. Ralph Ellison
a mia mi nori typo et? Rosa Salazar
“I Was Born...”
Open on a body surrendered to a motion not its own, seen from below, afloat on the agitated surface of murky blue water filling the movie screen. It isn’t the start of Sunset Boulevard,... | | | | | |
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