Controversy over poems at British Museum shows urgent need for more recognition for translators - The Conversation Indonesia - Translation

The British Museum has had to apologise after a translator’s words were used without permission. Writer and translator Yilin Wang shared on Twitter that their translations of work by the Chinese feminist poet Qiu Jin appeared in the museum’s exhibition, China’s Hidden Century, without consent.

The museum’s subsequent press release cited “unintentional human error”. It explained that it had corresponded privately with Wang and had now offered a fee for the use of the translations. Along with the Chinese poems, these were then removed from the exhibition. But the removal of the texts has also fuelled criticism of the museum, and sparked a debate about the role of translators.

Translation and copyright

Literary translation is legally recognised as an act of original artistic production. This means that translated literary texts enjoy their own copyright status, independent of the source texts. While Qiu’s work is now out of copyright because she died in 1907, Wang’s translations are not.

The role of original creativity in translation practices is frequently ignored or underestimated. It’s common to talk about reading “author X” rather than “translator Y’s translation of author X”. Even the Nobel Prize conveniently sidesteps the role of translators and their creative work when it confers its annual literary honour.

Recently, however, literary publishing has increasingly recognised the role of translators. In 2016, the International Man Booker Prize announced it would now split winnings evenly between the author and the translator. Translators are gaining visibility and it is becoming more and more difficult to pretend they don’t exist.

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Read more: International Booker Prize 2023: our experts review the six shortlisted books

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Translations are creative acts that take place in specific cultural contexts. They transform source texts into new, original literary works, and they can advocate for the source text and writer by introducing them to new readers.

Wang has written about the power dynamics of literary translation, including the barriers to access and participation faced by translators who are “outsiders” and translators of colour. In their essay writing, they draw specifically on their experience of systemic prejudice while translating Qiu Jin’s poetry.

A photograph of Qiu Jin from circa 1908. Wiki Commons

They describe translation as an act of “reclamation and resistance” – and talk of the barriers they and others face finding a career in translation.

Like a translation, a museum is not neutral or objective. The objects and texts on display have been deliberately selected and positioned together. Just like the objects they frame, the words in a museum belong to someone and they have been chosen to tell a particular story.

Museums increasingly face pressure to reflect on their processes of acquisition and their contested ownership of items. This latest mistake – and handling of the fallout – shows that they also need to be transparent about the origins of the words they use to build the stories they tell.

From a “hidden century” to hidden texts

Removing items from display is not standard practice for the museum. The museum made a public statement in 2020 that it would not remove “controversial objects” from display. A section of the website dedicated to “contested objects” explicitly engages with the provenance of some of its most famous pieces, such as the Parthenon marbles.

But now Wang has described the museum’s response as “erasure”, and Wang argues, it has troubling implications, both for the museum’s critical engagement with its own curatorship and for the power dynamics of its relationships with non-white contributors.

The British Museum said in a statement: “In response to a request from Yilin Wang, we have taken down their translations in the exhibition. We have also offered financial payment for the period the translations appeared in the exhibition as well as for the continued use of quotations from their translations in the exhibition catalogue. The catalogue includes an acknowledgement of their work.” Wang contests this.

Meanwhile, the story has not gone away. It has been reported in the Chinese and French media, and Wang’s still developing Twitter thread about the discovery has been shared over 15,000 times.

As momentum grows behind the criticism of the museum, it is a good time for all of us to consider how we value and engage with the work of translators, whose creative labour allows us to access worlds and imaginations far beyond our own.

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - Key Peninsula News - Dictionary

One day last month I was standing in line at my neighborhood gas station with a six-pack in one hand and a three-day-old corndog in the other when a tall, younger (than me) Black man with a semi-automatic pistol on his hip walked up beside me.

I nodded and smiled, which he acknowledged with a micro-nod. I paid up and went out to my car.

While fumbling for my keys, I watched out of the corner of my eye as he came out and brushed by a white man about his age and build on his way in. They both turned and looked at each other, and the white man said, “What?”

The Black man said, “Harold?”

They embraced. They wept. They shouted “hooah!”

