In praise of glowing mushrooms and Virginia Woolf's sister

In “Fictions of the Foreign,” David Bellos speaks to the challenge of preserving difference in prose without exoticizing (or otherwise diminishing) the text. To flatten a book stylistically into an imagined neutral English might be to lose something critical—but, on the other hand, he points out, to attempt to render something as “foreign-sounding” can often be an equally harmful endeavor, relying on the target culture’s idea of what the source language/culture’s foreignness looks and sounds like. At best, it's not quite true (a foreign text is not foreign in its source language and culture); at worst, tropey, reinforcing existing stereotypes.

Thinking about translating for an American readership, a lot of this strikes me as an issue not with translation, but with the literary landscape at large. Not only is English, as Bellos points out, a dynamic language that has borrowed much of its vocabulary from other languages and continues to evolve and absorb words and characteristics from other languages, but the US is also a culture of many cultures, each with unique storytelling and literary traditions. The idea that there’s a standard or neutral literary English, and that deviation from this immediately screams foreignness, strikes me as false, and maybe also points to a kind of failure of imagination, a sign that the American literary landscape may not yet fully reflect or embrace the diversity of languages, cultures, thought, storytelling traditions, styles/genres, etc, that exist across its readership and authorship. 

Chip Kidd and Jhumpa Lahiri speak to the translation work of designing book covers. The designer, Kidd articulates, has to be an interpreter and a translator. They are charged with (yet another delightfully impossible!) translation task: rendering the essence of a book into a single image. In “The Clothing of Books,” Jhumpa Lahiri speaks not only to this (oftentimes opaque) process, but also its re-translation across borders. According to editors, she writes, “a cover in one country never works in another.” I am skeptical of these editors. Having spent so much time with Uds. brillan en lo oscuro—where I find the cover of the Spanish language edition hauntingly beautiful and the English language one kind of appalling—I find myself wondering if this industry standard is a correct one. I love those glowing mushrooms, and personally think they transcend borders and visual vocabularies :)

I think both these issues— “readability” and the imagined appeal of the cover — speak to the tension that arises in trying to make art marketable, in one country or many, which—what a privilege to (hypothetically) create art and live off of it!—but also, how limiting to have market forces so significantly shape what's produced. Not a unique thought, I know. One thing I loved reading about in "The Clothing of Books" that felt like it pushed gently against this prioritization of marketability was the example of Virginia Woolf sitting down with her sister and giving an oral synopsis of the book for her sister to distill into a cover. That stayed with me, the beauty of translation that arises from a conversation, a relationship, a shared moment. 

Abbey