5 books set in Nigeria it’s worth checking out
A listicle of five books set in Nigeria it’s worth checking out – from classics to less well-known newcomers, there’s some great reading here.
more...Luise
What’s in a foreword? On translator’s notes
Translators make decisions that have an enormous impact on how texts arrive in linguistic contexts beyond the language they were written in. Especially in literary translation, many of these decisions are related to questions of aesthetics and style. But these are also, as our macht.sprache. project is making increasingly clear, decisions with political undertow and ramifications. The translator’s note is often a moment that allows translators to communicate to their readers the considerations that went into their decision-making.
more...
The Namesake
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut novel tells the story of the Ganguli family: Ashoke and Ashima, originally from Bengal, migrate to the North-eastern United States in the 1960s. They have two children there, and the novel follows the experiences of their firstborn son. It’s a novel about living in between places, cultures and assigned identities.
more...
5 books set in Southern Africa worth reading
Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania… Here are five books we can recommend to take you on some journeys through Southern Africa.
more...
Whose is the world in world literature? On world literature and postcolonial studies
So many texts on the subject of world literature at some point indicate Goethe’s coining of Weltliteratur in 1827 as its origin story. This is to start the conversation within a European framing. But one could choose another point of departure. For instance: In 1907, Rabindranath Tagore, an enormously respected figure of Bengali literature, was asked to give a lecture on comparative literature. He chose instead to speak on vishwa sahitya.
more...
The Nickel Boys
In a grazing pasture on the North side of what was once the campus of the Nickel Academy for Boys, an archaeology student from the University of Florida stumbles across a field of bones: unmarked graves. She and her cohort are there to excavate the official graveyard of the school before the lands are developed into an office park. The small bones in the known cemetery are already suspiciously often fractured, suggesting breaks and injuries before death: what history of abuses does the field of unmarked bones testify to? Thus begins Colson Whitehead’s prizewinning novel The Nickel Boys.
more...
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Saidiya Hartman is a Cultural Historian and Literary Scholar whose work explores histories of slavery and its afterlives primarily in a North American context. Her vantage point for writing is oftentimes fraught and incomplete archival records that eclipse and overdetermine Black subjects’ histories.
more...
The role of the translator: mediator, moderator, gatekeeper
Our macht.sprache. project has given us cause to think carefully about the work of translation, and the people who do this work.
more...
Ada’s Realm
Adas Raum is ambitious and epic in scope, gripping and intelligent in execution, and somehow both unforgiving and funny. It will let you meet Ada in her different iterations through the ages, as well as God in a number of irreverent and charismatic guises
more...