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Two essays about writing and the English language by Tim Parks in  The New York Review of Books Why Write in English? Tim Parks Why not write in a foreign language? If people feel free to choose their profession, their religion, and even, these days, their sex, why not just decide which language you want to write in and go for it? Ever since Jhumpa Lahiri published In Other Words, her small memoir in Italian, people have been asking me, Why don’t you write in Italian, Tim? You’ve been in the country thirty-five years, after all. What keeps you tied to English? Is it just a question of economic convenience? That the market for books in English is bigger? That the world in general gives more attention to books written in English? Is that it? Certainly economics can be important. And politics too. Arguably, these were the factors that pushed Conrad and Nabokov to abandon their Polish and Russian mother tongues. If it is not possible to publish at home, or to publish the...

The Translation Paradox Tim Parks Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books. The best translations from the Italian I have seen in recent years are Geoffrey Brock’s rendering of Pavese’s collected poems, Disaffections, and Frederika Randall’s enormous achievement in bringing Ippolito Nievo’s great novel Confessions of an Italian into English. Brock, who has also given us an excellent version of Pinocchio, finds an entirely convincing English voice for the troubled Pavese. Randall turns Nievo’s lively, idiosyncratic pre-Risorgimento prose into something sparklingly credible in English. However, neither of these fine books became the talk of the town and their translators remain in the shadows. ..... So does translation matter? Does the choice of translator matter? Some translators’ associations (in Germany for example) insist that a translator ought to be paid a royalty for the tran...

Memoirs by Andrei Sakharov Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty My Year Off by Robert McCrum An Italian Education by Tim Parks Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life by John Adams A Step from Death: A Memoir by Larry Woiwode   Parish the Thought by Bernard Ruane  Along the Way by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez 

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Tim Parks in The New York Review of Books  asks,  “ Is it really possible to be free as a writer? ” and  concludes that “celebrity, it would appear, breeds conformity.”   [full text]

An Italian Education by Tim Parks   The Glorious Ones: Classical Music Legendary Player by Harold Schonberg   Home is Where the Wind Blows by Fred Hoyle   For the Good of Humanity: Ludwik Rajchman by Marta Balinska   Dawn Powell: Biography by Tim Page