1.
A sad coda to The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli.

Julie Curtis describes how Svetlana Petriychuk and Evgeniya Berkovich (respectively the author and director of a 2020 play exploring the online soliciting of young Russian women to become the brides of Isis fighters) have been charged with terrorism offences... According to Curtis, this case is one more example of the current "purge of contemporary culture".

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2.
Advice on writing from Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud and Swing Time.

My favourite of the 10: "Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand -- but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied." Two years before writing these rules, she teased out the ten psychological stages of writing a novel. Nice quote: "It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself."

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3.
More on the alchemy of translation that is explored in Babel by Rebecca F. Kuang and in The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft.

Billie Nathan Setiawan explores the question of why some words are so damn difficult to translate from one language to another (in this case, from English to Indonesian, and vice versa). The answer boils down to culture and world view, of course. Language is not made up of abstract components whose direct equivalents you can look up in a table. It's the embodiment of a distinct cultural reality, with language and culture constantly influencing each other.



Also interesting in this context was a conversation between a writer (Carolina Schutti) and a translator (Jen Calleja). Interconnectedness is the theme that emerges most strongly:

Calleja: "My biography and all translators’ biographies affect their translations: because we’re individuals with different experiences, who have read and watched and listened to a range of things, which result in wildly or subtly different interpretations of the texts we then translate with the personal chest of words we reach for almost without thinking, or particular words we research and find often by chance and get excited about."

Schutti: "Translating literature... is and remains magical... Language influences our thoughts and therefore also our actions, and this richness must be preserved at all costs. Translation is the key to this: by taking on a work, translators are paying homage to a foreign language and culture. Translation is therefore not only about magic, but also about respect and appreciation."

Translation needs to be used wisely, however, as Carl Mika, referring to the linguistic situation in New Zealand, points out. The tokenistic use of an indigenous language risks eliding vastly different cultural underpinnings: "From a Maori perspective of the interconnectedness of things, there is a particularly isolating, divisive tendency in English, which diminishes full Māori meanings... The problem for te reo Maori in [some] situations is that a term’s 'essence'... has been modified to refer and equate to an English language term, and also to conform to a colonising worldview in the background... We see a warping of te reo Maori in these circumstances -- a negating of its spiritual character in order to refer to more tangible things... Wherever we see the naturally expansive nature of te reo Māori being 'disciplined' by other registers of language, we need to consider withdrawing it. We would simply advise policymakers and legislators to use English terms if they are referring to a non-Maori worldview."


Aotearoa, 2002

And, as if translation per se didn't hold enough minefields, consider the phenomenon of simultaneous interpretation, which involves working with a continuous stream of speech, and listening, recalling, and translating while still listening... Patricia Roman explains that the brains of students who have completed training in simultaneous interpreting actually show a thickening of the cerebral cortex in the areas responsible for speech processing and working memory. Jeez, I find it hard enough to remember and reproduce a phone number that someone has just given me...


It's the potential requirement for endless (and expensive) translation that made ASEAN choose English as its working language, for better or worse

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4.
We all love a list...

A few weeks ago, The New York Times produced a list of the 100 best books of the 21st century (being as how we're a quarter of the way through and all that). The titles were picked by 503 writers, poets, critics, "and other book lovers". Of course, there's an American skew to all this, as it included only books published in the United States (although translations were eligible). Nevertheless, I'm never averse to hearing about good books, and I'd actually read only nine of this Big 100, so it can be mined for additions to my already-unmanageably-long reading list. In fairness, quite a number of these titles were already on that list, so they've just needed to have priority stars attached.

Of course, there was the predictable outcry. No-one agrees with anyone else's rankings. Ever. It didn't help the issue of credibility when it was noted that Stephen King had nominated himself...

Then the NYT made another list, crowdsourced this time. I'd read 15 of these, but seven overlapped with the "official" list.

Finally, I spotted a rival list drawn up by Becca Freeman, whom I'd come across on Substack. She runs a site called Book Enthusiast, and she plotted the choices made by her readers. I'd read six of these, and of that half-dozen, four had already cropped up on other lists.


Just some of my To Reads... Time is running out for physical books this year. Some of these will go into the suitcase that's going to stay with a friend, so there might not be Velvet Cushion entries for a really long time...

Which brings us to what Becca Freeman calls the "three-fers", because they crop up on all three lists. Of these I've read just two: My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante, and Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. But the other 13 are obviously very interesting and list-worthy. To gain accolades from such different audiences, they must have more than a little something.