But, in the TED Talk, why did his glasses only have one temple?

Okay, covers etc. and foreignization are the main themes of the readings for this (final) week. I’ll take them one at a time. The Knopf designer is quite funny, almost all of his jokes work well, his covers seem to work well too, although it might be a case of picking covers that were especially especial and thus suggested approaches that were successfully successful. See, as a counterexample, the (hopefully attached) cover of Knopf’s A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, where the butterfly feels a bit disappointing. He also looks a little silly next to the much more earnest treatment that Jhumpa Lahiri gives the subject in The Clothing of Books. Lahiri is good on the details, her title even reminds us of the wonderful cloth of a clothbound edition, even as it aims at the larger issue of the physical presentation of the book in general. I like her remarks about editorial series, just thinking about rows and rows of uniform covers, the contents left mysterious, is the stuff that my own personal-library dreams are made of. I also have a fondness for the academic library rebinding of books into very heavy, identical green or red volumes with the titles and authors depressed into the spines. Certain publishing houses seem to do better than others as far as her issues of overdressing go—I am partial to New Directions, especially before they started allowing color on their covers. Recycling a cover wholesale from one book to another is nightmarish, as far as I’m concerned. Lahiri’s points are also specifically well informed by her multi-lingualism, her familiarity with non-American publishing markets, and her experiences of publishers trying to exoticize her covers along stereotypical, foreignizing lines. These days, even large swathes of the reading public seem daunted by the difficulty of books and need all the encouragement they can get to actually make it from one cover to another, and if that means over-ornamenting the books, it seems, to me, like an acceptable trade off. About the David Bellos article, his ultimate conclusion seems reasonable, translating the content of the book is enough of a challenge that trying to affect a style which represents the foreign language context is maybe a losing battle. One of the most convincing reasons for this is that the audience who is meant to benefit from the supposed French-ness of a French novel in English translation, for example, is exactly that group of people who are unequipped to make an informed judgement about the success or failure of such an effort, that is to say, English speakers who are not familiar with the French context. (One could try to argue that they have, at one time or another, visited France, and thus can evaluate such things “quite well, actually,” however language is an important element of culture. Additionally, a speaker of both French and English could pass such a judgement, but only in a way which is already informed by their familiarity with the French. That is, it's a Catch 22.) I especially like the implication that Bellos makes that, because English has become the dominant (leading) international language of media and business, everyday phrases from other languages are less commonly learned and naturalized into the knowledge basis of English monoglots.

-Elijah

Here is the cover of that book I mentioned from Knopf: