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Edmonds Kiwanis Club members donate dictionaries to third graders MLT NewsWednesday, April 10, 2024
In Words and Beyond Them: Jane Hirshfield on the Transformative Art of Translation - Literary Hub - Translation
Language and literature, made only of words, live both in words and beyond them. Sometimes between them. But also, always, in us: their human practitioners, beneficiaries, chorus, convocation, cocreators, progeny, and flock.
When I was seven or eight years old, I joined that congregation, going into a New York City stationery store on First Avenue between 20th and 21st Streets to scan the circular wire racks near the front door. I was there on my own, allowance money in hand, to select the first book I would buy for myself. I browsed, sampled, pondered—and brought home a Peter Pauper Press book of Japanese haiku. Now, over six decades later, it seems that I’ve followed the sounds and scents of that book for a lifetime.
Even for a child growing up in a housing project on the lower East Side of Manhattan, rain and moon, heat and shadow, are recognized as carrying meanings beyond the physical. Something allusive, elusive, awake, dappled, mysterious lived in those translated pages’ weathers, frogs, and blossoms, something beyond their bringing news also of “elsewhere.” They carried the sense that a surplus seeing and saying existed, that an altered, altering relationship to my own life and language might exist as well. And, too, the news that elsewhere and here were not separate, nor separate from me.
A good poem, it’s been said, expands the available stock of reality. Even more then, perhaps, a good translation. Reading in childhood the work of Bashō, Issa, and Buson, I could not have understood their words’ deeper dimensions. Yet through them I began to recognize the world as the Belfast-born poet Louis MacNeice described it: “incorrigibly plural.”
We take on faith that what we read is close to, or at least close enough to, the work’s experiencing in the language of its creation.My great good luck, as a reader and as a person, has been to have come of age in an era of blossoming translation. I’ve spent a lifetime reading works from languages I don’t know: Greek tragedies, Nahuatl flower songs, erotic love poems written in second century Sanskrit. Kafka and Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Borges. Lady Murasaki, Primo Levi, and José Saramago, Su Tung Po and Marina Tsvetaeva. The Eddas, Gilgamesh, The Dream of the Red Chamber, War and Peace. The world’s sacred texts and trickster tales, Sei Shōnagon’s diary, Turgenev’s sketches, the ghazals of Ghalib, Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, anonymous song-lines mapping the interior of Australia.
All given me by their translators’ hours and years of close-work pondering, self-doubt, and questioning; by their middle of night, insomniac searching for a more accurate or more resinous word. This verb or that one? The definite or indefinite article, as one must be added in English? Should some extra information be offered to make clear a meaning that would have been understood by anyone alive in the place and time the work was written, or should that context, however indispensable, be left for a footnote? Is the original’s tone sincere or might it be comic? How to translate, or not, the name of a bird that does not nest in the new language it’s being brought into, of a fish never seen there, a dish not tasted?
And what of the music, the rhythms? A native Japanese speaker hears alternating patterns of five and seven syllables, whether in poetry or prose, as the sound of a different order of thinking and feeling. A speaker of American English hears rhyming iambic pentameter, the recurrences of litany or blues. The rhythms of a limerick are instantly recognized by an American-English reader as also an attitude and an intention. But an Urdu ghazal’s repeated end-word may seem at first only baffling, the parallel tones of Chinese unconveyable, and the prosody of alternating five and seven syllables will go unnoticed.
The Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, in an essay on the self-translating Russian poet-in-exile Joseph Brodsky, speaks of “the desolations that accompany translation.” Walcott describes the translator’s cul de sac problem when the month-name “August” takes a masculine grammar in one language, while in another, the poet—in this case, Walcott himself—has personified August as “a housemaid-cook, her ebony head in a white kerchief as she whipped sheets from a clothesline in a house near the sea…”
Any writer who translates or is translated knows these problems. The pronoun “you” in English is gender-neutral and can turn toward any of seven or nine different meanings. In Polish, though, it must be male or female—making it simply impossible to translate, one translator told me, a poem of mine whose full effect depends on shifting from one meaning of “you” to another.
