Final Blog post

I had to look up when David Bello’s essay on “Foreign-Soundingness” was written because it felt outdated to me. (it’s 2013) This perhaps has less to do with his technical point, which is that maintaining the source language (in part or in whole) is the best way to retain the authenticity of the source text rather than attempt to make the target language fit the conventions of the source language. (although I’m actually quite open to both approaches) What felt outdated to me is the way this idea is discussed. Bello uses this language of introducing foreignness to a text, or of retaining some authenticity of foreignness, or adding “a flavor of foreign coloring,” the same language used by Diderot and Schleiermacher in the 1700s. (and he is certainly not the only to have done this since of course) Reading it today, I find it not only reeks of Orientalism (esp. for those "small" languages), but also assumes a flawed dichotomy of foreign vs native that I just don’t think can be justified anymore. Bello at one point says of a certain translation of Hindi words – “a linguistic anomaly in English” – that it would require “a translator’s footnote - because we do not know any Hindi.” Given that many of the ~570 million Hindi-speaking people know English, it seems many of those “we” do know Hindi. It turns out, “we” do contain multitudes.

I guess I’m ready for us to change the language around these ideas; do away with foreign and native, foreign and domestic, of equating whatever doesn’t sound “native” as “a representation of the funny ways foreigners speak,” etc. Perhaps moving towards the language of defamiliarization like Bruna Dantas Lobato did in her lecture, or thinking in terms of “translingualism” (“writing that crosses linguistic boundaries and thereby unsettle monolingual norms”) as another speaker, Eugene Ostashevsky has written about. Perhaps doing so would help liberate the translation process/practice to become more fluid and less locked into this binary of making one thing sound like another.

As for book covers, I am very much against placing a snapshot of the movie remake on them.

- Lois

Foreign Words and Familiar Images: Cover Design and the "Foreignisation" of Translation

These texts had me sitting with the idea that every act of communication is, in a way, a translation—whether you’re switching languages, explaining a concept, or even just presenting yourself. Reading David Bellos’s “Fictions of the Foreign” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Clothing of Books alongside Chip Kidd’s TED Talk “The Hilarious Art of Book Design” helped me understand how layered, and sometimes frustrating, that process can be.

Bellos’s essay focuses on how translators manage the “foreignness” of a text. Do we want Dostoyevsky to sound like someone we might bump into at a coffee shop, or like someone undeniably Russian? Bellos warns that too much fluency risks flattening cultural difference. But leaning too hard into foreignness can feel artificial, even comical or mocking. I found myself thinking about times I’ve tried to translate things from one language to another—not just words, but emotions, references, humor—and how often I’ve failed to make them feel right. Bellos made me realize that the translator isn’t just moving a story across language barriers—they’re also negotiating cultural expectations.

Lahiri takes this idea of translation and applies it metaphorically. For her, book covers are the clothing we wrap around stories—and sometimes they fit badly. She describes the sting of seeing her books dressed in exoticized, stereotypical imagery simply because of her name or background. I think for many people, especially those whose languages would experience this kind of treatment, there’s something familiar about being misread based on appearance, or having your story interpreted before it’s even heard. Lahiri’s longing for a uniform—a neutral outfit that avoids judgment—is a very interesting approach to solving this issue in a way that doesn't rely on the knowledge or good decisions of each publisher and translator.

And then comes Chip Kidd, who brings humor and design savvy to the same dilemma: how do you represent a book without reducing it? His TED Talk shows how a good cover doesn’t just decorate a book—it translates its tone, spirit, and purpose into visual language. Some of his designs are playful, others serious, but the best ones spark curiosity without giving everything away. I loved his point that the cover is not the story itself, but an invitation to open it. That tension between intrigue and integrity really stuck with me. I think the idea of cover design being a sort of translation from both Kidd and Lahiri is a different way of framing the issue than I'm familiar with. It's almost like the way many people use clothing as an extension of their identity—and reminds me of how some schools require a uniform so everyone is seen equally. 

