A group of literary agents is publicizing an open call for submissions from Muslim writers, in response to the recently instituted Federal ban on refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries. “Like so many of you, we are gravely alarmed by the present administration’s recent broad ban on refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries,” the…
Translators are the ultimate close readers — they consider every word, every comma, and every layer of nuance. For months, “translator Twitter” has included comments from translators around the world on the difficulty of doing “Trumpslation.” One classic question translators asked each other: how to translate “Make America Great Again” into Spanish? The Spanish newspaper…
‘It turns out that all Israeli art is about Jesus,” an American tourist said to me as he moved away from a painting in The Israel Museum’s paradigm-shifting new exhibit titled “Behold the Man: Jesus in Israeli Art.” In Hebrew, the title is a bit different: Zeh Ha’Ish, or “This Is the Man.” Throughout the…
One afternoon, when I was 22, I nervously asked my boss if I could attend a French writing workshop at the Alliance Française each week — during work hours. It was my first job out of college, and I worked as a copy editor at a daily financial newspaper covering the municipal-bond market. I was…
Copy editors around the world are struggling to write headlines that are accurate in a rapidly changing political landscape, and many are getting flak for calling white racists and anti-Semites what they are now calling themselves: “the alt-right.” Normally, calling someone what they call themselves — such as “environmental activist” — is reasonable, and if…
In the days of Hitler, the Bible was condensed and transformed. Throughout the Third Reich, the “Old Testament” was taken out, thus erasing the Jewish contribution. Imagine: a 12-year-old German reader in 1945 might have been entirely unaware of Genesis, Exodus, or Isaiah. It wasn’t just book burning, it was a replacement of text. It…
Voting early in Chicago, where the lines were long and snaking around the Edgewater Library stacks, I received a receipt printed in four languages — English, Spanish, Hindi, and Vietnamese. I immediately wondered about languages not listed but certainly heard in this zip code, one of the most diverse in America, and home to refugees…
I once heard a woman in cat’s-eye glasses say that she likes to look at a large map on her wall, which has pins affixed to the countries from which she has published literature in translation. But what haunts her, she passionately explained, are the empty spaces on the map — the countries with no…
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