Harvard University Press Blog

Culturomics, Close Reading, and Casaubon

The June 23rd issue of Nature magazine featured a profile of Erez Lieberman Aiden, described in the article as “molecular biologist, applied mathematician and, at 31 years old, the precocious doyen of the emerging field known as the digital humanities.” Among a pretty staggering laundry list of other achievements, Lieberman Aiden, along with his collaborator Jean-Baptiste Michel, is behind “culturomics,” a quantitative approach to analyzing culture.

Lieberman Aiden and Michel were granted access to the millions of books digitized by Google, and are using all of that data to “very, very not-carefully” read through a corpus said to represent 10% of all books ever published. They intend this method of analysis as a revolutionary complement to the traditional “close reading” approach of the humanities. The basis is frequency analysis: Lieberman Aiden and Michel argue that you can learn a great deal by tracking how frequently certain words or phrases have appeared at various points in history. Google’s popular and addictive n-gram viewer, a simple tool that allows anyone to graph the frequency of appearance of words or short phrases across Google’s digital corpus, was built to demonstrate the possibilities for culturomics.

As the Nature story indicates, many people in the humanities have some deep reservations about this new approach. Dan Cohen, director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and someone on the leading edge of innovation in the digital humanities, is quoted as calling the n-gram viewer a “gateway drug” for the digital humanities, which is surely meant as praise. But Cohen expresses anxiety over the attempt to do broad cultural analysis across a database that includes only published books. “I think saying all books equal the DNA of human experience — I think that’s a very dangerous parallel,” says Cohen. The article’s author draws out Cohen’s concerns: “How do you factor in the cultural contributions of furniture, or dance, or ticket stubs at a movie hall? What about all the books that were never published? Or the culture as experienced by the world's vast illiterate populations?”

Lieberman Aiden and Michel are careful to make clear that they value traditional approaches to the humanities, and that they’re not the bum-rushing reformers that much of the coverage of culturomics makes them out to be. In response to one historian/blogger’s take on the Nature article, Lieberman Aiden and Michel dismissed as a “straw-man” the repeated claim that the duo think their work should make any extant method of historical analysis redundant.  In the Nature article, Lieberman Aiden is quoted expressing a great deal of respect for traditional approaches to the humanities. “I think you should use the best methods available—and all of them,” he says. “And I think that includes carefully reading texts and trying to get behind what authors think.” The article’s author recounts an anecdote told by Lieberman Aiden one Friday night over Shabbat dinner:

He tells the story of Isaac Casaubon, a sixteenth-century Protestant scholar, who undermined the presumed Egyptian provenance of a set of religious texts by identifying a reference to a Greek play on words—something that could only have been written hundreds of years later. “That point is as objective an interpretive remark as any remark a scientist might make,” says Lieberman Aiden. “So the methods of humanists are very, very formidable. And I think the degree of insecurity they have over whether these methods are here to stay is not really befitting.”

Toronto, Week One

This year, after the retirement of David Stimpson, longtime HUP/MIT/Yale sales rep John Eklund has gamely gone international, taking on much of Canada. Eklund, who was named Publisher’s Weekly’s 2011 Rep of the Year, blogs his travels and book industry insights at Paper Over Board. Below is a report on his first week of meetings with buyers at some of Toronto’s many terrific bookstores, and some reflections on the state of bookselling up north.

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I began my first week of appointments in Toronto with more than a bit of trepidation. Though everyone has been extremely cooperative in accommodating my proposed dates, I haven’t met and worked with this many new customers since the day I started this job in 1998.

There were some logistical challenges. Canada Post has gone on strike, but it means my obsession with sending catalogs early paid off. Then Air Canada agents called a strike, but neither of my flights was inconvenienced. Anyway, a country that has a labor movement with gumption, what a great concept!

I took the bus down to O’Hare on Sunday morning. The driver was a trainee - tentative, learning the ropes, a little awkward. But he had an experienced handler hovering over his shoulder, explaining the shortcuts and schedule tricks. “Never skip a stop no matter how far behind you get! You never know when somebody might be waiting.” I thought of this man as his David Stimpson, and took it as a good omen.

Continuing the theme of repping by public transportation, I took the Rocket from Pearson to the Kipling subway station. It was a smooth ride but “the rocket”- really? Still, I was downtown in an hour for $3.00. The train passed through far-flung stations on the Bloor line I’d never been in, and I saw beautiful institutional pastels on the walls - mauve, sea green, and a kind of pale butterscotch - that I hadn’t seen since elementary school.

