The Ploughshares Blog

Time 2020-09-28 04:03:19

Web Name: The Ploughshares Blog

WebSite: http://blog.pshares.org

ID:62363

Keywords:

The,Ploughshares,Blog,

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Robinson’s novels are like glaciers. They move slowly, but they leave behind a transformed landscape. In the vast and complex landscape of American novel-writing, Marilynne Robinson’s is a unique and indispensable terrain. Questions about "ethnic literature," its place, and its limits permeate Nam Le’s 2008 short story collection. As he interrogates the term as a sweeping generalization for many kinds of writing, he also explores the conflict around what it means to be Vietnamese and a writer but not necessarily a One of my favorite little known facts about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is that she was a student in Vladimir Nabokov’s European Literature class at Cornell when she was an undergraduate in the 1950s. Nabokov’s influence is seen in many of Ginsburg’s writings. Jaquira Díaz’s 2019 memoir resonated deeply with me in a way that a bronzed Al Pacino never could, and that a book never had. David Karashima’s new book lays bare the invisible structures that support the international career of someone like Murakami: the multiple translators, editors, and publicists that take his work and create it into the product that Western readers then consume. Poets, novelists, and artists of the Anthropocene are using their art to reveal the ties that bind us to that hazy concept of “nature,” and they often start with its most potent symbol, the tree—the embodiment of extreme strength and extreme vulnerability. Hanif Abdurraqib’s 2017 essay collection explores a conflict he sees in his own project, perhaps in any endeavor toward joy: how can one write about music, let alone listen to it or make it, when people are dying? By reading worlds of relentless darkness, repeatedly made new through the language of dreams and fables, we can maybe more deeply access empathy and hope for the world we’re living in. While Addonia’s new novel gives us innumerable examples of what is missing from the lives of his characters, living in a refugee camp after their country is swept into war, each is combatted with a bout of illusion, a tactic to conquer the absences and to enliven what remains: Kathy Acker’s infamous novel includes a section titled “The Persian Poems,” which pairs words written in Farsi alongside their translations in English. What has largely gone unrecognized is that Acker has deliberately mistranslated specific words, bringing an entirely new meaning to this passage, Acker’s craft, and the reader’s internalization

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