By Claire Sabel, CC '13

Though lost to history, we are working to bring you whatever we can from the May issue of The Blue & White. Here, Allie Curry explains how we are able to read things not written in English, even though we won’t pay for the convenience.

The headline of a 2003 New York Times piece on the matter states it best: “America Yawns at Foreign Fiction”. Statistics confirm this—Americans don’t buy literary works in translation and major publishing conglomerates don’t publish them. Nonetheless, academics at Columbia fight for new, liminal, and innovatively funded spaces to study and support literary translators.

The Core Curriculum at Columbia College and Nine Ways of Knowing at Barnard College are inheritors of a tradition that values fiction, poetry, and prose for its transnational and transhistorical influence rather than its “trendiness” or sales potential. Point of fact, English is a relatively new development in the history of the Western Canon, especially as Lit Hum conceives it. Including the Biblical and Masoretic texts, only three of the 23 works on the standard Lit Hum syllabus were authored in English and two of those three—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse—are arguably the most hotly contested additions to the second semester of the course. This is similarly the case in many of Barnard’s First-Year Seminars where at least three Reinventing Literary History concentrations (which are focused on Classic and Great Books texts, “Women and Culture,” and pan-American literature) substantially incorporate translated works. Individual sections of these courses, however, vary wildly in terms of translation cognizance. Helene Foley, Professor of Classics, for one, believes that most students think “very little in general” of issues raised when reading literary works in translation. (more…)

Columbia’s Professor Stiglitz, who’s been making the rounds recently, published a commentary on the economic recession in Slate and, well, the headline says it all. (Slate)

Apple announced the iPhone 4S yesterday, and, along with it, their new Siri app; part voice-recognition, part artificial-intelligence, all HAL-9000.  It’s a shame the name is destined to be the butt of many jokes in Japan. (CNet, WSJ)

Turns out Apple themselves predicted this kind of technology in one of those futuristic advertisements from the 80′s—creepy coincidence or full-blown conspiracy?  You decide (see video below!). (TechCrunch)

Even without Steve Job’s prophetic vision, was anyone really blindsided by this?  It’s official: Chris Christie isn’t running for President.  Let’s be honest, he probably has to deal with enough problems as it is. (NYT)

In case you’re worried Dark Energy, expanding universes and the like might come in conflict with Einstein’s theories and all we hold dear, rest assured; this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics—winning for research into the Universe’s expansion—are confident that Eintsein remains the golden standard for physicists. “Every test we have made has come out perfectly in line with Einstein’s original cosmological constant in 1917.” (NYT)

As long as schools like Columbia champion the “sink-or-swim” school of language instruction, you will inevitably come into contact with, whether in fulfilling your requirement or just being intellectually curious, the Language Professor Who Does Not Speak English. This professor can exist in any language department. The idea of this professor is that you are supposed to appreciate him/her over time, but usually, at least while you are still in Elementary I, he/she will be the source of continued frustration that you will not experience again until you actually make it abroad (if you ever do make it abroad). What this professors will lack in bilingualism, however, he/she will generally make up in authentic cultural knowledge, due to the generally recent move from his/her country of origin.

You will probably at some point resent this teacher until you remember that one of your Elementary I classmates is planning to move to the country of said language and teach English there as soon as the semester is over, at which point you will feel like a hypocrite.

Conversely, this professor may speak limited amounts of a strange and original hybrid of English with his/her native language.

Text by Hannah Goldstein, illustration by Chloe Gogo