They were soldiers once. Everything they could remember about their war poured out of them like water over a dam. They wiped away more tears, standing in front of the gas pumps, clinging to each other, shouting “hooah!” over and over, beautifully oblivious to the cars maneuvering around them.

I very deliberately slowed down the fumbling of my keys to eavesdrop. I could not help absorbing what I’d feared, what I witnessed, what I felt, but I didn’t know what to call it or where to file it in memory. There’s got to be a word for this, I thought.

Where does one turn for guidance in such matters?

“The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” is one gateway.

“It’s a calming thing, to learn there’s a word for something you’ve felt all your life but didn’t know was shared by anyone else,” writes John Koenig in his introduction. “It makes you wonder what else might be possible — what other morsels of meaning could’ve been teased out of the static if only someone had come along and given them a name.”

Koenig wrote this book (Simon & Schuster, 2021) over the course of a decade while working on his popular blog on the subject. It began as a peculiar whim to push against those boundaries identified by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

This dictionary is a collection of invented words defining emotions many of us may have experienced but never thought to define or thought could be defined — our obscure sorrows — by turns light-hearted or tragic, and always poignant. Koenig was inspired to write the book by responses he got to his blog.

“There was the young woman in Pakistan who would observe her 96-year-old grandfather across the dinner table every night, mystified by the enormity of his life experience, so different from her own. There was a deployed U.S. Marine who secretly dreaded video chatting with people back home because it made him feel never closer but never farther away.”

Koenig’s writing is poetic, though I hesitate to use the word since there are no poems in these pages and the very word may scare off those who could benefit most by reading them.

But having said that, “It’s a poem about everything,” he writes. “These words were not necessarily intended to be used in conversation, but to exist for their own sake. To give some semblance of order to the wilderness inside your head, so you can settle it yourself on your own terms.”

And so we find such samples of shared experience as:

Apolytus: n., the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin. (From “apolysis,” the stage of molting when an invertebrate’s shell begins to separate from the skin beneath it + “adultus,” sacrificed.)

Ozurie: adj., feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have. … Some days you wake up in Kansas, and some days in Oz. (From “Oz” + “prairie,” with “you” caught somewhere in between.)

Thwit: n., a pang of shame when an embarrassing memory from adolescence rushes back into your head from out of nowhere, which is somehow no less painful even if nobody else remembers it happened in the first place. (Acronym of “The Hell Was I Thinking?”).

Zielschmerz: n., the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could. (From the German “Ziel,” goal + “Schmerz,” pain.)

In the years writing the blog that became his book, Koenig was often asked whether his words are real or made up. He struggled with that question before finally understanding that all words are made up — “no more real than the constellations in the sky.”

“Really, that’s all a word is: a constellation of thoughts and feelings that our ancestors traced into memorable shapes,” he writes. Some took hold, some disappeared.

“The meaning of things isn’t an emergent property of how long they last. We are the ones who define them for ourselves, if only for our own satisfaction. … To the honeybee, summer never ends.”

And about what I saw at the gas station. I’m no John Koenig but once I became open to thinking like him, a new word did suggest itself to me.

Circumseizure: n., an event of startling clarity one is helpless to resist, that overrides all preconceptions and desires to change it, making room for something else to flood in. (From “circumstance,” a condition connected to an event + “seizure,” a physical attack or action capturing someone or something by force.) 

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History is happening with the free Crow Dictionary App - KULR-TV - Dictionary

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History is happening with the free Crow Dictionary App  KULR-TV

An African worker-led cooperative helps New Yorkers lost in translation - Gothamist - Translation

Mamadou Diallo isn’t always the first interpreter that his asylee clients speak to.

One client, a woman in her mid-50s, had struggled to communicate with another interpreter, who spoke a different version of Fulani, a West African language.

Diallo recalled that at one point, after he'd conversed with the woman, her relieved daughter said, "Oh, we have the right one."

Diallo, 45, from Senegal, is a founding member of the African worker-owned cooperative Afrilingual, which aims to improve the offerings of city agencies’ required language services – while providing local immigrants with well-paying jobs.

The 10-person group, which will officially launch in August, will be joined by cooperatives versed in other languages, and a Community Interpreter Bank for more common languages, all aiming to serve the immigrant community’s language needs from within.

