뉴스 | 🇬🇧 영국 | "PHILOSOPHY"

The Guardian Culture

진보 성향

기타

Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam review – an electric debut set on Manchester’s Curry Mile

Written in breathless multilingual prose, this coming-of-age meets state-of-the-nation novel is an incredible literary performance Three twentysomethings “drive and dream of an impossible night on an endless street. moving as a massive through mad sticky traffic, destination: where else? manchester, wilmslow road, the curry mile, yo!” Thus opens Sufiyaan Salam’s high-octane debut novel, written largely in gen Z lowercase – and you’re in for a ride. The Boyz are British Pakistani friends in their early 20s. Immy is “something of a bad-boy muslim slut who don’t never text back”; Khan is “the mogul mowgli himself … the type to recite Warren Buffett epigrams like they’re hadiths”; and Haris has “a mind that never switches off, philosophy subreddits doing bares”. Each is looking for an escape – from their past, present, someone else, or themselves – and they come together for one night “cruising and bruising in a hire car towards what might just be the natural elastic endpoint of a friendship beginning to fray”. Continue reading...

The Guardian Culture

진보 성향

기타

‘Nothing is too much for a child’: the Norwegian books for kids tackling taboo topics from IVF to incest

In the Nordic country, books covering subjects such as childbirth and sex have become bestsellers among younger readers – and an export hit. Behind their success lies a unique philosophy of childhood learning ‘I wasn’t aware that I am such a brave writer and illustrator,” says Anna Fiske, a softly spoken Swedish-born author living in Norway who received death threats for a book she wrote in 2019. “I just tell things as they are.” Fiske doesn’t write political polemics but books for children: the title of the offending book is Hvordan Lager Man en Baby?, “How Do You Make a Baby” – and, yes, there are illustrations. Distributed in English-speaking territories through Fiske’s New Zealand publisher, it triggered threats from Canada and was banned from several school libraries in the US. “They said it was pornographic.” Continue reading...

The Guardian Culture

진보 성향

기타

Crossing the Wine Dark Sea by Emily Wilson review – a masterclass in translation

The polarising translator of the Odyssey and the Iliad sets out her philosophy in this fascinating collection Emily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey in 2017 and the Iliad in 2023 are now the standard English-language versions, acclaimed for their conciseness and fluency. Her infatuation with Homer began at the age of eight, when her primary school put on a production of the Odyssey, with her in the role of Athena, and the excitement hasn’t worn off. You can question some of the choices she makes in her translations (she questions them herself), but you can’t doubt the months and years she has spent finding the “least bad” compromises. Her new book is a series of essays on the challenges of translation and the pleasures and insights to be gained from reading the classics. She is fascinated by how far the ancient world intersects with the modern. Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Catullus and Aristophanes are here but so are Spike Lee, Erica Jong, PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves (a last link to the clever servants in Roman comedy) and Boris Johnson (“an incompetent drunkard” who somehow passed as an intellectual “on the basis of his ability to parrot a few garbled lines of Homeric Greek”). Wealthy white men in Silicon Valley get a look-in, too, for embracing Stoicism (not to be confused with stoicism) in “a watered-down form”. Continuities between then and now pile up: war, cruelty and political turmoil. But there are also important contrasts and she scolds those who look back on antiquity as “a mirror in which we always find ourselves”, even when we’re not there. Continue reading...

The Guardian Culture

진보 성향

문화/연예

Fantastic visions and cosmic rhythms: how Whistler is making me see – and hear – differently

A new exhibition at Tate Britain includes canvases titled after symphonies and nocturnes, but the inspiration flows in both directions. Plus, how Felicity Lott led me to an epiphany Comparisons between music, painting and sculpture have never quite rung true for me because you’re talking about fundamentally opposed ideas of what the experience of art is all about. A painting can be experienced in a second’s contemplation or an hour’s, but a piece of music, be it symphony or sonata, has to be journeyed through for just as long as the performance lasts. And yet, the week the James McNeill Whistler exhibition opens at the Tate in London (here’s Jonathan Jones’s five-star review), I’m having to reconsider. Whistler was profoundly influenced by music, a connection that goes so deep that the results aren’t only aesthetic but visceral, in the fabric of the form and expression of his pictures and his philosophy of painting. Continue reading...

뉴스

타임라인 키워드

Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam review – an electric debut set on Manchester’s Curry Mile

‘Nothing is too much for a child’: the Norwegian books for kids tackling taboo topics from IVF to incest

Crossing the Wine Dark Sea by Emily Wilson review – a masterclass in translation

Fantastic visions and cosmic rhythms: how Whistler is making me see – and hear – differently