Given the likely plight of the many interpreters left to the tender mercies of the Taliban in the recent Afghan conflict, this book is timely, because it highlights the fact that historically interpreters have taken risks or been exposed to dangers not of their own making. They’re not just anonymous or culturally liminal figures hovering in the background and performing the necessary task of conveying the sense of conversations between different nationalities. Indeed, it would seem that the better interpreters are at their job, the more each side becomes suspicious. What might they be hiding? Are they adding their own nuances, agenda or biases to what they’re transmitting? Can interpreters ever accurately convey what was said? How can they (or should they) “soften” language which might seem offensive yet still convey what was said? As Henrietta Harrison, a professor of Modern Chinese Studies at Oxford, tells us, it “was not just a question of finding someone with the necessary linguistic skills. What mattered was trust.” Unfortunately, “their abilities to empathize with the other side, and, quite literally, speak their language, meant that their loyalties could never be entirely clear.”
Author: John Butler
In this collection of travel stories, Canadian journalist and photographer Andrew Scott takes us on a lively romp through China, Japan, Laos, India (twice), South Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia and Turkey. The congenial Scott exhibits just enough seriousness when it’s needed and is always sensitive to the people he meets, refreshingly non-judgmental and patient, although he admits that this insouciance sometimes took a good deal of effort on his part to maintain.
English literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries saw a profusion of lengthy, serialized novels by people such as Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell. On the continent Marcel Proust wrote his seven-volume A la recherche du temps perdu, which took him fourteen years to write (1913-27), and of course there’s Tolstoy with War and Peace and Dostoevsky with The Brothers Karamazov. These authors were rank amateurs compared with one Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848), the Japanese writer who managed to churn out what must be the most mind-bogglingly monumental novel in the history of literature, the Hakkenden, the first part of which, presented here (the translator promises a complete version), came out in 1814.
Of all the three great sects of Zen in Japan, the Soto school is perhaps the best-known and most inclusive, admitting to its ranks lay people and women in addition to monks. It’s one of the most widely practiced forms of Buddhism in Japan, where there are reportedly nearly fourteen thousand temples dedicated to it. Soto is also very popular in North America; in 1966 the Soto Zen Buddhist Association was founded by Japanese and American teachers, a response to a great and growing interest outside Japan in the practices of this school.
Surrealism is usually connected with the visual arts: Salvador Dali’s limp watches or René Magritte’s rainstorm of bowler-hatted businessmen. Whilst surrealist writing is perhaps not as well-known, French poet André Breton declared in his 1924 Surrealist Manifestos that in surrealism “the agonizing question of possibility does not arise,” and that “the man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.” Carl Jung once said, “it’s not the world as we know it that speaks out of [a person’s] unconscious, but the unknown world of the psyche.”
This large-format book of wonderful photographs by Jon Kolkin, an American doctor and artist who has spent many years in Asia practicing both his avocations, takes readers away from the purely visual impact of the subject matter to something beyond.
In the world of religion, it seems that one can find an abundance of crazy or eccentric people whose sayings and doings have found their way into folklore, or who are venerated by generations of people who incorporate them into their spiritual lives as if they were guides, family members or friends.