The city invested $5 million in the efforts last year, but it’s unclear if they’ll get a spot in the next budget due on Friday. The initiatives were left out of Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed budget.

Accurate and accessible information and services is a matter of life and death for individuals, and a public health imperative for all of us.

City Council Immigration Committee Chair Shahana Hanif

The co-op will compete with out-of-state companies ranking in the lion’s share of city contracts for translation and interpretation services, worth some $13 million in 2019 and $21 million in 2020, according to estimates from the Independent Budget Office. Some city officials and advocates contend the existing providers are insufficient and leave many foreign-language speakers to rely on family members and nonprofits for help.

The need for interpreters in the city has only grown in the last year amid an influx of tens of thousands of new migrants to the city, including many from African countries.

“We see more and more people who need language-access services,” said Maimouna Dieye, program manager at African Communities Together, the nonprofit helping launch the co-op.

She later added: “It's right for these, our fellow New Yorkers, to be able to access city services in their languages.”

New York City is among the most linguistically diverse urban areas in the world, with more than 700 languages spoken, about 10% of the world’s known total, according to the Endangered Language Alliance. More than 1.2 million people living in the city speak a language at home spoken by less than 1% of the city’s population, per a 2020 report by the comptroller's office. The report said an estimated 220,000 of those individuals reported that they don't speak English well or at all.

And more than 3 million households in New York City are considered “limited English speaking,” meaning no member over the age of 14 is fluent in English, based on the most recent Census bureau data.

Afrilingual cooperative member Aminata Chabi Leke, 37, a Senegalese immigrant living in the Bronx, recently conducted a cultural competency training for attorneys, paralegals, and other staff at the local nonprofit Take Root Justice.

Arya Sundaram / Gothamist

Local officials have enacted more mandates to beef up the city government’s interpretation and translation services to ensure foreign-language speakers can access city services, including shelters and public benefits. But agencies still struggle to comply with these laws, such as Local Law 30, passed in 2017, requiring city agencies to provide telephonic interpretation in at least 100 different languages and translate key documents into the 10 most commonly spoken foreign languages.

The consequences of mistranslation can be severe. Errors can threaten proper medical care, or the chance to secure permanent residency in the country. The pandemic shined a light on the need for appropriate language services, wrote Councilmember Shahana Hanif, who chairs the immigration committee, in an op-ed supporting the initiative.

“Accurate and accessible information and services is a matter of life and death for individuals, and a public health imperative for all of us,” Hanif wrote.

Co-op members also speak of the group as a personal boon.

Diallo, for example, earned an English bachelor’s degree in Senegal, and he originally came to the U.S. on a student visa to train in computer science. He said he currently works part-time as an Uber driver, and full-time for $37 per hour as a houseman at the W Hotel.

The Newark resident said he hopes the co-op will offer him a better-paying career.

“I just don’t want to do all those informal jobs,” Diallo said.

He later added: “If we do well, if we work hard, it can be a source of living.”

But Diallo says his participation isn’t entirely financial, referencing a time he missed a day job shift to help a client.

He says he’s gratified knowing that his work helps another African immigrant get the services they need, or the chance to win asylum.

“They're my people. It’s my community,” he said. They're an underserved community.”

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Dictionary Films Managing Director Chris Rossiter Rides Into the ... - Little Black Book - LBBonline - Dictionary

The Cutters Studios family, which includes hundreds of talents across partner companies Cutters, Dictionary Films, Flavor, and Another Country, are about to say goodbye to yet another legend: Longstanding Dictionary Films Managing Director Chris Rossiter is set to retire at month’s end.

A creative-industry titan who spent 25 years with Leo Burnett Chicago prior to joining Dictionary a decade ago, Rossiter’s internal announcement was filled with gratitude and high praise for his outstanding colleagues. Before he disappears into the sunset, the company’s leadership engaged him in this historic exit interview.

Q> After 25 years with Leo Burnett, from the position of EVP/Executive Director of Production, you joined Dictionary Films. What attracted you?

