Bob's Journal

According to an oft-cited and oft-lamented statistic, a mere 3% of books published in the U.S. are works in translation.  Read more

John Sargent, Macmillan's longtime chief executive, will leave the publishing company in January because of disagreements over its direction, according to an announcement from its parent company, Holtzbrinck, on Thursday.

For much of history, reading was a fairly noisy activity. On clay tablets written in ancient Iraq and Syria some 4,000 years ago, the commonly used words for "to read" literally meant "to cry out" or "to listen". "I am sending a very urgent message," says one letter from this period. "Listen to this tablet. If it is appropriate, have the king listen to it."  Read more

The translator is a writer. The writer is a translator. How many times have I run up against these assertions? - in a chat between translators protesting because they are not listed in a publisher's index of authors; or in the work of literary theorists, even poets ("Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text," observed Octavio Paz).  Read more

This past March, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the house, my wife was watching television. This was not her style. The kids had been home for three weeks, she was finishing up graduate school, and we were still shooting for a semblance of normalcy. This was back when everyone mistakenly thought we were on collective pause.  Read more