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Recently I joke tweeted “What The Nutcracker’s Battle With the Rat King Taught Us About Trump Resistance,” as if I were writing that piece. I’m not. Last week, I traveled to Boston to watch my sister perform in her nineteenth year of Nutcracker, and the next day we sat in the Massachusetts State House, watching the state’s electors vote for Hillary Clinton. It seemed that Hoffmann’s tale had nothing to with 2016, and that issued a challenge.
Thousands of years before genetic research, MRIs, CAT scans and X-rays, we had theater. Not as entertainment, but as technology. That’s the claim of Bryan Doerries’ Outside the Wire, a theater company that brings charged readings of ancient Greek plays to communities who’ve experienced trauma.
I recently spent a long weekend collaborating with friends on a narrative outline for a point-and-click adventure video game. Relying less on twitchy button-mashing and more on logic puzzles, conversation, and critical thinking, the adventure game genre is a good project for a writer.
That number is low, but looks good next to the fact that only about 3% of all the books published in the US are translations, a number that grows even smaller if you focus on literary fiction (roughly 0.7%).
Among the long list of German words that lack a direct English translation, there’s one I’m particularly fond of: nestbeschmutzer. It translates roughly to “one who dirties their own nest” and can be used in the context of a whistleblower, but most often means a denigrator of one’s own country or family.
This ability to slip in and out and between voices has been crucial for my style of work. I’ve always been involved in multiple projects at a time, and while I typically finish translating one book before moving on to the next, there are always edits coming back from authors, or small rush jobs to fit in, and as in life, nothing is neat and clean and separate.
In November of this awful year I emailed my two brothers an article, which I thought really broke things down. This really breaks things down, replied one brother, sending me an article on how to deal with shunt trip fuses and boiler rooms…
Any funeral is poignant. But that’s particularly the case for those who die anonymously, unclaimed by friends or family. In the Netherlands, city poets have responded to the tragedy of “lonely funerals” by researching each deceased person and writing a tailored poem. The poems are short, stark, and moving speculations on identity and loss.
Last week, the House Freedom Caucus released a list of 232 regulations it recommends that Donald Trump overturn when he gets into office. The Caucus recommends overturning OSHA’s Silica Rule, which “engineers controls to keep workers from breathing silica dust.” Their reasoning? The rule “drastically impacts the construction industry.”
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