When you read a translation, you notice the seams. A slightly unnatural phrase catches your eye. A sentence that feels too American for a Japanese novel makes you pause. A word choice that seems odd forces you to reread. As you’re reading, you’re watching someone work. That awareness is the core skill of copyediting. You […]
A translator sits with a sentence in Korean, Japanese, or Italian and faces a hundred possible English versions. One is literal. One captures the rhythm. One preserves the emotional weight. The translator cannot have all three so a choice has to be made. Deborah Smith, who translated Han Kang‘s The Vegetarian and Human Acts, faced this constantly. A […]
For the last year, jazz has been my project. Miles Davis. John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk. Bill Evans. I have been working through the history of the genre, trying to understand what makes it work. Tension and Release What struck me first was the tension. A jazz soloist plays a phrase that bends away from the […]
James Joyce does things with punctuation that should not work. Long stretches of prose with no periods. Sentences that start without capitals. Dialogue that runs into narration without quotation marks. A copyeditor would have a heart attack. The writing works. The punctuation choices make it work. The Breathlessness of No Periods Near the end of Ulysses, […]
Over the years, I have played piano in churches, rock bands, country bands, and folk groups. Each genre has its own vocabulary, its own rules, its own expectations. You do not play a rock song the same way you play a hymn. You do not comp chords for a country singer the same way you […]
Miles Davis built a career on playing less. While other trumpet players filled every bar with notes, Davis would hold a single note and let it hang in the air. He trusted that one note, held long enough, could say more than a hundred fast ones. The Virtuosity of Restraint The same restraint shows up […]
For years, pop music was something I dismissed. Too simple. Too polished. Too eager to please. Then I started paying attention. The Discipline of Three Minutes Around 15 years ago, something shifted. Pop music stopped feeling shallow and started feeling disciplined. A three-minute song has to grab you in the first five seconds. It has […]
Someone once told me that the secret to travel is to stop trying to see everything and start trying to actually be somewhere. We were planning our honeymoon in Paris in 2013. I had numerous maps. I had planned routes. I had calculated how many days in each arrondissement, how many museums I could visit […]
I’ve spent enough time in countries where I don’t speak the language to know that Google Translate is a liar. It will give you words. It will not give you meaning. A direct translation might be technically correct, but it almost never lands the way you want it to. Meaning lives in context, in tone, […]
I have a complicated relationship with The Catcher in the Rye. I read it at seventeen, the right age, and I found Holden Caulfield insufferable. I read it again at thirty, and I found him heartbreaking. But one thing has not changed across either reading. He is right about the phonies. Holden hates anyone who performs. […]
Tyson Peveto 