Chris>  I started at Burnett at 22 as an officially titled 'junior producer.' A few of us quickly realised that meant 'almost professional,' and after some lobbying, our titles became associate producer. Less than 20 years later, I was running the department, having merged what had been four production departments across two agencies (Arc WW and LBC) into one. Seeing that everything we produced was either motion-based or still-based, and that implementation and delivery were the only real differences, combining the talents introduced a lot of efficiencies, helping us work faster, better manage tight schedules and budgets, and grow talent into new delivery models.

When it became time for a new challenge, I felt done with the agency side of production. Going a bit further on this, my passion was for helping bring creative ideas to life, and I had specific ideas about streamlining production and post to the benefit of everyone involved. That’s when Tim McGuire and Craig Duncan asked me to come aboard. In a nutshell, the vision they shared was helping Dictionary Films grow and contribute more toward Cutters Studios’ emergence as a collective powerhouse. I’d already known Tim and Chris Claeys for many years, and though Craig and I were pretty new to each other, we became close really fast.

From the very beginning, everything about what they wanted felt like what I wanted... and that’s still true today.

Q> After joining Dictionary, how long did it take for you to feel you’d made the right decision?

Chris>  Two minutes. Simply the welcoming I got from people across the companies and the different offices.

Q> What Dictionary project is your single most favourite of all time, and why does it stand out?

​Chris>  Every project I did with Chris Hafner. I miss him every day.

Q> Is there a specific project you’d like to discuss in a bit of detail?

Chris> We were shooting a project for a liquor brand, a product shoot in a loft with some holiday decorations and extras, etc. Toward the end of our last shoot day, we heard a huge crash outside. A few of us ran to the scene and saw that an SUV had crashed and was flipped over on its side. As I helped one of the passengers to the curb, we were told there was a woman in the vehicle and she couldn’t get out. The hood was smoking and I watched as one of our crew vaulted in one leap up onto the top of the heap. He reached in and with one hand and in one move, pulled the driver out and got her to safety, unhurt. I’ve truly never seen someone move so fast and with such disregard for himself. Afterwards, he just went back to work on set. I marvel at it to this day. Amazing!

Q> Is there one or more career achievement that you will forever hold dear?

Chris> I’d like to think I had a hand in helping some people grow into and learn to grow within this business. I had great, great mentors at every step, and I hope I passed on some goodness to others.

Q> When you look over the Cutters Studios constellation today, what are you most proud of?

Chris> I think we really were a leader in truly combining top-drawer production with an absolute A-list of post-production services and talents as one cohesive company. A lot promised this feat prior to us, but they were really just creating strategic partnerships. A lot more actually provide it as one company now, but we pioneered this process from a multi-office, shared-service standpoint.

Q> What is something that most people don’t know about you or Dictionary?

Chris>  How much it hurts when they don’t choose one of our directors for their projects. There’s immense pain every time.

Q> What advice would you pass along to the next generation?

Chris>  The first was given to me, right from the start: Don’t be afraid to ask questions; nobody knows it all and pretending you know what you don’t is really dangerous.

The second is something I learned managing projects and people along the way: Don’t ask the same question over and over. Doing so might be a clue that either you don’t want to get better or perhaps aren’t a good fit for your job. In either case, you should find something else to do.

Last of all, and most importantly, be active in growing your experiences and the people you meet and work with. It’ll help your work, your soul, and the world.

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Dictionary Films Managing Director Chris Rossiter Rides Into the ... - Little Black Book - LBBonline - Dictionary

The Cutters Studios family, which includes hundreds of talents across partner companies Cutters, Dictionary Films, Flavor, and Another Country, are about to say goodbye to yet another legend: Longstanding Dictionary Films Managing Director Chris Rossiter is set to retire at month’s end.

A creative-industry titan who spent 25 years with Leo Burnett Chicago prior to joining Dictionary a decade ago, Rossiter’s internal announcement was filled with gratitude and high praise for his outstanding colleagues. Before he disappears into the sunset, the company’s leadership engaged him in this historic exit interview.

Q> After 25 years with Leo Burnett, from the position of EVP/Executive Director of Production, you joined Dictionary Films. What attracted you?

