Alan Jacobs

Is this Jane Austen as a girl?

Variable-focus eyeglasses — ideal for distribution to poor people around the world.

All translation is interpretation, since it is a choice among meanings; but translation is not the same activity as interpretation. A good translation of a troubling text will preserve the reason for the trouble, and thereby leave open the gates of interpretation. The great Thomist historian of philosophy Etienne Gilson, who served on the French delegation to the San Francisco Conference in 1945, rejected a French translation of the United Nations Charter because it erased certain cunning ambiguities in the original, observing that “il faut traduire le texte dans tout son obscurité.” One must translate the text in all its obscurity: The fidelity of the translator must include a commitment to honoring the density and the alienness of the original. The translator must not preempt the mental toil of the reader.

As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them.

What did Halberstam think he was going to get from Jordan that Jordan hadn’t said a thousand times already? I don’t think there is any way to be interesting once you’ve been asked the same question over and again. The first time your daughter asked you why the stars shine so brightly, I bet you gave some intricate astronomical explanation. The second time, you talked about how they would look even brighter out in the desert, and the third time you said that stars always give 110 percent. It’s human nature.

W. H. Auden used to say that he could only evaluate someone’s thinking — and especially their critical judgments — if he knew what their imaginary Eden looked like. He suggested that everyone fill out the survey below, and indeed filled it out himself. He wrote, for example, that his ideal religion was “Roman Catholic in an easygoing Mediterranean sort of way. Lots of local saints.” He believed that public statues should be “Confined to famous defunct chefs,” and insisted that the only sources of public information should be technical journals and gossip. For self-examination:

• landscape:

• climate:

• ethnic origin of inhabitants:

• language:

• weights & measures:

• religion:

• size of capital:

• form of government:

• sources of natural power:

• economic activities:

• means of transport:

• architecture:

• domestic furniture and equipment:

• formal dress:

• sources of public information:

• public statues:

• public entertainments:

Fidelity matters less for popular music than for books. This seems counterintuitive, but it’s true. I was happy with my copy of Abbey Road despite its abysmal sound quality and the fact that - quelle horreur! - I had only recorded one channel of a stereo mix. Throughout the 1960s and well into the 70s, the main way a lot of people listened to music was through crappy a.m. car radios and crappy a.m. transistor radios. And need I mention eight-tracks? The human ear and the human brain seem to be very adept at turning lo-fi music signals into fulfilling listening experiences - the auditory imagination somehow fills in the missing signal. Early MP3s, though they were often ripped at very low bit rates, sounded just fine to the vast majority of the music-listening public, so quality was no barrier to mass piracy. A lo-fi copy of a book, in contrast, is a misery to read. Blurry text, missing pages, clunky navigation: it takes a very dedicated reader to overcome even fairly minor shortcomings in a copy of a book. That’s one of the main reasons that even though bootlegged copies of popular books have been freely available online for quite some time now, few people bother with them.

The overwhelming emphasis on materials and process inherent to fine printing is a tremendous obstacle to the act of reading and the ritual of sitting down to take in a story or poem. Fine press books have ceased to have anything to do with this ritual. In planning these editions, the fine press publisher asks (as Ms Warde noted) How should it look? not What must it do? As a result, the deluxe limited editions are not about content—they are about materials and process. They are exclusively about form, and as such, they are prime examples of function following form: the cardinal sin of design.

If these undeniably beautiful fine press editions, for which every detail is carefully considered and laboriously crafted, is inherently an example of bad design, then what book format can claim to be a successful example of good design? The paperback. The hastily designed, poorly printed, glorified pad of cheap paper is a far more successful piece of design than the fine press book. Although not necessarily handsome, the paperback book can be considered the more beautiful, more successful form because it selflessly gives itself over to the content. Rarely do we concern ourselves with the welfare of our paperbacks.This is because we are too busy reading them. The books are doing their job. Isn’t this the most basic test of successful design, that the object in question is used almost without thought? Is this an attribute the fine press book can claim?

You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

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