And yet, a few years later, a different Polish translator included that poem in an anthology of American poets. I do not read Polish. I have no idea what Julia Hartwig’s translation of my poem may seem to say, or how the poem’s larger meaning is affected. Yet I am glad, on faith, that the poem has been brought into Polish.
There is the famous Italian saying, a cliché to evoke here: Traduttore, traditore. “Translator, traitor.” For a person doing the translating (or in my case, cotranslating), the act seems, however humbling, at least possible. One tries, in bringing a thousand-year-old Japanese five-line tanka into English, to choose the grammatical voice and verb tense that most strengthen the poem. The original grammar often specifies neither; the receiving language requires them; you must choose.
Being translated, though, I’ve shaken my head at the complete implausibility of the task, when even within what seems a single language, confusions abound. In the U.S., pumpkin pie is the traditional closing sweet of the fall-harvest holiday dinner. In England, “pie” means a savory main dish, not a dessert (which is called, in the English of England, a “pudding”), and pumpkins are eaten only by livestock. A Japanese translator once asked, “By ‘end,’ did you mean ‘finishing point,’ ‘goal,’ or ‘edge’ like a board of wood has?” “All those, yes, you understand the meaning exactly.” “Japanese doesn’t do that.” A Russian translator emailed that “long-legged” is a cultural stereotype for Americans, did I mean to imply that, and if not, might she say “spindly-legged” instead? “Does it sound good, musically?” I asked. “Very good,” she replied, then moved on to whether the “foreign” in “foreign dust” should be of the invading barbarian kind or indicate only “from elsewhere.”
And still, even knowing all this, when I read a work in translation, I take what is offered at its word. What else can a reader do? We choose a book, we start to read, and the pages include no crosshatch marks of the arduous choice-making, no smoke scent of sorrowful compromise, no crumpled sheets from the vertiginous liberty-takings slipped into the printed text. We take on faith that what we read is close to, or at least close enough to, the work’s experiencing in the language of its creation.
In books where style is clearly foreground—Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony comes to mind, a triumph of singular brushwork in Tim Parks’s translation, as does the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, whose distinctive sensibility Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak’s collaborative translations brilliantly carry—the reader can’t help but hope their own experience is at least kin to that of readers of the Italian or Polish.
And yet… I once began rereading War and Peace in the then-new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky but hadn’t quite finished before leaving on a month-long trip. The book was heavy. I completed reading it in the only translation available at my destination: the Constance Garnett, published in 1904. Much was different—sentence rhythms, diction, even the characters’ names—and still it was, after some readjustment, the same book.
I am, as by now must be evident, a forgiving reader of translated works. We all must be forgiving to read at all. The very act of turning ink shapes or pixels into meaning and world is a cognitively generous act, requiring of us every benefit of the doubt.
Translators are surely the harshest critics of one another’s work, objecting to one another’s choices with continuous, demurring dismay. At scales large and small—as is broadly evident in the pages of this anthology—philosophies of translation can honorably widely differ. In “The Task of the Translator,” the German critic Walter Benjamin propounds the preservation of difference—a sentence originally in German should, brought into English, retain an audible reminder of the original grammar and soundscape. (We might think of this as translation speaking as a living person does after changing places and languages: with an accent and syntax that hold their full background and history.)
The Mexican poet Octavio Paz felt differently—he proposed that a translator must try to evoke the same effects by different means. Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations from Greek gave me my first entrance into the tragedies, believed that what was not strange to a work’s original readers should not seem odd to readers in the receiving language. Beauty should echo beauty, he felt—and his translation of the Roman poet Catullus’s elegy for his brother remains, for me, among the most moving and beautiful translations ever made (and contains at least one invention of Fitzgerald’s own). Libyan poet, editor, and translator Khaled Mattawa (who is among the translators included in this collection) has in turn compared translation to playing a musical score—an act not of mechanical repetition, but of interpretation, bringing a work newly to life each time.
