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.
Hanan
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