In Jhumpa Lahiri's essay, "The Clothing of Books," I loved how she explored the definitive, fixed nature of book covers, and therefore why she struggles with them. Her books are "no longer wild, coarse, malleable." The text or piece of art is made into an object---something that is published, distributed, and sold. The designers behind these book covers are concerned with how people see the book, "what they think of it, what they want from it." I liked how she expressed how the packaging seemed rigged somehow, even if it is accurate or essential.
These ideas are in conversation with some of the things Chip Kidd brought up in his TEDTalk on book cover design. Kidd made the point that the book jacket is a distillation, or a haiku of the story in a sense. It is art, but it is also business. It has to grab someone's attention, without being too heavy-handed. It was interesting to work through some of his projects with him, seeing what he was given and how he created the cover. It is delicate work, and often unsatisfactory.
Lastly, in David Bellos' "Fictions of the Foreign," he explored a kind of paradox in translation: the effort to foreignize something, and the very theory of foreignness in translation, is always constructed within the target language, and therefore is shaped by what that culture deems as 'foreign.' Even attempts to preserve authenticity and bring the reader closer to the source text end up reflecting the translator's perceptions, rather than the original itself. I liked how Bellos explored multiple vantage points when considering foreignization: how it isn't easy to represent the foreignness of foreign languages with complete seriousness or without it feeling awkward or artificial, but also how translated texts that are conscious of foreignization can teach willing and interested readers about the sound, feel, and syntactic properties of the original. Moments of friction or unusual language can also be very compelling and beautiful, from my point of view.
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