Chris>  I started at Burnett at 22 as an officially titled 'junior producer.' A few of us quickly realised that meant 'almost professional,' and after some lobbying, our titles became associate producer. Less than 20 years later, I was running the department, having merged what had been four production departments across two agencies (Arc WW and LBC) into one. Seeing that everything we produced was either motion-based or still-based, and that implementation and delivery were the only real differences, combining the talents introduced a lot of efficiencies, helping us work faster, better manage tight schedules and budgets, and grow talent into new delivery models.

When it became time for a new challenge, I felt done with the agency side of production. Going a bit further on this, my passion was for helping bring creative ideas to life, and I had specific ideas about streamlining production and post to the benefit of everyone involved. That’s when Tim McGuire and Craig Duncan asked me to come aboard. In a nutshell, the vision they shared was helping Dictionary Films grow and contribute more toward Cutters Studios’ emergence as a collective powerhouse. I’d already known Tim and Chris Claeys for many years, and though Craig and I were pretty new to each other, we became close really fast.

From the very beginning, everything about what they wanted felt like what I wanted... and that’s still true today.

Q> After joining Dictionary, how long did it take for you to feel you’d made the right decision?

Chris>  Two minutes. Simply the welcoming I got from people across the companies and the different offices.

Q> What Dictionary project is your single most favourite of all time, and why does it stand out?

​Chris>  Every project I did with Chris Hafner. I miss him every day.

Q> Is there a specific project you’d like to discuss in a bit of detail?

Chris> We were shooting a project for a liquor brand, a product shoot in a loft with some holiday decorations and extras, etc. Toward the end of our last shoot day, we heard a huge crash outside. A few of us ran to the scene and saw that an SUV had crashed and was flipped over on its side. As I helped one of the passengers to the curb, we were told there was a woman in the vehicle and she couldn’t get out. The hood was smoking and I watched as one of our crew vaulted in one leap up onto the top of the heap. He reached in and with one hand and in one move, pulled the driver out and got her to safety, unhurt. I’ve truly never seen someone move so fast and with such disregard for himself. Afterwards, he just went back to work on set. I marvel at it to this day. Amazing!

Q> Is there one or more career achievement that you will forever hold dear?

Chris> I’d like to think I had a hand in helping some people grow into and learn to grow within this business. I had great, great mentors at every step, and I hope I passed on some goodness to others.

Q> When you look over the Cutters Studios constellation today, what are you most proud of?

Chris> I think we really were a leader in truly combining top-drawer production with an absolute A-list of post-production services and talents as one cohesive company. A lot promised this feat prior to us, but they were really just creating strategic partnerships. A lot more actually provide it as one company now, but we pioneered this process from a multi-office, shared-service standpoint.

Q> What is something that most people don’t know about you or Dictionary?

Chris>  How much it hurts when they don’t choose one of our directors for their projects. There’s immense pain every time.

Q> What advice would you pass along to the next generation?

Chris>  The first was given to me, right from the start: Don’t be afraid to ask questions; nobody knows it all and pretending you know what you don’t is really dangerous.

The second is something I learned managing projects and people along the way: Don’t ask the same question over and over. Doing so might be a clue that either you don’t want to get better or perhaps aren’t a good fit for your job. In either case, you should find something else to do.

Last of all, and most importantly, be active in growing your experiences and the people you meet and work with. It’ll help your work, your soul, and the world.

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Jennifer Croft Knows a Good Translation When She Reads One - The New York Times - Translation

What books are on your night stand?

“Landscapes,” by Christine Lai, “Glory,” by NoViolet Bulawayo, “La Migración,” by Pablo Maurette, “Time Shelter,” by Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, Sara Baume’s “Seven Steeples,” a little book about Paul Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,” by George T.M. Shackelford, and “Goodnight Moon” — the board book edition — by Margaret Wise Brown.

What’s the last great book you read?

I just finished reading “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, which is a masterpiece. He is brilliant and sensitive, and he manages to write about things that matter (to him and to us) while drawing on a panoply of influences, from hip-hop to anime to 19th-century Russian literature, which enables him to deeply engage the widest possible audience, an ability I very much admire.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Translated novella, hammock, oaks.

Which translators working today do you admire most? And which writers in other realms — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets?

