The information compiled in the R.R. Hawkins Award-winning Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson documents, in nearly 200 color maps, the paths of Europeans, Africans, merchants, slaves, and human life, showing how and when so many people went from port to port, hub to hub, as the many regions developed and evolved over the history of the slave trade.
Joan of Arc and Odysseus have more in common than one might think. Not only that, but since the former conversed with saints and the latter with goddesses, today would today recommend them to a shrink. According to Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, both figures exist in literary works that capably demonstrate statecraft.
Leading Proust scholar William C. Carter has started a website “devoted to studying and celebrating the life and works of Marcel Proust” that offers both a wealth of literary resources and an online course. Along with University of Alabama at Birmingham student Nicolas D. Drogoul, Carter has launched Proust Ink
The importance of translation in bringing new books and ideas into English is crucial. Although no one has declared a universal language since Louis XIV, the dominance of English in international commerce, media, and even academia is impossible to ignore. Yet merely an estimated three percent of the hundreds of
Ali Ahmad Said Esber is better known to the Arabic world as Adonis, though he is only beginning his entrance into the Anglo world. Syrian-born and currently living in Paris, Adonis is, and has been for decades, one of the most popular modern poets writing in Arabic. His twenty volumes
Without meaning to, Rika Lesser has assumed the title of sole English translator of Göran Sonnevi’s poetry. She was not even interested in the work until she heard the poems from his own mouth, noting, “[H]earing Sonnevi read aloud utterly changed my view of his work. I would not have
Yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition, Susan Stamberg interviewed Sarah Greenough on her new book of letter correspondence: My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933. Unlike new 21st-century ways of sending love notes such as texts and Facebook messages, which seem only to escalate
In his semi-autobiographical Cyclops, Croatian author Ranko Marinković relates the experiences of a young man in Zagreb who starves himself in order to avoid combat in World War II.
Unpublished and relatively unknown until now, Lewis’ translation of the Aeneid is available in C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, edited by A.T. Reyes, shows the widely disseminated and studied epic through the eyes of the beloved British writer. In this bilingual edition, Reyes presents Virgil’s Latin text with the famous author’s long-forgotten interpretation.
If you don’t speak French, you’re not going to read the real text, you’re going to have to settle for Anglicized idioms. (The author spoke Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German, French, English, and Bulgarian, and then his confession he said he tried to learn Swahili, but who knows, really.) But even