Thursday, December 27

Translation in Practice

"As the Canadian writer, Anne Michaels, says in Fugitive Pieces, you choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude."

Thursday, December 20

Do not speak as loud as my heart

Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh take me back to the start


Sometimes you're crying when you hear a song and you wonder, if you don't love him anymore, if you haven't loved him in years, why is it this hard.
I think you cry out of what you lost, and that's alright.

Quando pagamos pelo humor

Sunday, December 9

On Populism

"(...) Populism is always a form of identity politics (though not all versions of identity politics are populist.) What follows from this understanding of populism as an exclusionary form of identity politics is that populism tends to pose a danger to democracy. For democracy requires pluralism and the recognition that we need to find fair terms of living together as free, equal, but also irreducibly diverse citizens. The idea of the single, homogenous, authentic people is a fantasy (...) And it is a dangerous fantasy, because populists do not just thrive on conflict and encourage polarization; they also treat their political opponent as “enemies of the people” and seek to exclude them altogether. 
This is not to say that all populists will send their enemies to a gulag or build walls around the country’s borders, but neither is populism limited to harmless campaign rhetoric or a mere protest that burns out as soon as a populist wins power. (...)
Populist governance exhibits three features: attempts to hijack the state apparatus , corruption and “mass clientelism” (...) and efforts systematically to suppress civil society.  
Of course, many authoritarians will do similar things. The difference is that populists justify their conduct by claiming that they alone represent the people; this allows populists to avow their practices quite openly. It also explains why revelations of corruption rarely seem to hurt populist leaders (...) In the eyes of their followers, “they’re doing it for us”, the one authentic people."

What Is Populism?, Jan-Werner Müller

Sunday, December 2

Saturday, December 1