I daydreamed about my first visit to Toronto in the early eighties. I spent a weekend at the decrepit Selby Hotel on Sherburne, in the room in which (supposedly) Ernest Hemingway lived when he wrote for the Toronto Star. Feeling the literary vibe made it a little easier to ignore the roaches and the thumping cheesy disco in the basement.

There are precious few North American cities anymore where one might take a “book vacation,” but Toronto remains one of them. True, when bookselling and publishing elders gather, as they did at David’s happy, bittersweet retirement party at his beloved Pilot Monday night, the inescapable theme is “the good old days.” Stipulating that there were once many more bookstores selling many more interesting books, I’m still skeptical. Moms Mabley used to make fun of people who dwell on the good old days. “What good old days? When? I was there, where were they at?”

Be that as it may, I just spent a wonderful week visiting diverse and wonderful bookstores in a truly wonderful city. It’s the kind of trip I’d gladly make for fun, and I’m being paid for it! I’d been to many of these shops before as a customer, but it’s an entirely different thing to sit down with buyers to sell them the lists.

What were some of these places and personalities?

York University Bookstore, which features the kind of deeply scholarly trade inventory that was once routine in college stores before the sweatshirts took over;

The University of Toronto Bookstore, which is housed in one of the most beautiful rooms in book retailing;

Books for Business, a tidy, bright, smartly selective business specialty store in the financial district;

Marc Glassman, owner of the widely mourned Page’s Bookstore, is now juggling about a dozen book balls, including the Toronto International Film Festival shop and a clever reading series called This is Not a Reading Series. (Toronto is book event crazy. Like film festivals, there seem to be reading festivals of one kind or another every week.)

The wonderfully quirky and old-school charming Book City stores, a collection of local neighborhood shops which reminded me of Milwaukee’s legendary Harry W Schwartz chain, where I learned bookselling;

Housing and Mental Illness

The post below comes from Russell K. Schutt, co-author with Stephen M. Goldfinger of the recently published Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness.

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A recent New York Times article examined the tragic and brutal murder of the group home counselor Stephanie Moulton by Deshawn James Chappell, a group home resident diagnosed with schizophrenia. The circumstances of the murder force our attention to two questions: What is schizophrenia? And what are the prospects for community integration of persons with schizophrenia? We need look no further than the comments elicited by the NYT article to realize the extent of controversy about these questions. But what does scientific research actually show about these issues?

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, the causes of which are not yet well understood. It afflicts about 1% of the population, typically emerging in late adolescence or early adulthood. Neuroimaging and functional testing identify diminished brain volume in key areas and declining cognitive and social functioning at the time that symptoms of the disease emerge. After onset, the symptoms persist, although their intensity fluctuates and some long-term research has identified patients in whom symptoms have dissipated many years after onset. Psychotropic drugs relieve symptoms such as hallucinations and paranoid delusions for some patients, but they have no effect on cognitive or social functioning.

Debates over the prospects for community integration of persons with schizophrenia have framed mental health service policies since the 19th century. The first state psychiatric hospitals were designed to provide a protected, humane environment for persons with serious mental illness. Without much quality evidence, state hospital superintendents in the 19th century issued glowing reports about patient improvement. Even still, the hospitals were soon overwhelmed by a rapidly increasing patient census, inadequate resources, and a shift in professional psychiatrists’ focus to private patients. Exposés in the 20th century suggested that the environment of state hospitals was more likely to exacerbate patients’ symptoms and diminish their prospects for return to the community than to restore their health.

The proponents of deinstitutionalization sought to end the warehousing of persons with serious mental illness and to instead provide community-based care that would normalize treatment services and facilitate community engagement. They were motivated as well by the discovery of psychotropic medications that lessened symptoms; state governments’ desire to shift costs to Medicaid-reimbursable community-based care; and the growing demands of advocacy groups for patients’ right to make their own treatment decisions.

Whatever the precise mixture of commendable and crass motives, the goals of deinstitutionalization were only partially achieved. State hospitals were indeed depopulated, but alternative community-based care was only partially funded and psychotropic medications proved to be only partially effective. In addition, rising housing costs and the widespread destruction of cheap single room occupancy hotels made it impossible for many persons with serious mental illness to maintain any type of community residence. The large number of people with serious mental illnesses who became homeless or were incarcerated indicates the failures of this new service system.

