Columbia University Alumni

"My loyalty as a translator is to both the author and the reader, but in a pinch, I try to help the reader."

"The sex scenes were the toughest to translate. Sex is notoriously hard to write about, and no easier to translate. My prose probably falls somewhere between puritanical and pornographic. Maybe sex is just better in French."

"Like most translators, I’m a ventriloquist, and I work hard to make people sound like themselves, and not like me."

"Good writers are an editor's stock in trade (...) You have to treasure them and treat them right."

"Food makes history in France, in legend and in fact. (...) But when Charles de Gaulle radioed the French underground that the D-Day invasion was imminent, his message included the key phrase les carottes sont cuites. Literally, this means "the carrots are cooked," and metaphorically "it's all over." What other nation marches to war in the glow of beta carotene?"

"My grown-up novels have been translated into several languages, but my relationship with my translators has always been limited to a few e-mails to clear up some point or other. With William Rodarmor, all that changed! He started by telephoning me to introduce himself, and we very quickly built a relationship of trust. And he got passionately involved with the text, wanting to know everything about everything, including somewhat remote elements of the historical context that would better enable him to understand this or that detail. He literally bombarded me with messages and sometimes tracked me to my lair, because he wound up knowing the book better than I did! And he managed it all with great humor."

"Like it or not, a translator has to take liberties. How many depends on closely the translator hews to the words of the text. I’m on the side of the reader, so I’d never produce a literal, word-for-word translation, however faithful. My goal is always to produce a text so smooth that the reader isn’t aware it’s a translation. It should read like a book that Mathieu would have written if he were more fluent in English. So I occasionally take liberties, especially with jokes, slang, and idioms. But thanks to email, I can run my textual sins by the author before committing them to paper. Even after some forty books and screenplays, I still love doing translations."

"I'm walking walking walking to where the sun is setting. I'm looking at it and wanting to catch it in my hand and to be squeezing until color are dripping out from it forever. That way everywhere it is always dark and nobody is ever having to see any of the terrible thing that is happening in this world."

"And now the woman is praying to God... I am laughing laughing because God is forgetting everybody in this country."

"I am fearing because I am seeing that the only way not to be fighting is to die. I am not wanting to die."

"There’s strong leftist support for Palestinian causes in the United States. Many of my friends in New York, for example, think that Israel is doing terrible things in the Occupied Territories."

"Did the Palestinians build the concentration camps? He said. What about the the Armenians: do their deaths mean less because they are not Jews."

"So we were playing all this game then and thinking that to be a soldier was to be the best thing in the world because gun is looking so powerful and men in movie are looking so powerful and strong when they are killing people, but I am knowing now that to be a soldier is only to be weak and not strong, and to have no food to eat and not to eat whatever you want, and also to have people making you do thing that you are not wanting to do and not be doing whatever you are wanting which is what they are doing in movie. But I am only knowing this now because I am soldier now."

"Sometimes it is hard to shake the feeling that, all jokes aside, there really is an epidemic of sorrow sweeping our world, the full brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few."

"EACH PERSON MUST, ON SOME LEVEL, TAKE HIMSELF AS THE CALIBRATION point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic."

"Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.”"

"while the buildings and roads of the capital city suggest a rational, orderly society, the reality is the opposite"

"And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster."

"Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met."

"I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables.”"

"I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.”"

"Policemen routinely stop drivers of commercial vehicles at this spot to demand bribe"

"Help us fight corruption. If any employee of the consulate asks for a bribe or tip, please, have a discreet word with the Consul General"

"thousands of cars over the course of a day would pay toll at the informal rate, lining the pockets of the collectors and their superiors"

"Hey, hey young guy, why trouble yourself? They'll take your money anyway, and they'll punish you by delaying your passport. Is that what you want? Aren't you more interested in getting your passport than trying to prove a point?"

"And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city."

"I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy."

"Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?"

"WE EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A CONTINUITY, AND ONLY AFTER IT FALLS away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float."

"To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone."

"I have mentally rehearsed a reaction for a possible encounter with such corruption at the airport in Lagos. But to walk in off a New York street and face a brazen demand for a bribe: that is a shock I am ill-prepared for.”"

"I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy—certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process—and in that sense I have returned a stranger.”"

"the next Edward Said! I was going to do it by studying comparative literature and using it as a basis for societal critique."

"They gave no reason. They just said I would have to submit another one in twelve months. I was crushed. I left school. Plagiarism? The only possibilities are either that they refused to believe my command of English and theory or, I think this is even more likely, that they were punishing me for world events in which I had played no role. My thesis committee had me on September 20, 2001..That was the year I lost my illusions about Europe."

"the hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators"

"Over the past forty years the doctrine of originalism (along with its sibling, textualism) has been the cornerstone of the jurisprudence of the conservative majority that now dominates the [[w:Supreme Court of the United States|[Supreme] Court]]. Concocted in the 1980s to roll back the constitutional precedents of the New Deal and Great Society eras, supposedly in the name of judicial restraint, originalism purports to divine the original intentions of the framers by presenting tendentious renderings of the past as a kind of scripture. This bad-faith invocation of the framers has become a ploy to justify overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, eliminating commonsense gun regulation, and more. But now this originalist petard is exploding in the majority’s face. No degree of cherry-picking or obfuscation can deny the historical record of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is unequivocal: if Donald Trump engaged, in any way, in the insurrection of January 6, he is automatically barred from holding any public office, federal or state."