Some translators of poetry hew to the work’s original forms, convinced that what was conceived in dactylic hexameter should remain there. Stephanie McCarter, a current classicist, chose to set her 2022 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into the iambic pentameter of blank verse, finding it the nearer equivalent. For an Anglophone, she writes, that meter “simply sounds like poetry, even to the untrained ear.” Others choose hybrid or half-forms, slant rhymes, free verse. Visual conventions may come into poetry’s translation also. In Western traditions, the jagged right margin tells you a poem is a poem, yet the translator-scholar Hiroaki Sato is adamant that haiku should be printed as a single line, not broken into three. In Japan, a poem’s essential poemness is set by ear, not eye.
Any choice made in these realms, whether in poetry or in prose, risks losing something the writer would feel inextricable to the work; yet choices must still be made. For instance, how does one translate a pun, when even the use of homonyms has different resonance in different languages? In English, puns tend toward the comic; in other languages they are a neutral device for increasing meaning. (I know of only one that holds between languages: the word “pine” is used for trees and the emotion of longing in both English and Japanese.)
There’s also the question of time. Some translations of older works deliberately keep the fragrance of antiquity in them—the King James Bible, for instance, was famously brought by its committee of translators into a style and diction of English already a little archaic, to instill in its words the authority of a sacred text long in place. In her illuminating translator’s preface to the Metamorphoses, Stephanie Carter advises not antique diction, but the practice of a stringent temporal hygiene.
When later cultural attitudes and habits of mind are brought into earlier texts, she writes, those intrusions shift not only qualities of surface, but the work’s fundamental worldview and world. Other translators are blatantly and unapologetically anachronistic. This collection includes an Eleventh-Dynasty Egyptian hymn whose singer, four thousand years ago, surely knew nothing of origami, microchips, or bulletproof vests.
Most often, translated works are brought into a more quietly contemporary diction and current aesthetic. This transmigration can make older pieces available in new ways. I was once asked to present The Ink Dark Moon, my cotranslation of the work of the two foremost Japanese women poets of the Heian era, to a graduate class at a Tokyo university. Ono no Komachi wrote in the ninth century, Izumi Shikibu at the turn of the millennium. I’d thought the request odd—would a group of students in Boston want to hear Emily Dickinson in Japanese? I was mistaken.
The students said they were hearing the poems for the first time as relevant to their own lives, as genuinely moving—a response I attribute more to the erasing of a thousand years of dust than to the specifics of Mariko Aratani’s and my choice of words. Poems brought into current-day English could speak as they did when first written: as this moment’s murmur into this moment’s ear.
In his five Massey Lectures delivered for the CBC in 2022, the Indigenous Canadian writer, playwright, and musician Tomson Highway spoke of the different selves his three different languages evoke. English, as he experiences himself in speaking it, is a language “above the neck,” good for matters of mind. French he finds the language of heart and stomach. His birth-language, Cree, he describes as sexual, scatalogical, and immutably funny—onomatopoetic, quickening, a language that laughs at and along with existence.
The act of translating, especially, asks of a person a willing vulnerability and agreed-to exposure.Languages, then, have their own sensibilities, and these qualities, too, a translation must try to convey, bending the receiving language beyond its home-ground capacities, opening tongue and ear to alternative ways of being, hearing, knowing, feeling. By this process of exchanging capacities, news, gossip, worldviews, and knowledge, cultures broaden, become more capacious. This, too, is the gift of the translations found in this volume. They hold specific experiences, yes, to be tasted and walked inside of, but carry also translation’s fundamental increase of perspective, perception, and possibility, of what can be said, and how.
I will not attempt to describe here the full range of what these pages hold—readers can turn the pages and see for themselves. Their writers come from Eritrea, Chile, Iran, Korea, Norway, Poland, Kurdistan, India, the island of La Réunion. Past, present, and future in turn find their recordings, envisionings, and imagining. A sea krait titles one piece, a lion another. One selection here was assembled from the words of a group of gathered ex-combatants from a conflict zone. Another is missing, withdrawn by its author for reasons of conscience, as described elsewhere. Its absence, though the decision must be respected, grieves me. The larger causes for its absence raise a grief far greater.