Climate Change Meets the Little Mermaid

Robert Verchick, author of Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World, sent us the following report from Copenhagen, where rising sea levels are soon to threaten many of the city’s most cherished landmarks.

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Denmark’s famed “Little Harbor Lady,” or in English, “Little Mermaid,” has had her share of antics and perils. She’s been photographed by millions in Copenhagen’s harbor, carted off and shown at the 2010 World’s Fair in Shanghai, beheaded (several times), dynamited, splashed with pink paint, and enveloped in a burqa. An environmental nerd for all occasions, I look at her longing face and wonder, How long before the rising sea swallows her up? Bolted to that rock in the sea, a shaft of concrete now inserted into her neck, what will she do? Or, for that, matter, what about the thousands of others who call coastal Copenhagen home? Is anyone thinking about this?

Many experts expect the world’s seas to rise somewhere between 1 to 1.5 meters this century, depending on location (and, of course, it could be more). Add to this a potential for stronger storms and much higher storm surges and you see why cities like Copenhagen, London, New York, and Miami are all in the crosshairs.

Danish experts have begun using computer-enhanced mapping techniques to predict what a high-tide of 2.26 meters—what they believe a "20-year event" might look like in 2110—would do to the city. The result leaves an inner city map covered in blue, including the Danish Stock Exchange, the Royal Library, and the city’s stunning Opera House. For this reason, the country is developing a proposal for a dike along Copenhagen’s North Harbor and an area called Kalveboderne to protect some of the city’s most treasured assets. For areas lying outside the protected region, which includes the Opera House, engineers are considering elevating roads and introducing architectural adjustments.

Back in New Orleans, where I live, we are also strengthening our fortress walls. At the opening of hurricane season this month, city residents took comfort (perhaps) in the strongest flood-control system ever constructed for the region. My favorite part is the Lake Borgne Barrier, a 1.8-mile-long castle-toothed wall, anchored by 66-inch-wide, 144-foot-deep concrete columns. The structure, which cost $1.1 billion and was built in just two years, is designed to block the kind of crashing hurricane surge brought by Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 swept through the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and Industrial Canal into the heart of New Orleans.

As I continually remind my students, resistance, while expensive and complicated, is not always futile. But it must be done with full knowledge and disclosure of what residual risk remains. And it must incorporate a strategic use of natural barriers and other natural systems to amplify the protection value. That means restoring and preserving natural buffers like beaches, wetlands, and flood plains.

The importance of natural shields, what coastal engineers call “soft-armoring,” is gaining attention all over the world. Indeed, the Obama administration has proposed a draft of revised standards for flood-control and other water resources projects that would require the “wise use of floodplains” and maintain a presumption in favor of nonstructural solutions to flood management. That would be a terrific start. But other policy innovations must follow. As legal researchers at Georgetown’s Climate Center are learning, many federal permitting systems that apply to coastal structures are designed to favor “hard armoring” proposals, often fast-tracked through general permits, over less familiar “soft armoring” techniques.

And what of Copenhagen’s Little Harbor Lady? Standing next to her, assuming my straightest posture, I estimate that a high-tide of 2.26 meters would at least encircle the waist of this pensive lass, though I like to imagine those finned ankles would do her some good. Staying afloat, you know, is mostly about preparation.

On Fathers, Evolution, and Bedtime

Dads got their annual time in the spotlight over this past week as we geared up for and then celebrated Father’s Day. Here at HUP we’ve been glad to see a book we published last year get a nice bit of attention in the Father’s Day media blitz. It’s called Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior, and it was co-written by Peter B. Gray and Kermyt G. Anderson.  Just in the past week the BabyCenter blog cited the book; it featured in a Vancouver Sun op-ed; and there was a particularly thorough post about the book on MSNBC.com’s Cosmic Log, where Alan Boyle looked at how anthropologists suggest that current social trends might be reshaping fatherhood in the mold of the “good old days of hunter-gatherer fathering,” an era when researchers like Gray and Anderson assert that fathers were more active in their children’s development than in much of modern history.

