• All Time Top Visitors (Countries)

    Thank you. Дякую. 谢谢。Thanks ever so. Спасибо. Danke. תודה./شكرا. Merci. Whatever Canadians say. شكرا. I’m not sure when Blogger started tracking these visits, but I’ve had this account for several years now, though not as long as I’ve been blogging (since 1999). I’ve lived in 3 of… more ›

  • Scrivening

    I have to say that I really like using Scrivener for translation! I’ve been using this app for almost two years now, but only for writing, drafting work, both nonfiction (essays, a book) and fiction. With this new translation project,… more ›

  • Unmentionables

    “Beauty is just as vapid as its distinctions.” The recent translation of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, translated by Emma Ramadan and published by Deep Vellum, has got me thinking about apophasis, and not because the protagonist is writing an essay on… more ›

  • Perimeter of Poverty

    I rarely feel or experience white privilege as such. As someone who grew up in poverty in rural Texas, I always thought the battle was between the poor and the rich. My entire experience growing up corroborated that fact. At… more ›

  • An-Original Translation

    Imagine being a historian of nineteenth-century Paris and your academic publisher demanding to see the original city before accepting your manuscript. What kind of original would you provide? A map before Haussmannization? A keychain fob with a miniature Eiffel Tower?… more ›

  • A Queer World (In Three Quotes)

    “IN the Morocco of the 1980s, where homosexuality did not, of course, exist, I was an effeminate little boy, a boy to be sacrificed, a humiliated body who bore upon himself every hypocrisy, everything left unsaid.”–A Boy to Be Sacrificed… more ›

  • Dead Babies

    At the edge of my undergraduate alma mater lies a cemetery for those who died in a nearby, long-since-vanished house for unwed mothers. I wonder who these poor mothers were. I wonder about these poor, unnamed babies tucked away underground… more ›

  • Exorbitant Stupidity

    If you follow this line long enough, you get to deconstruction where a theorist would be looking for internal contractions or paradoxes that would essentially render the text meaningless. At the end of this line, you’re saying writing can’t mean… more ›

  • The Circumscription of Triangles & Squares

    Spirit/soul/life, pneuma/pysché/zoè or bios, spiritus/anima/vita, Geist/Seele/Leben­­­—these are the triangles and squares in which we imprudently pretend to recognize stable semantic determinations, and then to circumscribe or skirt round the abysses of what we ingenuously call translation. –Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit:… more ›

  • Dear Senator

    I’m currently drafting a letter to my senators regarding the letter they sent to Iran. It’s a letter about another letter–a meta-letter, if you will. Dear Senator: As a constituent from the great state of Texas I want to commend… more ›