*
It’s said that the world loses a language every two weeks. With that language, a unique ecosystem of knowledge and history vanishes also. As with the disappearing animals and plants, we race against quickening extinction. Each work in Best Literary Translations 2024 is a small act of both preservation and cross-pollination—each writer’s vision, sensibility, and concerns are, as the word “translation” holds at its root, carried across. In those moments of carrying, a conjoining occurs. Both receiver and text live afterward changed; some new hybrid of experience, language, and understanding comes into being.
The act of translating, especially, asks of a person a willing vulnerability and agreed-to exposure, a dropping away of the boundaried defenses of a fixed self. The act of translating opens the psyche’s innermost rooms to the unknown. Free of preconceptions and opinion, you must know what is there on its own terms before you can judge it. This is the opposite of this moment’s barraging news, inside the US, of acts of stand-your-ground deadly violence and the deliberately fanned fear of the “other” that lies behind it. A translator is a person offering home ground and welcome to others, as is also a reader, first starting a book. This simple, basic widening of self, psyche, and sense of community—to curiosity; to the magnets of beauty, story, laughter; to the tastes and shapes of the new; to the embrace of questioning, embrace of feeling, embrace of eros over thanatos and mutuality over power—this is one counterweight to the fear, self-assertion, tribalism, and division of our current socio-political era.
Translation, then, and our continuing practice and support of it, has a transformative social dimension. Welcoming the sheer variousness and plurality of all lives; holding the desire to feel what others have felt, to see what they have seen, to imagine what they have imagined; wanting to know oneself not as soloist but as part of a larger chorus and wanting that full chorus heard, its full music sung across time, place, culture, language, causes and conditions—this is the path of kinship rather than closure. To write, translate, read the stories and poems of our lived interconnection is to be part of the work of tikkun olam, the repair of the world—needed now, needed always. Yet we need not feel this as weight or obligation. It is simply what happens when a person is curious enough to pick up a book about things they don’t already think, holding lives they don’t already know.
–May 1, 2023 Mill Valley, California Mount Tamalpais Arroyo Corte Madera del Presidio Watershed on the unceded land of the Coastal Miwok people
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From Best Literary Translations 2024, edited by Jane Hirshfield, Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún. Copyright © 2024. Available from Deep Vellum Publishing.
'Webster's Bitch' at Keegan Theatre: How language plays tricks on us - The Washington Post - The Washington Post - Dictionary
There’s a certain symmetry to the fact that a newish play bearing a title some outlets have deemed too spicy to print or say is about the malleable nature of language itself.
“Webster’s Bitch,” a rich if not yet fully conjugated workplace dramedy from playwright Jacqueline Bircher, had its world premiere at Connecticut’s Playhouse on Park last year and now arrives at the Keegan Theatre. It follows two generations of lexicographers (plus one fidgety visitor) through an eventful evening at the headquarters of Webster’s Dictionary. As the office opens, its two junior staffers are on deadline to complete their weekly online update. “New definitions every Friday!” one of them chirps, which, to certain constituencies — stressed-out dictionary-revisers, anyone over the age of 40 — might sound like a threat.
The incident that escalates ordinary ticking-clock stress to existential calamity is a hot-mic gaffe by Webster’s editor in chief, caught on video at a Yale University conference referring to his long-serving deputy as “my bitch.”
Some 40 miles down Interstate 95, in Webster’s Stamford offices — the sticky-noted, card-catalogued, page-proof-wallpapered set is by Matthew J. Keenan and Cindy Landrum Jacobs — the shock waves ripple up through the generations. It’s Extremely Online Gen Z-er Ellie (impish Irene Hamilton), making a nuisance of herself while waiting for big sister Gwen (Fabiolla Da Silva) to finish work and take her for drinks, who spots the video trending on Twitter. (The play is set in 2019, allowing Bircher to avoid both the pandemic’s upheaval of white-collar culture and Elon Musk’s erosion of that once-mighty social media platform.) Ellie shares the bombshell with Gwen and Nick (Andrés F. Roa), the office’s other millennial, both of whom panic over how Joyce, their superior and the subject of that careless remark, will respond.