All of this attention on modern fathers, and this welcome coverage of Gray and Anderson’s rich evolutionary perspective, makes a recent article on a persistent societal barrier between motherhood and fatherhood even more interesting. The piece appeared on Jezebel last week and is titled “Could A Mom Have Written Go The F--k To Sleep? And Would It Have Been A Bestseller?” (Well, actually, Jezebel doesn’t bother with the coy hyphens, and, in what follows, neither will we. Be warned.)

For those who’ve somehow missed it, Go the Fuck to Sleep is a parenting and publishing sensation.
It’s a picture book, written by the novelist Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Roberto Cortés, that gives us a father at his wit’s end come bedtime. The book began as a lark, picked up steam online, went to number one on Amazon, had a first printing of 300,000 copies, has been performed by Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog, and has already been optioned for film. That kid who wouldn’t go to sleep is suddenly making an awful lot of money for daddy.

What Amy Sohn asks in her Jezebel piece is whether a mother could have gotten away with a book like this—and been met with a reception that would pay for her kid’s college just based on preorders. From her piece:

As much as I want to believe that “Funny is funny” and it would have been a runaway success regardless, I can't help but think that things might have gone down differently.

A mom who even thinks the word “fuck” around her kid? A mom who can’t get her child to sleep or is unwilling to co-sleep to do it? A mom who isn’t more lovable than caustic, always and forever? I can't help but think the Internet masses on parenting sites like this would have a field day with it, raking me over the coals for the same sentiment that is so funny when expressed by a dad.

— If you hate being a mom so much, why did you have a child in the first place?

— Clearly your daughter can’t rest because you work.

— You have an anger management problem and you're giving your kid ADHD.

— You need Zoloft.

— I pray that you bring no more children into the world because it will spare another individual the years of therapy he will need to get over the trauma of having been raised by such a selfish and insensitive person.

And, of course: That book is so lame, I could have written it.

Ovid Cares Not For Your Hairdo

“For a good time, read Ovid; for a very good time, read Slavitt’s Ovid.” – Michael Dirda

For your very good time, the 14th poem of the first book of Ovid’s Amores, from Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of Ovid, a new volume of translations by David R. Slavitt:

 

How many times did I tell you to leave your hair alone?

    Well, look at you now. There’s nothing left to dye.

All you had to do was nothing at all, and now

    you’d still have hair, wonderful, fine in texture,

long enough to reach down to your waist. Chinese

    silkworms don’t make anything quite like it.

Spiders, spinning their webs that hang from beams and branches,

    would have to defer to it for sheer beauty.

It was neither black as jet nor blonde like flax, but mixed, 

    rather like what you might find on Ida

where, on the slopes, there are handsome cedars of just that shade.

    Aside from the color, your hair was easy to manage,

and you could find a hundred different ways to wear it.

    It gave way to the teeth of the finest comb,

and it held a hairpin in place. Your hairdressers loved their labor.

    I often watched as they hovered over you

and saw them grin in delight at how well their work was going.

    And early, when you hadn’t arisen from bed

and lay supine with your hair streaming out on the pillow,

    you had a Bacchante’s beauty—or what I imagine

as those mad dancers dropped down on the grass in exhaustion.

    But for all their docile beauty, what pains did they endure,

what tortures did you impose, what patience did they exhibit?

    The hot curlers for ringlets burnt them. I saw 

the smoke that would arise, and I cried out against it

    and asked you to spare your hair, not out of kindness

but vanity because it was beautiful as it was.

    O iron-hearted girl. Your natural curls

could have taught the curlers to what their art aspired.

    And now, your tresses, your beautiful tresses are gone.

Errol Morris and the Flying Frog

Last week, from the Twitter account of filmmaker and writer Errol Morris:

What next, indeed. James Livingston, the author of Rising Force: The Magic of Magnetic Levitation, the book that inspired this discourse, spoke with us recently for an episode of our podcast. He explains the levitating frog.

Have a listen:

 

HUP Podcast - James Livingston 

 

But, maybe first, have a watch:

 

Obama’s Demi-Doctrine: Historical Resonances

The post below comes from Christopher McKnight Nichols, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age.

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President Obama is shaping a new vision of America’s foreign policy. It involves a limited, ethical, and coalition-oriented U.S. global presence. Such a position aims to combine recent multilateral actions in Libya with unilateralism in Pakistan, pending troop reductions in Afghanistan, and likely new commitments elsewhere. It is nuanced. It seeks to present U.S. global activism as a shared “burden” of membership in the international community. It defines threats on an individual basis. Though it upholds aspects of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy commitments and goals, it explicitly casts itself in opposition to Bush’s national security strategies, which were characterized by preemption and unilateral regime change, painting them as costly and unwisely aggressive.