"The majority opinion in Trump v. United States, the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history, secures the monumental historic disgrace of the John Roberts Court. Since last winter, the Supreme Court has intervened directly in the 2024 presidential campaign by effectively shielding Donald Trump from being tried on major federal charges before the November election. No previous Supreme Court has protected a political candidate in this way. Far more ominously, in March the Court in Trump v. Anderson openly nullified the section of the Fourteenth Amendment that bars insurrectionists from holding federal or state office, discarding basic lessons about threats to American democracy dating back to the Civil War. Now, in Trump v. United States, handed down on the last day of its 2023–2024 term, the Court has seized the opportunity to invent, with no textual basis, "at least presumptive" and quite possibly "absolute" presidential criminal immunity for official acts, a decision so broad that it essentially places the presidency above the law."

"I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes."

"the moment there is a power cut"

"Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.”"

"Church has become one of the biggest businesses in Nigeria… these Christians are militants, preaching a potent combination of a fear of hellfire and a love of financial prosperity…"

"Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, rises out of the Sahel like a modernist apparition. The avenues are clean and broad and the government buildings are imposing, with that soulless, vaguely fascistic air common to all capitals cities of the world…"

"O, go away, you steely monster! Why must you arrive so soon When I, at the moment, am lost in thought And wish that I could hide myself At home among the mielie-stalks, Covered with cobs, surrounded by pumpkins; For there I should never be disturbed By bustling crowds of chattering people Passing noisily on their way: I see them at dawn, I see them at dusk – At sunrise and sunset they pass me by."

"It is that wind it is that voice buzzing it is whispering and whistling in the wires miles upon miles upon miles on the wires in the wind in the subway track in the rolling road in the not silent bush it is the voice of the noise here it comes the Third World Express they must say, here we go again."

"You have to remember that the items that have been stolen from the Museum or have been plundered, are not owned by only one person and usually not only by Afghans. It is usually one or two Afghans with five or six Pakistani partners. And the underground stolen art business in Pakistan is just as well organised and it is just as dangerous as the drug business. In fact, I have heard some people say that as far as the end-result is concerned, it’s even more profitable than drugs."

"Dupree’s analysis clearly suggests that ‘the museum was not plundered by rampaging gangs of illiterate Mujahideen’. The looters in 1993 were discriminating in what they took and apparently had both the time and the knowledge to select the most attractive, saleable pieces. For example, they removed from wooden display mounts only the central figures (depicting voluptuous ladies standing in doorways) of the delicate Begram ivory carvings. It is also telling that although some 2000 books and journals remain in the library, volumes with illustrations of the museum's best pieces are missing."

"Afghanistan never did have any monuments on the world heritage list. As far as I know, nine different monuments have been nominated over time for inclusion on the world heritage list. The world heritage committee just opened their meeting for this year, and there is one Afghan monument, the minaret at Jam, being considered this time. Because of the sympathy and the general feeling about Afghanistan these days, people seem to think it has a good chance of being put on the list. But the reason the nine others never got on the list was because the government of Afghanistan could not fulfill the requirements for their protection."

"While I have seen a few museum pieces for sale in Afghanistan, there are a number of artifacts on the market that have recently been dug up in Afghanistan. Mujaheedin commanders in all parts of the country are involved in this illicit activity, most notably in the east near the Hadda museum. An important Buddhist pilgrimage site in the second through seventh centuries, Hadda has been totally stripped of its exquisite clay sculptures in the Gandhara style, which combines Bactrian, Greco-Roman, and Indian elements. Looted artifacts from Faryab and Balkh provinces in the north allegedly include jewel- encrusted golden crowns and statues, orbs (locally described as ‘soccer balls’) studded with emeralds and all manner of exotic ephemera, as well as fluted marble columns similar to those found at Ai Khanoum in the northeastern province of Takhar. These are being carted away to embellish the houses of the newly powerful, according to witnesses."

"Many interpretations of the archaeology of the Eurasian steppes suffer from anachronistic reasoning or what might be termed the Genghis Khan syndrome (even though the Great Khan came from the wrong ethnic group!). That is to say, current reconstruction of the subsistence economies on the western steppes during Bronze Age times unequivocally demonstrates that the classic mixed-herd mounted pastoral nomadism that characterized the steppes during historic times and that has been amply documented by ethnographers was not yet in place. Aside from the question as to when horses were first domesticated and ridden, peoples were dominantly herding cattle, not tending flocks of sheep and goats (with an occasional Bactrian camel tossed in). Rather than noble conquering warriors capable of devastating anything in their path, the Bronze Age peoples of the western Eurasian steppes were impoverished cowboys in ponderous ox-drawn carts seeking richer pasture and escape from the severity of the climate, particularly the increasingly harsh winters they experienced as they moved eastwards across the rapidly filling steppe. This story cannot be followed in detail here, but it is relevant to the northern component of the Bactrian Margiana archaeological complex that is discussed by Lamberg-Karlovsky. He has reason to suggest that the “origins” of this complex may ultimately be documented in southern Afghanistan or Pakistani Baluchistan, as opposed, say, to the western origins favored by Sarianidi or the northern origins favored by Kuzmina."

"Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that "liberated them from all restraints" and allowed them to experience every impulse as a "divine command". What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they "conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities". Podhoretz added, "It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life". Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an "expanded consciousness", the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery."