Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso bajo la especie de una biblioteca
Mensagens
Grief
Photo: AfEX " We know that extreme physical pain drives out language," Julian Barnes writes in Nothing to be Frightened Of , but "it's dispiriting to learn that mental pain does the same." The "nothing" of Barnes's title is death, the thought of which produces an emotion, fear – fear so intense, so pervasive, as to be at times disabling. Death as an event, a fact rather than an emotion, is literally the Stünde Null, the zero hour, of our lives. None of us is excepted, death's hit rate is 100%. From the perspective of the defunct, we know very little. Dead men don't write books. (We do get the occasional insight. After suffering a major heart attack, the Australian billionaire Kerry Packer is said to have whispered to his sons, "I've been to the other side, and there's fuck all there.") Those of us who are still standing after a death – what CS Lewis termed "the club of the left-over living" – experience an ...
Wishlist: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbours' languages - as did many ordinary Europeans in times past. But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes, and we wouldn't even be able to put together flat pack furniture. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech, and translating Madame Bovary ? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or o...
The Tempest Made Flesh
I received The Word Made Flesh as a birthday gift this year, and have been enjoying it greatly. So, I thought I’d send in a picture of mine. I got this tattoo early in 2011, a couple weeks before I turned 40. It’s my first and (currently) only tattoo. I’ve spent most of my life working on Shakespeare, performing, directing, studying. This tattoo is inspired by the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, published in 1623. The text is from “The Tempest”, act 3, scene 2, from one of my favorite speeches in all of literature. I left the spelling as it is in the Folio, and the typeface is inspired by the Folio font. The rabbits are from the header engraving of the First Folio text of The Tempest, first page. —Chris
