IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
There’s a certain art to translating novels – and some do it better than others. There has been a big appetite for novels translated into English recently (by the likes of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard), so this look at translation is fascinating and timely.
(The Guardian, approx 29 mins reading time)
Repeating words in English doesn’t give you the same poetic effect as in Korean, and Korean similes are loose, in that you don’t specify the ways in which one thing is like another. That just doesn’t work for an English reader: they would think “that doesn’t sound right”. So I make them less loose, but hopefully in a way that isn’t boring.
It’s still hard to believe David Bowie is gone – remember his great work with this look at the recording of his final album.
(Observer, approx 23 mins reading time)
Honestly, what I was thinking was more about trying to just immerse myself in these songs. My process was figuring the deeper I got into these songs, the freer I was in the sessions to express myself. So before the sessions, I listened to the demos a lot, and when we were playing I was just trying to play from the spirit of those songs and also reacting to David’s vocals, which were really passionate and really compelling.
Often after an act of terror, the focus is on the perpetrators. This NYT article instead brings us the stories of the victims, and shows us the impact of terrorism on people.
(New York Times, approx 15 mins reading time)
Eight couples were slain together, doing the things couples do. Muhammad and Shawana Naveed, wed three months before, went for a Sunday stroll in a Pakistan park. Stephanie and Justin Shults, accountants who met at Vanderbilt University and were living in Brussels, had just dropped her mother off at the airport.
4. The Gucci wife and the hitman
Celebrity power couple Patrizia and Maruizio Gucci seemed to have it all – but when their relationship collapsed, she hired a hit man to murder him.
(The Guardian, approx 21 mins reading time)
After Reggiani was arrested, the media dubbed her Vedova Nera – the Black Widow – and touted all the stereotypical theories about her likely motives. She was jealous of Maurizio’s girlfriend, she wanted his money, she was bitter about his neglect, she was plain mad. If there is a grain of truth in any of these, there was also something deeper, too. “Everything Reggiani was stemmed from being a Gucci,” says Ferrè. “It was her whole identity, even as an ex-wife.
John Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1988, is now a free man. This recent longread looks at his life just prior to his release.
(Washingtonian, approx 28 mins reading time)
Hinckley was a 25-year-old college dropout on March 30, 1981, the day he went to the Washington Hilton with a $47 pawnshop revolver and shot President Ronald Reagan. He said he did it for actress Jodie Foster and called it “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.” The following year, a DC jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. Since that time, he has been committed at St. Elizabeths.
The first-ever Refugee Olympic Team was announced in June – and Sports Illustrated goes behind the scenes to talk to its members. Their stories are heartbreaking and inspiring.
(Sports Illustrated, approx 29 mins reading time)
No Olympic refugees, however, have been flung farther than judokas Popole Misenga, 24, and Yolande Mabika, 28. A five-year civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed some 5.4 million people—including Misenga’s mother—before officially ending in 2003, but continued fighting in the east, including the judokas’ hometown of Bukavu, has since forced 450,000 people to flee. Misenga and Mabika defected during the 2013 world championships in Rio and never left the city. Mabika, separated from her family as a child, is hoping that her Olympic fame just might be seen by her father, mother or brother, prompting them to reach out.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In the early 2000s, a new writer called JT LeRoy became the toast of the literary world. With a tragic backstory, and a dark writing style, JT became beloved in Hollywood. The only problem? He was a hoax. With a new film out this weekend about JT LeRoy, it’s time to revisit the bizarre tale.
(Vanity Fair, approx 58 mins reading time)
By 2004, however, the well seemed to be running dry. He had a contract for a third book but hadn’t yet produced much that was worthwhile. When he did write, aside from completing a thin “novella,” he spent most of his energy on journalism for publications such as BlackBook, Nerve, and T: Travel, a New York Times Sunday-magazine supplement, which sent him to Disneyland Paris. Mostly he seemed to be caught up in a whirlwind of literary celebrity—“the Truman Capote highway,” in the words of one friend.
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