At Granta, literary translators Mara Faye Lethem and Julia Sanches trade correspondence about the personalities of different languages, what it was like for Sanches when Boulder by Eva Baltasar was nominated for the International Booker Prize earlier this year, and what it’s like to “seep into others’ texts” as a translator.
Sanches:
I wonder if some of our physical responses to a particular word or scene are conveyed in our translations. If there’s a way to tell what the translator knows viscerally, or if it’s simply part of the job to create the illusion of that close, intimate knowledge and experience, just as it is (I assume) with poets and novelists. You’re a novelist too – tell me, are we doing very similar things in different ways (e.g. mapped and unmapped)?
Lethem:
I think we all inhabit various worlds at once, I think being a translator helps me to navigate those worlds, when they are separated by language. I was recently looking at some writing I did in college and the professor’s red marks removed all of the Brooklyn from my grammar. It took me a long time to trust my decision-making as a translator, to accept how I seep into others’ texts, but in the end I suppose that’s what makes a translation come alive, and eventually come into its own as a new book.
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Sara Clemence is ruthless in this piece, questioning the privilege and indulgence of the people who travel to the one place on earth that still belongs to nature, just because they can. The self-important justifications of these tourists will leave you feeling even more frustrated with the human race. Clemence is right: Don’t go.
Overtourism isn’t a new story. But Antarctica, designated as a global commons, is different from any other place on Earth. It’s less like a too-crowded national park and more like the moon, or the geographical equivalent of an uncontacted people. It is singular, and in its relative wildness and silence, it is the last of its kind. And because Antarctica is different, we should treat it differently: Let the last relatively untouched landscape stay that way.
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Inspired to enlist in the U.S. Marines after 9/11, sniper Grady Kurpasi volunteered to fight for Ukraine after the Russians invaded the country. He disappeared on April 26th, 2022 after encountering enemy fire. Back in the United States, his wife Heeson refused to believe that Grady had been killed in action. But for nearly a year, the mystery remained: Where was Grady Kurpasi?
“That’s what sparked my interest,” Aces says. “Grady being Grady, [he] could easily look and sound like a North Korean if he was still alive. But the report didn’t make sense because it said the dude’s face was blasted off. He wouldn’t be able to talk. Did they mistake Grady for a North Korean soldier? And maybe they’re just trying to keep him alive. Which didn’t meet the narrative that we were reading, where they were just cutting people’s heads off. So, in the back of our minds, this [was] a long shot.”
And source after source confirmed the same story.
“It very, very quickly turned from a situation where we didn’t expect to do anything other than recover remains into a very real possibility that he was still alive somewhere,” Josh says. “We had three or four different sightings of him from different people that had no connection to one another.”
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American children who are ripped away from their families. The people who run for 24 hours. The dark side of an ancient city. A man who treats water like wine. A surprising response to a bad trip.
Shoshana Walter | The New York Times Magazine and Reveal | June 29, 2023 | 7,167 words
I’m not sure that there’s anything more American than making it difficult for a person to be a mother. I don’t mean physically giving birth—thanks to anti-abortion zealots and the Supreme Court, many states are now literally forcing people to do that, with horrific consequences. I mean being a person, with everything that alone entails in a country defined by inequality, precarity, and prejudice, who also has a child. Exhibit A: As Shoshana Walter found in a feat of investigative reporting, people swept up in the opioid crisis, who’ve done exactly what they’re supposed to do—who got clean and take prescription drugs to stay that way—are now having their babies seized by the government. “They don’t want you on illicit street drugs,” one of Walter’s subjects says, “so here, we’re going to give you this medicine. But then if you take this medicine, we are going to punish you for it and ruin your family.” The injustice doesn’t end there. “We also found women who were reported after taking antidepressants, anxiety and ADHD medications and even over-the-counter cold medicine during pregnancies,” Walter writes. “Some women were reported after testing positive for the fentanyl in their epidurals.” The emphasis is mine; my jaw dropped at the Helleresque insanity of that detail. —SD
Stephen Lurie | Slate | July 1, 2023 | 4,505 words