What ties all three of these perspectives together is the idea that every form of translation—linguistic, visual, or cultural—is inherently interpretive. It involves decisions about what to keep, what to emphasize, and what to let go. It’s a form of storytelling in itself. And it’s never neutral. As someone who’s still learning how to articulate ideas clearly, and who sometimes worries about being misread or misunderstood, this all feels deeply personal. Whether I’m sharing my work, choosing how to present myself, or just figuring out how to bridge different parts of my life, I realize that I’m constantly translating—not just between languages, but between selves.

Reflections on Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Clothing of Books" (Tennant)

Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay The Clothing of Books made me think about the dominant aesthetic of book covers in France, where white is king. Immediately, my mind conjures the sober stock design of Gallimard jackets with their eggshell palette, clean rectangular lines, and signature red typeface. Gallimard's influence as a publisher is so imperial that their book covers now belong to the nation’s iconography. If you ask me, there is a quintessentially French logic to their style in the same way that the dazzling superabundance of graphic covers in the U.S. reflects a quintessentially American tradition of XL consumer culture and optionality (i.e., the paradox of choice). Given that French history has been molded by secularism and French culture born out of related values, the nation's publishing mechanisms favor the preservation of the author (justified as “faithfulness”) over concessions to a more collaborative and diversified final product. The ubiquity of the Gallimard cover in the French marketplace speaks to (and perpetuates) an underlying belief that illustrations pollute the reading experience, restraining readers' freedom to imagine. The singularity of Gallimard's aesthetic does away with the question of function that troubles Lahiri: "Once the cover exists it's part of the book, and has an effect, either positive or negative. It either attracts or repels the reader." It aims to eliminate the middleman. 

However, as Lahiri points out, the conventions of contemporary publishing show a relationship between reader and book that is "far more mediated.” I cannot help but appreciate the industry's impulse to elevate books into fuller packages adorned with accessories: cover art, blurbs, author bios, milestone banners, anniversary editions, and so on. The jacket represents the designer's investment in the writer’s work and earnest desire to see it succeed. If the book is bad, there is no saving it: the reader remembers a bad book. To quote Roland Barthes: "The brio of the text (without which, after all, there is no text) is its will to bliss: just where it exceeds demand, transcends prattle, and whereby it attempts to overflow, to break through the constraint of adjectives---which are those doors of language through which the ideological and the imaginary come flowing through." It may be naïve and romantic of me, but I find that bliss to be a utopian force that transcends any superficial dressing like a book cover.

What Do the Stories Look Like?: Distillation, Belonging, and Looking Pretty

What Do the Stories Look Like?: Distillation, Belonging, and Looking Pretty

by Meghan Miraglia

Even before I'd reached that part of the TedTalk where Kidd says that book designers have to be interpreters and translators, I thought that covers are a translation of a story - “a distillation” of the text. Book designers take what they interpret to be the emotional core of the text, and they render it the most visible. 

I get really fussy about the physical interaction that the reader has with the book: paper, covers, text, the way the book sits on a table/in your hand…all of that matters, and it impacts the reading experience. I remember the IQ84 cover! The TEDTalk made me curious about what sells in the United States versus in other countries - for instance, on Bookstagram, lots of users will lust over UK book covers because they “look prettier” than the American iteration. Did the book itself matter? Sure. But not as much as the cover.

Lahiri is right - book covers, though not of an author’s choosing, are “another part of me [that have] to be dressed and presented to the world” (10). I’m interested in her conversations around covers as awakening and defining of a text (objectification). I love her early mention of a uniform, which makes me wonder about Fitzcarraldo, with their signature minimalist blue/white uniform. It’s the “branding” of the text as “belonging” to this publisher, not the author. 

