When the NME voted him 26th in its annual Cool List, one place above his hero Dr Dre, [James] Murphy just found this preposterous. ‘Things like that make me want to go home and never come out again,’ he says.
Ostler has faith in a virtual system, which he claims will revolutionize global communications, and make foreign language learning a thing of the past. The traditional culture of Theravada Buddhism may not be the most receptive context for such radical change, but the internet serves as a low-cost, low-risk testing ground for new translation technologies. Google Translate, Babel Fish, and Microsoft’s Bing Translator all offer instant, automatic translation across a range of languages, and are constantly expanding their services. The results are often riddled with mistakes, sometimes amusingly. But Ostler believes that improvements in the technology will eventually ‘remove the requirement for a human intermediary to interpret or translate.’ Printed texts and recorded speeches will be accessible to anyone with the right software as 'virtual media.’It is a bold vision of the future, and a particularly attractive one to Ostler, who is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. A technological revolution could save declining tongues from extinction. Those who now neglect their traditional regional language in favor of English would no longer need a lingua franca to access the same commercial and cultural opportunities. For Ostler, this is not just a desirable outcome. It also affirms 'the social order created by mother tongues, where each community has its own language, as if by nature.’ He does not admit the irony that this natural order could only be enforced by digital means, but the belief in its enduring integrity is perhaps enough. Such beliefs, he argues, can be a powerful force for change: 'The survival of a lingua franca is always a matter of confidence and ideology as much as reasoned calculation.’
Burrator Reservoir, Sharpitor, Devon, UK
If there is such a thing as world literature, it is because today’s most interesting writers are also well‑travelled readers and a lot of what they read is in translation. An up-and-coming Colombian novelist might be inspired not just by Borges, Conrad and Faulkner, but by contemporary novelists from Asia, Africa and Europe; his literary response to their work will go on to influence what his contemporaries on the other side of the world write next. These complex patterns of cross-fertilisation would end overnight if it were not for literary translators and the publishers who support them. So you’d think people would thank us, wouldn’t you?Well, sometimes they do, but in the next breath they’ll tell you what a terrible career move you’ve made. To a degree, they’re right, because the pay is pretty appalling. Although some translators get a sliver of the royalties, most work for a flat fee. We who translate from non-western languages will often discover, if a book becomes a world phenomenon, that most other translations will be from our translation and not the original. But by and large, we receive no extra fee and it is only when those working from our translations send us frantic emails that we discover how far our words have travelled.
A scene, unlike a description, not only has a beginning, a middle and an end, but by the time it’s over, something has changed, something has happened without which the story can’t continue. Each scene must be necessary to the narrative. It’s probably because I’m the mother of small children, but it often helps me to think of my novel as a building constructed of Legos of varying shapes, colors and sizes. Each scene is a single Lego piece that must snap into the larger edifice. Every Lego block of a scene both builds on and holds up the others.When rewriting, I inevitably find passages that aren’t necessary to the plot. They hang around like the random blocks left in the box when you’re done building the Lego Atlantis Deep Sea Striker. Usually I’m convinced that these passages are among the most gorgeous things I’ve ever written. It’s then that I remind myself of Faulkner’s painful advice: ‘In writing, you must kill your darlings.’ I can no more include those bore-geous passages that do nothing to propel the story then I can snap a random red 3-by-2 Lego piece onto the head of my son’s Deep Sea Salvage Crew Diver.
Good narrative writing must defend itself. Every sentence, even every word, must be there for a reason beyond its beauty. It must move the story along, pushing it toward what comes next. Good writing can and should be beautiful, but it must never be only beautiful. Bore-geous is always too much, and never enough.
In recent years, neuroscience has begun to solve the mystery of overeating. It turns out to have little to do with our taste buds, or even with our conscious desire for certain foods. Instead, the impulse to overeat depends on the pleasures of the stomach and intestines, which have an uncanny ability to detect the presence of calories. When we reach for that third helping of turkey, we are obeying the wishes of the gut, following a bodily desire that’s difficult to resist.
Half a millennium before Columbus’ calamitous 1492 arrival in the Caribbean, DNA from the Americas may have infiltrated the European genome by way of a woman brought to Iceland by Vikings. That’s the potential import of a widely-reported study that finds traces of a genetic variation seen among American Indian populations in four Icelandic lineages who likely share a common ancestor brought from North America before 1700. The variation, which occurs in mitochondrial DNA passed down only through the mother’s line, is one of several markers that was present with the founding populations of native North Americans arriving 14,000 years ago. The Icelandic version has drifted in ways that suggest it originated in an American Indian woman who lived around 1000 AD.
One good outcome of McGurl’s analysis would be to lay to rest the perpetual handwringing about what MFA programs do to writers (e.g., turn them into cringing, cautious, post-Carverite automatons). Because of the universitization of American fiction that McGurl describes, it’s virtually impossible to read a particular book and deduce whether the writer attended a program. For one thing, she almost certainly did. For another, the workshop as a form has bled downward into the colleges, so that a writer could easily have taken a lifetime’s worth of workshops as an undergraduate, a la Jonathan Safran Foer. And even if the writer has somehow never heard of an MFA program or set foot on a college campus, it doesn’t matter, because if she’s read any American fiction of the past 60 years, or met someone who did, she’s imbibed the general idea and aesthetic. We are all MFAs now.On the flip side (as McGurl can’t quite know, because he attended “real” grad school), MFA programs themselves are so lax and laissez-faire as to have a shockingly small impact on students’ work—especially shocking if you’re the student and paying $80,000 for the privilege. Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the ‘70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.
I started Riddley Walker in straight English but my characters wouldn’t wear it, they insisted on breaking up long words and imposing their own grammar, syntax and pronunciation on their vernacular. The Ardship of Cambry, eyeless and misbegotten, assumed the twisted title of the dignitary of our time; Whitstable became Widders Bell, Herne Bay became Horny Boy and so on. People “vackt their wayt” when they had to leave a place, which is what Erny Orfing does when he has to “voat no kynd of fents” (this expresses a vote of no confidence as well as giving the image of the security he feels he lacks) and leave the Eusa folk. The language slows the reader down to Riddley’s speed as he takes in what’s happening and so effectively becomes a supporting player in the action. Since Riddley Walker I can’t spell properly any more, but what the hell.
On no grounds whatever, our chastened worldview is taken to require the exclusion from philosophic thought of the human self as experience. Now, when our mingled nature is overwhelmingly an issue in determining the future of the planet, we fold ourselves into the natural order that only we can threaten, as if it were realism rather than evasion to minimize our singular gifts and propensities and to pass ourselves off as nothing more than the cleverest of the apes. Like old Adam hiding in the Edenic underbrush, trying to deny that his presence has added any new element to the world’s being, we minimize the fact that we, alone in nature, can and do make choices whose consequences are profound, endless, unfathomable. Refusing our exceptionalism we deny its essence and mystery—the mind in time and through time, the ponderings of aged civilizations as surely as the sudden lonely insight. The openness of James’s method to the reality of everything human is sound and empirical. In this and in much else he represents choices we would do well to return to, options we would still find of use.