This is Obama’s Demi-Doctrine. It is “demi” because it is less than a fully elaborated doctrine but closer to one than it might at first appear. It has refocused U.S. military and intelligence assets on the threat from Al Qaeda while also recognizing the need for building diplomatic bridges, seeking genuine multilateralism, and avoiding overreach by drawing down troops in Iraq and preparing to do so in Afghanistan. This “half” position does not bind America to any one-size-fits-all model for international relations. It posits no singular definition of the “nation’s interests.” In those respects it is fundamentally unlike such “full” doctrines as President Truman’s Doctrine opposing communism everywhere (1947) or President Monroe’s Doctrine prohibiting foreign powers meddling in the hemisphere (1823).

Still, the tenets of the Demi-Doctrine aren’t entirely new. In fact they have a long history. As a policy stance it began with the first modern American debates over foreign engagement and expansion more than a hundred years ago. At that time philosopher and anti-imperialist William James argued for taking all peoples and places on their own terms. He maintained that the nation should pursue “moral suasion” over “savage ambition” in foreign affairs, acting more as an exemplar than as a crusader. Obama’s new multilateral, case-by-case approach to U.S. involvement abroad builds on such views. It blends internationalist, isolationist, realist, and idealist arguments. And it has roots in pragmatism and anti-imperialist rhetoric. It encompasses Woodrow Wilson's idealism, draws on WWII Era beliefs about the international obligation to protect human rights, and builds on Cold War ideas of collective security (such as embodied in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

But just because Obama’s “new” American foreign policy has a history and has merits does not mean it does not have costs. Again and again over past decades, American interventions—particularly when linked to multilateral military coalitions and aimed at humanitarian ends—have had negative, sometimes catastrophic, and often unintended consequences. Relatively limited U.S. commitments of military and diplomatic force abroad have ranged from the unilateral actions in the Philippines in the late nineteenth century to various interventions during and after the Spanish-American War, through much more recent multilateral involvement in Bosnia and Somalia in the 1990s. Engagements such as these, which involved humanitarian rationales, have been deeply problematic. Few succeeded.

Nonviolence Without Borders

Protesters throughout this Arab Spring have been inspired by the legacy of the American civil rights movement. Nico Slate, author of the forthcoming Colored Cosmopolitanism, explains below how this transnational affinity echoes that of an earlier era, a hidden history of bonds of sympathy and solidarity forged between African Americans and Indians during their freedom struggles of the late nineteenth century through the 1960s.

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A 50-year-old comic book about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s approach to nonviolent resistance has been translated into Arabic and has been circulating amongst protesters in Egypt and throughout the Middle East for months. According to a recent article by CNN, the cartoon is only one manifestation of a broad interest in the civil rights movement amongst today’s nonviolent activists. The comic book in question, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, itself documents an older link between the civil rights movement and freedom struggles throughout the world. The comic book, which can be found here, traces King’s leadership back to the nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi in India.

As I detail in my forthcoming book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, connections between Indian and African American freedom struggles go well beyond the relationship between Gandhi and King. The comic book was published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization that by the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been working for decades to translate Gandhian methods for use in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. FOR helped organize the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial organization that launched sit-ins modeled on Gandhian protest in the early 1940s and later pioneered the freedom rides. Many civil rights activists—some now famous and others largely forgotten—turned to Gandhi for inspiration and ideas.

Fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, two young Black women were arrested on a bus near Petersburg, Virginia. Like Parks, both women were already actively engaged in the struggle for racial equality. By the time they boarded an old bus bound for Durham, North Carolina in late March 1940, Pauli Murray and Adelene McBean had long discussed how they could most effectively challenge racial segregation. The poor condition of their bus gave them the opportunity to translate their thoughts into action. Seated near the back of the bus, directly over a wheel, the two young women suffered with every bump. When McBean began to feel a sharp pain in her side, she and Murray occupied seats in the middle of the bus. The driver told them to move back. They refused and, after a lengthy debate with the driver and local police officers, were arrested. Murray wrote friends soon after her arrest, “We did not plan our arrest intentionally. The situation developed and, having developed, we applied what we knew of Satyagraha on the spot.”