Translating "Foreignness"

 I was really intrigued in the reading by the idea the "'The translator’s task is to “transmit this feeling of foreignness to his readers.'” This, in a sense, rubs against Bly's notion of translating into "American" as one of the steps. This way, the source language's vibe or aura is retained rather than erased. This does, as the article states, require some level of familiarity with the language, but I feel the reader could intuitively perceive the retained quality of a language, even if they are barely familiar. I like the notion that we should preserve a certain level of "foreignness" in our translations. It is easy to want a text to feel "American" and perhaps may be more marketable, but at the end of the day, the text was not originally in english and most likely was not written in the context of American culture, and it is okay if the cultural temperature and references are not so surfacely accessible, I don't know think that is the point. Obviously, a translation should not be completely out of reach, and stealth glossing is a helpful tool, but I think to disguise it as something it is not is a disservice to the author and the reader. 

Staged for the Market


The challenge of capturing the "foreign" in translation lies in balancing the text's smoothness and familiarity, as if it were originally written in the target language, with the need to preserve elements of its difference and origin. Translators have long debated this choice. In the past, keeping foreign words or phrases in the text was more acceptable, especially when there was an established cultural familiarity. But representing foreignness isn't straightforward. Often, it depends less on the original language and more on what the receiving culture imagines foreignness to be. This becomes especially complicated when translating from languages that lack a shared history with English, such as Yoruba, where we just have no idea how they are meant to sound. In many cases, making something sound "foreign" in translation only works when it isn't really so foreign to begin with.

Jhumpa Lahiri shares a similar concern when she writes about book covers as an outer layer that introduces the book to the world. Covers speak in a visual language shaped not by the writer, but by designers, editors, and marketing teams. Their choices are often driven by aesthetics, but increasingly by market demands. Like translations that try to preserve the essence of the original, covers aim to convey something of the book's spirit. Yet they, too, are filtered through the tastes, assumptions, and expectations of a particular audience. Lahiri has seen this firsthand in the covers of her own books, images that often reflect stereotypes or simplified projections of who she is. In both translation and cover design, what reaches the reader is shaped by more than the original text. It is shaped by the world the text enters, and by what that world is ready to see.

~Ibrahim 

Last Blog Post

 Chip Kidd Talk: The hilarious art of book design

His job was to tell stories, and talks about book design in relation to understanding what the book is about. The Hepburn is presented as pure content and form form side by side. His emotes with his hand, pointing to the screen passionately about the Jurassic Park graphic he created. I enjoyed his occasional dry humor. His audience loved the book design in relation to phallic drawings, denoting the audience's engagement with the book design. Throughout the talk, he captured the audience with both his jokes and his outfit. It's clear that his work pertains to entertainment of his audience.

Bellos, Fictions of the Foreign:

"No less than 40 percent of all headwords in any large English dictionary are imports from other languages."

This semester, I've been really interested in how language changes with immigration and, perhaps more aggressively, colonization. This quote stood out to me as it points to how current languages are not what they were a few mere centuries ago. In translating Persian for my project, I realize how imperfect my reading of Farsi is, but also that deciphering old Persian is much more difficult. Language changes. We as translators can choose what languages we want to deal with.

Bellos talks about "foreignness" in translations, and the consideration of words translating from one language to another. This is all subjective, as we've discussed with other considerations in class, like the concept of faithfulness. To me, I would need to have a deep understanding of linguistic and history to comment on Bellos's argument.

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Clothing of Books

I am a huge fan of Lahiri's work. I attended a reading in undergrad where she spoke about self-translating her fiction from English to Italian. When she was asked why she chose to translate it herself, she answered along the lines of, "because I could." 

In her talking about "the clothing of books," I was drawn to her talking about "optical echoes." She writes, "I would like it if, even once, a cover for one of my books were designed by someone who knew me well, who deeply knew my work, for whom it really mattered." It's interesting to think about the non-intimate parts of creative writing, mostly in the editorial sphere. A book cover is the first thing I see, and if it's particularly horrendous, it might ruin the book for me. However, if it's a recommendation from a friend, I don't care about the appeal of the book cover as much. Lahiri makes me think about how a book could be an author's life work, but the author may not have much say in what goes on the cover. Where is the balance? I appreciated how this reminded me to stand up for myself when I am face-to-face with a publisher. Lahiri is continuously inspiring me.

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