BOOK OF THE WEEK
If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation by Daniel Hahn
Had Shakespeare known just how globally his works would be enjoyed after his death, he may well have wondered just how “his astonishingly complex weave [could] be unravelled and then remade with a wholly different linguistic texture”, writes Fintan O’Toole in his review of Daniel Hahn’s book about translating the Bard.
Few other writers have ever paid such close attention to “every nuance of rhythm, sound and meaning” as Shakespeare, Fintan adds – elements that are notoriously tricky to translate. What’s more, which modern-day author has extensive enough linguistic expertise to consider so many different translations, from Bangla to Brazilian Portuguese and from Japanese to te reo Māori? “Writing a brilliant book about this art would seem to go far beyond the unlikely into the realms of the impossible… But Hahn somehow manages to orchestrate a dazzling variety of notes from widely different cultures into a delightful praise-song for both the Bard and the geniuses who translate him.”
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Fieldwork As a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy
The latest novel from the always energetic Meena Kandasamy is framed as a document given to her by Amy, an Indian woman living in London who has been the victim of a deepfaked sex tape. Amy quickly goes viral, facing mockery and wrath on social media.
“The book brilliantly captures the hopelessness of being carried along on a wave of mob hatred,” writes John Self in his review, while “the book’s bouncy form – made up of messages, lists, rants – is a structure from which Kandasamy can hang views about modern life, the empathy gap in social media, activism and the manosphere”, always managing a “perfect balance between anger and comedy”.
How to Win a Trade War by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown
In How to Win a Trade War, Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown mourn the loss of the old, rules-based global trading order – in which normal people, company bosses and even economists didn’t need to worry about the trading system, because it just worked.
The authors’ guide to the “less stable and less friendly trading environment that is replacing it” is “determinedly, almost aggressively, lighthearted”, writes The Observer’s economics editor Ben Zaranko. They provide a “whistle-stop tour of what otherwise threatens to be a dry topic”, “cheerily” glossing over details, likening government stockpiles to “Reddit preppers” stashing away goods in case of disaster, and describing tariffs and trade barriers as “party drugs that deliver soaring highs and crushing comedowns”.
“One overarching message of the book is that the old rules-based order isn’t coming back, and we all need to adjust to that reality,” Ben concludes.
END NOTES
This week, The Observer’s pop critic Kitty Empire reviews Still in a Dream, Simon Reynolds’ history of shoegaze. Here’s Kitty:
“We’re all familiar with corralling bands into scenes: Britpop trips easily off the tongue, while yacht rock has gone from insult to descriptor. The internet is rife with niche micro-subgenres. A site called Every Noise at Once seems to have tabulated pretty much all of them as a colour-coded mind map, from ‘abstract idm’ all the way to ‘zouk riddim’.
“But the 1980s-90s cusp really did teem with coinings and turns of phrase. Although everyone was at it, the music critic Simon Reynolds spat them out almost compulsively. Post-rock is probably his most famous. But ‘wide-brimmed hat music’ was how he described the wipe-clean soul-pop of the early 80s. Its more agit-pop wing was ‘soul-cialism’, in which everything soulful – no matter how bland – equated to some moral high ground. (Reynolds didn’t like the Style Council.)
“My personal favourite? ‘Pernicious adequacy’. In context, Reynolds used it to describe the interregnum of the mid-80s before the artists he became passionate about got going. Really, though, it nails on the head all the music that isn’t terrible, but fails to set the heart racing, an elevated sneer that works for so much cultural output, no matter the era.”
Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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