End of carousel
Gwen, the more aggrieved of the pair, is sharp enough to recognize that this scandal threatens not only the superannuated career of their boss’s boss — appropriately named Frank — but also the credibility of their entire enterprise. That’s because Webster’s definition of the offending word, unlike those proffered by competitors like the Oxford English Dictionary, elides the sense of mastery in which the loose-lipped Frank used it. When Joyce (a wry Sheri S. Herren) learns from the youngs about what went down, she puts her duties ahead of her feelings and orders Gwen and Nick to start revising their definition of the b-word, pronto.
The versatility of that contested epithet has always been part of its appeal. It has the monosyllabic blunt-force effect of all the best curses, but so many contextual variations that — to cite one example not referenced in Bircher’s script — the 1971 Rolling Stones song “Bitch” wouldn’t even make a list of the band’s most unabashedly sexist recordings, while Meredith Brooks’s 1997 hit “Bitch” embraces and reclaims the word in its gendered-insult sense.
Bircher’s writing is at its most perceptive, and Da Silva’s and Roa’s performances at their most persuasive, when Gwen and Nick are competing over who can compile more definitions and usages of the word the fastest, and cite 10 examples for each. More than once, Gwen is compelled to point out that it was Nick, not her, who handled the contested word’s most recent revision. After a one-on-one meeting with Joyce doesn’t go her way, Gwen launches into a monologue elucidating how her competence and work ethic are taken for granted by her better-paid peers. It would be more effective still if Da Silva’s performance as Gwen didn’t seem to be foreshadowing that eruption from the instant we meet her.
Herren’s Joyce is a more nuanced and dimensional character, but she’s also getting more help from Bircher’s script: Only Joyce really gets to surprise us, revealing how a woman of a prior generation found a way to survive the same indignities to which she now subjects Gwen. Abuse begets abuse, tragically.
Like poor Gwen, Bircher’s play is ambitious in a way that makes success more elusive. What at first looks to be a simple workplace farce morphs into something more curious and observant, particularly once Frank (Timothy H. Lynch) makes his entrance a full hour into the show, long after anyone who didn’t spot his name in the program will have assumed he shall, like Godot, remain forever delayed. Lynch is nuanced enough to make Frank a memorably self-loathing villain instead of a one-note stooge, which ultimately makes the show more rewarding as a drama than as comedy.
Paradoxically, it’s the way Bircher dips a toe into several rich pools of inquiry without ever diving into any one of them that left me convinced that she has yet to mine fully the potential of her own premise. Because office politics in general are a bitch. Salary opacity? You bet. Managerial gaslighting? The most virulent and ruinous example of all.
At one point, Gwen boasts about the record number of usages/contexts she documented for a single word: More than 120 for “go.” Go, in the imperative usage, is still my advice regarding “Webster’s Bitch,” though, as with Gwen’s and Nick’s spilling-over inboxes, Bircher may yet discover more meanings through the alchemy of revision.
Webster’s Bitch, through May 5 at the Keegan Theatre, 1742 Church St. NW, Washington. About 95 minutes with no intermission. keegantheatre.com.
Tuesday, April 9, 2024
JFK tests devices to translate instructions, assist hearing, visually impaired at airport security - Newsday - Translation
John F. Kennedy Airport is testing new translation devices that can deliver visual and audio instructions in 83 different languages, as well as assist the vision and hearing impaired.
JFK is one of 10 airports in the country testing 50 of the handheld devices at security checkpoints with the Transportation Security Administration. The five translation readers, each smaller than a smartphone, are being used at JFK terminals to audibly announce questions and directions. They also show a digital readout of instructions and can translate instructions to or from other languages into English.
TSA officials said the devices, which are two months into a pilot program, are meant to expedite airport security for non-English speaking travelers and also to expand accessibility for the hearing and vision impaired.
“We hope this will turn out to be a valuable tool for our officers to provide guidance to passengers who might not speak English,” said John Essig, the federal security director for Kennedy Airport.
Essig said that the translators will provide a quicker resource than relocating officers who may be fluent in other languages. The devices will also help explain directions at security such as if agents need to open a carry-on bag for a search. Agents can now give those directives, or orders to take off shoes for a security screening in a traveler’s most comfortable language, Essig said.
