‘If I had known she were heading for Tokyo then, and if I had known she thought of Tokyo as a city of zombies, I would have wanted to know, of course, whether she saw me that way, too.’
Toshiki Okada’s ‘Breakfast’ seems as though it ought to provide plenty of material for a discussion of the challenges with which it confronts a translator. Here is one candidate: its punctuation. The punctuation is decidedly non-English. How does one translate a comma from Japanese into Englis…
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Ariel Saramandi on her experience teaching in a lycée in Mauritius.
Fiction by Sidik Fofana, set in the South.
Kevin Maxwell on the police in the UK.
Morgan Parker and Rachel Long in conversation.
Poetry by Danez Smith, author of Don't Call Us Dead.
‘He was long and white; his hands especially were long and white, and he sewed; he looked after the linen; he worked as a woman would; he lived in the house; he didn’t speak, he was rarely spoken to.’
Translated from the French by Stephanie Smee.
‘How does a person waste her twenties like that? The answer of course being easily indeed. As easy as can be.’
‘What a strange, terrible, exciting present – something you have to defile in order to appreciate.’
‘My wife and I lay side by side, the bear looming over us in the same way a crucifixion scene looms above the pews inside a Catholic church.’
Short fiction by Naomi Ishiguro.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley on why The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is the best book of 2015.
'I met Ian Fleming at Cape's annual party. Jonathan Cape made no secret of disliking Fleming, had read only the first chapter of Casino Royale and nothing whatever of his subsequent books.'