You might not think a 24-hour race run around a 400-meter track would make for a compelling longread. It sounds grueling and monotonous. Dangerous, even. Everyone runs at their own pace. How can you even tell who’s excelling? Enter reporter Stephen Lurie who crafts a fascinating story by describing the tiny details of the racer’s experience in Pennsylvania’s Dawn to Dusk to Dawn ultramarathon. He takes a sport most know nothing about and puts the reader on the track, alongside the runners. “Gagz had been running for 17 hours and 20 minutes when he made it to the southeast corner of the loop,” he writes. “He’d already chugged past this spot 370 times, but on his 371st lap, he started walking across the lanes. He reached the edge and laid down, propping his tattooed legs up against a waist-high chain-link fence, long gray beard falling toward the damp red track. He planned to sleep for exactly five minutes.” Before you read this story, you might question the point of this ultra-endurance experience. But as Lurie shows us, anyone who has pushed themselves hard to do something challenging—regardless of what that something is—understands the invaluable education the very act of endurance gives you about you: the important subject of all. —KS
Guy D. Middleton | Aeon | July 4, 2023 | 4,000 words
Although I have not been to Pompeii, I have visited Herculaneum—a city that fell to Mount Vesuvius on the same day almost 2,000 years ago. Wandering the miraculously preserved streets, I imagined the lives of its residents, whose footsteps would have echoed on the stone so long before my own. Guy D. Middleton does more than imagine in this piece; he pulls in research, clawing away any romanticism to paint a picture of the brutality of Pompeii, a place where slaves would have endured sexual assault and violence, “being owned and being used,” as Middleton puts it. A pithy piece of wall graffito advertising sex is his jumping-off point: “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.” (Clearly, we share a penchant for drawing on walls—and sex—with ancient Pompeiians.) Middleton smartly uses this line to turn detective and, in trying to uncover who Eutychis was, displays Pompeii’s wider underbelly. It makes for a dark story, but one deftly told. —CW
Katherine LaGrave | AFAR | October 28, 2020 | 4,042 words
People who have fascinations tend to be the most fascinating people. For AFAR, Katherine LaGrave profiles Martin Riese, America’s first water sommelier, a man who has been obsessed with water since he was four years old. This piece could easily have devolved from profile into caricature, but it’s LaGrave’s restraint that keeps you reading. (Ok restraint and the wonderful water puns and wordplay sprinkled throughout.) “Riese is taking cues from the element he considers most beloved, going with the flow and flowing where he’s able, taking opportunities as they come, and sharing why we should care about water with anyone who cares to listen,” she writes. Take the plunge and read LaGrave’s piece. You’ll not only be awash in new knowledge of sustainably sourced high-end water, but you’ll also satisfy your thirst for a well-written piece on a little-known topic. And that’s something I can raise a glass to. —KS
Recent psychedelics coverage tends to focus on four primary categories. There are the drugs’ benefits and/or dangers, as well as stories focusing on their creators and wielders: those who use them to help people and those who seek to profit from their use. Chris Colin’s fascinating Wired feature skirts that tetrad, instead tracing the evolving norms around supporting a person when their inward journey goes to dark places. From the opening graf, you know it’s going to be a fun read: “Everything was insane and fine. The walls had begun to bend, the grain in the floorboards was starting to run. Jeff Greenberg’s body had blown apart into particles, pleasantly so. When he closed his eyes, chrysanthemums blossomed.” Using Greenberg’s trip, his own psilocybin experience, and a solid dose of cosmic-cowboy history, Colin shows how the way we respond to a person’s “psychic distress” speaks volumes about how we respond to one another in general. That we’re in the midst of a psychonautics surge is not surprising; that we’re responding to the moment with care and common sense is. —PR
Audience Award
Here’s the piece that bowled our readers away this week.
For GQ, Eric Wills profiles Jason Belmonte, the most successful 10-pin bowler in Pro Bowling Association history. With his controversial and unorthodox bowling style, Belmonte is a man who is changing the sport with his own two hands. —KS
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In this beautiful essay for Emergence Magazine, Diné poet Jake Skeets reflects on his role in butchering a sheep as part of celebrating Kinaałda, the Diné puberty ceremony for a young relative. Skeets finds inspiration in witnessing an elder teach his partner’s sister how to make a traditional recipe and uses the gentle, wise spirit of that educational moment to build his confidence in preparing the animal for the meal.
