Blog Post 9 by Drew

Chip Kidd is so funny. I don’t know what I was expecting from a Ted Talk on book design, but it wasn’t a campy sass master dressed like a sea captain who delivers roughly one joke per ten-second increment. His image vs caption vs image + caption (content/form) discussion was super interesting, and I think the takeaways resonate for writing too. There’s a constant evaluation, at least for me, of how much to explain, vs how much to imply via (hopefully) resonant images. I love the book design with removal pants, and how he compares a cover to a distillation, or a haiku (shoutout Basho, shoutout Tawara).

The David Bellos essay was really fascinating to me, particularly in two contexts: 1) translating Yanitsa Radeva’s poems 2) writing my own poems while I’m still in a translation headspace. He writes, “Foreignizing translation styles bend English into shapes that mirror some limited aspect of the source language, such as word order or sentence structure” (39). I definitely feel that, whether I take an I want this to sound foreign approach or not, the existing syntaxes and constructions in the source language force me to do interesting things in English, which fortunately bears a massive lexicon and a notable openness to experimentation (if not in readership’s aesthetic preferences, at least in the extent to which things can be puzzled out).

Gosh, I love Jhumpa Lahiri. The Clothing of Books is wonderful. May all current Boston University MFA students (or at least… one…) experience a similar level of literary stardom in their alumni futures. Given her interesting pivot to the Italian language, and her essay collection Translating Myself and Others, I was sort of anticipating to see her show up among the readings in this class, though not necessarily in relation to this topic. I am always impressed when nonfiction makes me feel emotional (which has happened a nonzero number of times this semester, so nice work curating readings, Professor!), and the ending here really does the trick. The serendipity of the Morandi and the Matisse—and the resonances they hold, not only for Lahiri, but also outside of her, for us—is such a perfect closing image.

Thank you so much!

Best,

Drew Rollins