Gandhi used the word satyagraha, combining the Sanskrit for “truth” and “holding firm,” to refer to his particular approach to nonviolent civil disobedience. In her memoirs, Murray remembered that when she and McBean were arrested their knowledge of satyagraha was “sketchy” and they had “no experience in the Gandhian method.” Like Murray, many Americans would learn the “Gandhian method” in the process of applying it against racial injustice. Less a rigid system than a series of guiding principles and a source of inspiration, Gandhian satyagraha would be reinvented in restaurants, department stores, buses and jails throughout the United States.

Connections between South Asians and African Americans extended beyond nonviolence, as Manning Marable’s new book on Malcolm X makes clear. Marable’s work demonstrates the breadth of linkages between African American Muslims and global Islam. Colored Cosmopolitanism reveals that such linkages were part of a larger constellation of connections in which nonviolent activists, Black and South Asian Muslims, Hindu reformers, Christian missionaries, followers of Marcus Garvey, African American soldiers, Indian immigrants, labor organizers, and many others forged links across freedom struggles. What provided coherence to these multifaceted linkages? I argue that a transnational conception of color came to serve as a bridge between people struggling against racism throughout the world. African Americans and South Asians together imagined a colored cosmopolitanism, a “dark” or “colored” world united in the struggle against racism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression. Advocates of colored cosmopolitanism fought for the freedom of the “colored world” even while calling into question the meanings of both color and freedom.

"Translation - It's a Living"

Last month Jane Marie Todd was awarded the annual Translation Prize for Nonfiction by the French-American and Florence Gould Foundations for her translation of Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon. For HUP she has also translated Aviad Kleinberg’s Flesh Made Word, Maurice Olender’s Race and Erudition, Anne-Marie Eddé’s forthcoming Saladin, and many others. What follows below is the speech she delivered upon receiving the award.

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I would like to thank the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation for this award, and for recognizing a group of people who do not ordinarily get a great deal of recognition. Translation is not an easy way to make a living; nor is it an easy way to make a name for yourself, since you are always writing in someone else’s name.

I have been a full-time, freelance translator for about twenty years. For the most part, I translate scholarly works for university presses and art catalogs and other publications for museums. I do not have a position at the university. That means, on one hand, no titles, no promotions, no regular paychecks, no travel funds from my home institution, no paid vacations, no sabbaticals. I do not even have library privileges at a university library, so I cannot order books from Interlibrary Loan or access JSTOR when I need a quotation from a scholarly journal. On the other hand, I spent enough years in academia not to be envious of academics.

Is it any wonder that translators are a modest and unassuming lot? We are happy just to have regular work, to get interesting projects, and to be paid promptly and relatively well. I therefore want to thank Sharmila Sen, my editor at Harvard University Press who commissioned the translation of Reading and Writing in Babylon, for supplying me with all those things for a number of years.

Despite its drawbacks, translation is a wonderful way to make a living. I work at home in comfortable clothes, with my little dog dozing at my feet. From my desk chair, I journey through time and space and explore the most diverse disciplines imaginable: from Old Babylonia to the Byzantine Middle Ages, from the early days of cubism to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, from the Chinese literati painters to the gods of ancient Egypt, from Fra Angelico’s monastery to Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge, and from Mme de Pompadour’s opulent château to the tiny Gan kingdom in Burkina Faso. One day I might be following complicated arguments from Kant or Spinoza, and the next day I will be asked to translate advertising copy for a milliner’s shop in Paris: “Chez Katharina M, the hats twist into arabesques and whorls... They whirl and pirouette, so airy that—on seeing them—you imagine a bird in flight or the sweep of a rippling gown…” I have always had wide-ranging interests: my degree is in Comparative Literature and I wrote my dissertation on a psychoanalyst and a philosopher. But I can’t think of any other profession where I could learn so much about so many different things.

I am a language nerd: I love learning new words, new specialized vocabularies, and even new diacritical marks (did you know that the Turkish alphabet has a letter “i” with no dot over it?). Translation is extreme close reading, and one of the pleasures it affords me is to be able to follow an author’s thought processes, to see how a mind works with and through language.

Here are two things I learned while translating Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon. The first is that, when compared to the task of the Assyriologist, translating from French to English is a breeze. Let me read a longish passage from the book to serve as an illustration and to give you a feel for the writing. The section is entitled “How to Read a Cuneiform Tablet”: