Much is found in translation. There’s the extraordinary pleasure of having readers in languages I don’t know. But there’s also the way translation makes visible some new aspect of the original text, some influence I didn’t realize it had absorbed. When I think about the Italian translation of my work, I can feel the presence of Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, unnerved and delighted that I mysteriously now share their readership. When I’m translated into Turkish, it is Nâzım Hikmet’s political melancholy I think of. Maybe those who like his work will, reading me in Turkish, find something to like in mine as well? In German, perhaps even more than English, I sense the hovering presences of writers who shaped my sensibility—writers like Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, and W.G. Sebald, among many others. Thanks to translation, I become a German writer.
I trust my translators utterly. Their task is to take my work to a new cohort of my true readers, the same way translation makes me a true reader of Wisława Szymborska, even though I know no Polish, and of Svetlana Alexievich, even though I know no Russian.
"It doesn't get easier with each book. I don't feel any more confident now than when I started.
"You're revealing part of yourself. You're drawing on something from deep inside and that's exposing."
The trip was a revelation. Whatever uncertainty I’d had about the water—you will find “Corfu and sharks” in my browser history—or my desire to swim through great swaths of it immediately evaporated as we entered the warm, clear, ultra-buoyant sea, watched over by Russell. We would swim twice a day, sometimes hugging the shore, sometimes embarking on crossings of deeper, rougher channels. One day we swam two miles to our hotel from a tall, barren slab of rock our guides called Tooth Island that beckoned mysteriously on the horizon. Sometimes we would swim in and out of coves, looking for colorful fish or elusive crustaceans, exploring tiny, secluded beaches. Midday we would repair to the taverna for a Greek salad. At night we ate fresh fish, drank bottles of Mythos lager, and played Bananagrams.
Nothing you can do in nature is as immersive as ocean swimming. “You are in nature, part and parcel of it,” wrote Deakin, “in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming.” Our affinity for water is natural, Lynn Sherr writes in Swim: “We were fish ourselves hundreds of millions of years ago.” Our bodies are mostly water; our blood courses with salt.
A critic, a comic, a historian, a philosopher, and an amateur theologian walk into a bar. “Hello, Professor Eagleton,” the barman says, “What will it be?” If this joke is at all funny, that is because it leads one to expect an interaction between five people who turn out, absurdly, to be one. How could a single person be so many things? But the joke is unoriginal, and the setup is technically flawed. Since the subject of the sentence is singular, the verb should be “walks” not “walk.”
All of which is to show that jokes fall in the scope of rational explanation. We can give reasons why something is funny or why it is not, why a joke works or why it doesn’t. These reasons aren’t just causes, triggers that inhibit or provoke an unintelligible laugh. They help us to make sense of humor.
Like many writers on this topic, Terry Eagleton begins his new book, Humour, by owning the complaint that to analyze humor is to kill it. In fact, Eagleton goes meta: he begins by noting that many writers on the topic begin by noting this and he notes that it isn’t always true. The British comedian Stewart Lee, who may be the best stand-up working today, makes a trademark of analyzing jokes on stage in order to critique the audience response. When we attempt to explain a joke, what we are doing is continuous with this; it is what stand-ups do, to wonderful effect, on Stuart Goldsmith’s podcast The Comedian’s Comedian.
Like “Tubes”, Mr Blum’s book about the hidden infrastructure of the internet (published in 2012), “The Weather Machine” traces the “long supply chain of data” that produces the morning weather report. The smartphone weather app is “the handsome face of a complex and sprawling machine”, a vast operation encompassing awesome supercomputers, tens of thousands of observation stations and over 100 satellites. The book strips this forecasting engine down to its parts, revealing the people and places that keep the gears turning.