JFK sees 90,000 passengers departing daily, Essig said. That includes the airport’s largest international Terminal 4, which sees up to 20,000 passengers daily, and more than 10,000 passengers at its international Terminal 1.
TSA agents demonstrated the devices last week at JFK as passengers were waiting in winding security lines to board flights on 85 international airlines, ranging from India to Kenya.
Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, said the TSA should continue to update languages spoken at checkpoints and train agents with a list of terms that can be translated. He also called for increasing transparency to ensure there are no breaches of personal privacy.
“It is important that all New Yorkers and people traveling through New York to be able to communicate with government officials,” Awawdeh said. “No matter what language they speak.”
Disability advocates said the new translators will also improve accessibility for the blind and deaf community.
The new field testing of the devices will help up to 100 million deaf and hard-of-hearing travelers who go through U.S. airports annually, said Chris Rosa, president and CEO of the Albertson-based Viscardi Center, a nonprofit that advocates for disabled children and adults.
He said improving communication with enhanced technology may improve the quality of travel for hearing impaired passengers.
“Communication barriers are a source of anxiety and risk for deaf and hard-of-hearing passengers during high-stakes encounters at TSA checkpoints,” Rosa said. “Communication struggles can be awkward, result in holding up already long lines of travelers awaiting screening, and create suspicion among TSA agents when deaf and hard-of-hearing passengers appear not to be responding confidently.”
The TSA also offers a program called TSA Cares to assist passengers with disabilities to escort them through airport security.
The specially trained offers can meet passengers at checkpoints and help anyone with limited mobility or anxiety, Essig said. The TSA asks passengers to request assistance 72 hours in advance.
“The whole purpose is not just to help one community,” Essig said. “This is for everyone who struggles to get through security.”
Therese Brzezinski, director of the Long Island Center for Independent Living, said assistance and accessibility using the translation devices will make travel easier for everyone.
Brzezinski added that there needs to be increased awareness and sensitivity for the deaf and blind community, “especially when screening the variety of devices they may depend upon to navigate safely and stay connected, engaged, and informed.”
“Travel has become a stressful experience no matter who you are,” she said. “Travel as a person with disabilities and/or language differences dials the stress level up to 11. So, TSA’s development of services like TSA Cares and use of these communication devices has the potential to make an incredible difference.”
John Asbury is a breaking news and general assignment reporter. He has been with Newsday since 2014 and previously worked at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California.
Florida school district pulls dictionaries, encyclopedias from shelves to review for sexual content - Yahoo News Australia - Dictionary
A Florida school district has pulled hundreds of books to determine whether they should be permanently removed from schools, including several dictionaries and encyclopedias.
The Escambia County School District compiled a list of more than 1,600 books to be pulled from school shelves for “further review by media specialists,” to determine if they will be permanently removed, according to their website.
That list of books that could be banned pending review includes five dictionaries — such as Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary — and eight encyclopedias.
This review is to ensure the school district complies with Florida’s House Bill 1069, which requires the suspension of materials “alleged to contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct, as identified in current law, pending resolution of an objection to the material.” The law, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, went into effect on 1 July 2023.
Superintendent Keith Leonard said in a statement it is inaccurate to say the district has imposed a ban on this list of more than 1,600 books.
“I want to clarify that our district has not imposed a ‘ban’ on over 1600 books,” Mr Leonard said. “Additionally, the dictionary has not been banned in our district.”
“Our school district, and especially our dedicated media specialists, remain committed to adhering to all statutes and regulations, while also providing valuable and varied literacy opportunities for every student,” he continued.
The fact that many of these books are even under review reveals a concerning trend in Florida, Kasey Meehan, program director for PEN America’s Freedom to Read project, told The Independent.
“This demonstrates that there is a chilled atmosphere in Florida where we’re seeing dictionaries being pulled to be considered under a law that rejects sexual content in schools,” Ms Meehan said.
“Even though these books may likely go back when we’re talking about encyclopedias and dictionaries, the idea that they’re pulled out of extreme caution just to meet this legislation is alarming,” she continued.
A spokesperson for the Florida Freedom To Read Project told The Independent the review in Escambia is “ridiculous.”