There are so many great translators working into English right now — we’re so lucky — that I won’t even be able to scratch the surface, but here are three who are also writing fiction, plays and nonfiction, respectively: Anton Hur (who translates from Korean), Jeremy Tiang (who translates from Chinese) and Frank Wynne (who translates from French and Spanish).

As for writers in other realms, I adore Angie Cruz, who is quietly reinvigorating the English language by infusing it with Spanish, and who is so deft at voice that her characters feel like family by the end of every book. Jamel Brinkley’s prose is so graceful and entrancing. Idra Novey’s political poetic novels pack such a fantastic punch. Maaza Mengiste is a genius. I hope Paul Yoon wins the Nobel Prize, unless there is a better prize by the time he’s old enough to win the Nobel Prize, in which case I hope he wins that. I’ll be happy to read anything by Virginie Despentes, who writes in French, László Krasznahorkai, who writes in Hungarian, and Yoko Tawada, who writes in German and Japanese. Novels originally published outside of the United States are often less heavily edited, and I like that freshness, that uniqueness and sometimes that slight chaos.

For children, Yuki Ainoya writes and illustrates oneiric little masterpieces translated from Japanese by Michael Blaskowsky.

Which writers in other languages do you wish had a wider audience in English?

I recently nominated the Senegalese writer and activist Boubacar Boris Diop, who writes in French and Wolof, for the Neustadt Prize, which he won, but I think he still hasn’t reached the readership he deserves. I especially love “Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks,” translated by Vera Wülfing-Leckie and El Hadji Moustapha Diop.

What makes for a good translation? Can you (or anyone) recognize a good translation from a language you don’t read?

In general, there has to be chemistry between form and content for a book to be good. What translators do is create new forms for the same content in order to bring readers great books they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. If a translated book reads as great — if the chemistry is there, which does not necessarily mean the book sounds like it was originally written in English — then the translation is great. You don’t need prior knowledge of, say, Iceland or Icelandic in order to appreciate Victoria Cribb’s translation of Sjón’s “Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was.”

Your novel “The Extinction of Irena Rey” (coming next year) is about a group of translators contending with the disappearance of the author they translate and trying to figure out who they are without her. Should we surmise that you see translators as parasites on a host organism?

The central metaphor in “The Extinction” is amadou, a once widespread product of the fungus Fomes fomentarius, which starts its life as a parasite but becomes, after killing its host tree, a decomposer. As such, it enriches the soil and ensures the ongoing vitality of the forest.

Translators overwrite originals, making texts in other languages visible and invisible at once. Without translators, literary traditions and even languages might rot in isolation. With translators, the literary ecosystem keeps up the diversity it needs in order to flourish.

Fomes fomentarius embodies the clash between alarming and awe-inspiring that I think makes translation unique among literary forms. Amadou, meanwhile — the treated flesh of that fungus — was how humans started fires before the invention of safe and reliable matches. (One common name for Fomes fomentarius is tinder polypore.) That technology went extinct, but I don’t think our relationship with Fomes fomentarius is over. It could replace some forms of plastic. It can stand in for leather now.

Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

Listening to audiobooks doesn’t make me feel guilty, but it does give me a lot of pleasure, and it does seem to make some people feel guilty. I love Aoife McMahon’s narration of Sally Rooney’s “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends.” I love getting a feel for the Irish rhythms of Rooney’s prose, and I find listening to those books, likely as much thanks to McMahon’s voice as Rooney’s, very soothing. When stressed, I frequently also return to Merlin Sheldrake narrating his own gorgeous book about fungi and connectedness, “Entangled Life.” And I will listen to literally anything narrated by Edoardo Ballerini.

Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?

I fell in love with my husband, Boris Dralyuk, as he was translating Mikhail Zoshchenko’s “Sentimental Tales” from Russian. He wooed me by recounting the tales every evening on my doorstep as he picked me up for dinner, carefully, paragraph by paragraph.

How do you organize your books?

I like to let them organize themselves.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Bolesław Leśmian, Bruno Schulz and Gershom Scholem. I’d record their conversation, publish the transcription, and convince Edoardo Ballerini to narrate the audiobook. At no point in this scenario would I cook.

What do you plan to read next?

“Reproduction," the new novel by Louisa Hall.

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