My role in these ceremonies has slowly begun to shift. I’m no longer a child who simply witnesses but an adult who must participate, and as such it’s important to enter the space with the proper mindset. We don’t think negatively or with anxiety during the next four days. We don’t hesitate or feel unsure about our roles and duties. We enter the space with a lean toward what is beautiful in the world, what is right and balanced. Even writing this essay, I feel compelled to focus on what is working rather than what is not working, because you don’t pair a ceremony like this with more negative assumptions. It is beauty way. It is hope. Some might call it a naïve optimistic hope, but I call it a critical hope.
Sheep represent so much more than food, so food sovereignty itself represents the inherent right of peoples to their own ways of living. “Sheep is life,” as the saying goes. Sheep offer nourishment, clothing, and tools. No part of the sheep is wasted. However, to get this harvest you must tend to the sheep, waking up early every day to ensure their survival. This shepherding gives way to a circle of care and attention that births a way of life. A way of life we have an inherent right to. This is food sovereignty.
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Before the novelist Victoria Amelina was killed in a missile attack in Ukraine on July 1, 2023, she wrote about what it was like to grow up in the shadow of Russia as a Ukrainian. In this piece, published posthumously by The Guardian, Amelina considers the true meaning of home and brotherhood as she recounts her transition from a wide-eyed child enthralled by Moscow to an activist who documented Russian war crimes against her homeland.
When I was 15, I won a local competition and was chosen to represent my home town, Lviv, at an international Russian language contest in Moscow. I was excited to visit the Russian capital. Moscow felt like the centre of what I considered home. My library was full of Russian classics, and even though the Soviet Union had collapsed almost a decade earlier, not much had changed in the Russian school I attended, or on Russian TV, which my family had the habit of watching. Additionally, while I didn’t even have the money to travel around Ukraine, Russia was happy to invest in my Russianisation.
At the contest in Moscow I met kids from all those countries Russia would later try to invade or assimilate: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova. The Russian Federation invested a lot of money in raising children like us from the “former Soviet republics” as Russians. They probably invested more in us than they did in the education of children in rural Russia: those who were already conquered didn’t need to be tempted with summer camps and excursions to Red Square.
I remembered this story in 2022, watching an interview with an elderly man in Mariupol. He was desperate, disoriented and disarmingly honest. “But I believed in this Russian world, can you imagine? All my life I believed we were brothers!” the poor man exclaimed, surrounded by the ruins of his beloved city. The man’s apartment building was in ruins and the illusion of home, the space he perceived as his motherland, the former Soviet Union where he was born and lived his best years, had been crushed even more brutally. The propaganda stopped working on him only when the Russian bombs fell. The border between independent Ukraine and the Russian Federation arose in his mind as a crucial barrier, just like it did in mine when I realised I had only been brought to festive Moscow to lie about my home town in Ukraine, so that the Russian viewers could hate it even more.
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As more and more people board the USS Psilocybin and head into the depths of their consciousness, more and more of them will at some point find themselves in a precarious psychic situation. But riding out the eternal darkness of one’s soul doesn’t need to be a solo voyage—nor, as Chris Colin examines, does it need to be avoided. A new generation of organizations is helping people steer into the chaos, and come out the other side reborn.
A volunteer named Jasmine picked up the phone. Immediately she emitted a gentle, knowledgeable, and grounded vibe. She didn’t try to distract him from his anguish or minimize it. On the contrary, she validated what he was feeling and gave him permission to explore his pain further. “Very quickly she turned it into something I felt that I could go through,” he said.
Greenberg spoke with Jasmine for nearly an hour and a half, then called again later, as the crisis softened into something more like curiosity. With her help, his angst metabolized into a searing peek under the hood. Where before he’d felt abject terror, he now saw an invitation to make real changes in his life.
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