“The language in the law is bad, and the guidance from the Florida Department of Education is irresponsible,” the spokesperson said. “They are the ones with the power to fix this. Until then, districts will continue to ‘err on the side of caution’ as they have been told to do at the expense of our children’s education.
Instances of book bans in Florida — taking place under HB 1069 as well as HB 1557, better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — have disproportionately affected books authored by or written about people of colour and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Both parents and national organisations are fighting back on bans throughout the state.
PEN America filed a complaint last year against Escambia County School District and the Escambia County School Board alleging an earlier set of book bans and restrictions violated students’ right to free speech and equal protection under the law, according to a press release from the organization.
Oral arguments for the complaint began on Wednesday, 10 January.
Meanwhile, a federal district judge ruled this week that another lawsuit from PEN America could move forward challenging a Florida panhandle school district’s removal of several books about race and the LGBTQ+ community.
The Independent has contacted the Escambia County School District and members of the Escambia County School Board for comment.
Monday, April 8, 2024
Rotarians donate dictionaries to Kūlanihākoʻi High School - Maui Now - Dictionary
April 8, 2024, 3:09 PM HST
* Updated April 8, 3:10 PM
After learning of a need for dictionary books at the new Kūlanihākoʻi High School, Rotarians from the Rotary Club of Kīhei Wailea and Lahaina Sunset donated 35 dictionaries to the school’s English Department.
The request came from Lauren Lott, the school’s curriculum coordinator who remembered the generosity of the Rotary Clubs of Maui that provided dictionaries to third-grade students at elementary schools in Maui County. Lott reached out to Joanne Laird, the Maui Rotary Island Resource chair. She asked if any Rotary clubs might have dictionaries to spare for their school, and the 35 dictionaries were ready for delivery within two weeks.
During a tour of the Kīhei campus, Rotarians saw that the school’s library was empty of books and not yet ready for students. The members of the Rotary Club of Kīhei Wailea saw an opportunity to make a difference and began brainstorming fundraising ideas to fill the library shelves.
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“We are thrilled to collaborate with the Rotary Club of Kīhei Wailea and are grateful for their support in our classrooms and potentially beyond,” Lott said.
For more information about the Rotary Club of Kīhei Wailea, its community service projects and how to get involved, send email to President Jay Satenstein at [email protected].
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Travel the World With These International Books In Translation - Book Riot - Translation
Task #8 of the 2024 Read Harder Challenge is “Read a book in translation from a country you’ve never visited.” If you haven’t traveled much in your life, this will be easy! There are so many excellent books in translation from around the world. If you’re a seasoned traveler, you might find this one a little trickier, but if you’ve visited every country in the world, I can’t say I feel too sorry for you.
This is such a broad category that it felt strange putting together a short list of recommendations — there are many thousands of books you could choose from! So don’t take these as the definitive list of books in translation from around the world. I chose books in a variety of genres, leaning towards the speculative. Books in translation are often associated with literary fiction, but they span all genres and formats! I also only chose one book per country, to give you the best chance of a recommendation that matches your travel history.
Let me know in the comments what you’d recommend for this task! What’s your favorite book in translation?
Finland:
Fair Play by Tove Jansson, translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal
Tove Jansson is best known for her Moomin children’s books, but she also wrote adult novels, like this one. Fair Play, published in 1989, is about Mari and Jonna, a writer and artist who have lived together for decades. This domestic, slice-of-life story is inspired by her relationship with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, aka Tooti, whom she lived with for 45 years. It’s a cozy “celebration of everyday queerness.”
Also check out these other Swedish books in translation.
Korea:
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated from Korean by Anton Hur
From a cozy domestic novel to something much less comforting: this is a collection of unsettling horror and speculative fiction stories that are “by turns thought-provoking and stomach-turning.” Be prepared to visit a dystopian gynecology office and an underground monster fighting ring. You’ll also meet a cursed rabbit lamp. This was nominated for the National Book Award in Translated Literature. Chung and Hur also have a new book of short stories out this year: Your Utopia.
Also check out these other Korean books in translation.
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