It was a delight this week to revisit Chip Kidd’s TED Talk. I first encountered it in a Type & Design course I took a few years ago. I wasn’t familiar with My Name is Red before this course, and it was exciting to see the creativity that went into the design of that jacket. Watching this immediately after reading Lahiri’s The Clothing of Books was jarring. It made me wonder about the slant towards male authors in his presentation (I think Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich were the only women represented) and who in the industry gets this kind of care in book design. It’s hard not to despair when thinking of book design, as the art is going by the wayside, as many people now believe they can do serious graphic design with an AI assistant and a basic grasp of Canva. Bellos’s essay “The Paradox of ‘Foreign-Soundingness’” focuses on the packaging of literature over which a translator still has some control (unlike book cover design, unless one independently publishes): namely, how the text sounds. I think there is an interesting thread between all these texts—the fluidity of translation (and I think designing a book cover might be a form of translation, or at least a cousin) has to do with how much dialogue is happening between the two languages. For Lahiri, I wondered if perhaps she was happiest with the cover that included a photograph of her because it helped preserve the essential core of her fiction, which is herself, and therefore created a more fluid dialogue between herself and her audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment