Mailing List


Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Articles Available Online


There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Please click on the links below to download, print and assemble (instructions in slideshow above) Vanessa Hodgkinson’s For the Motherboard: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, typeset by James Bridle    LXIX   But obsolete Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Transparency-grid of Nights and Days; Hither and thither tweets, and posts, and slays, And one by one back in the Hard Drive lays   **   But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays  Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;    Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,  And one by one back in the Closet lays   Rubáiyát Layout 1 Rubáiyát Layout 2     A Note on the Text by Vanessa Hodgkinson   The Rubáiyát that I own is one given to me over a decade ago when I lived in Kuwait A modest copy bound in plasticised leather, it is cheap but speaks of the sumptuousness of its genealogy Of ‘travelling size’, it is like a bloated cheap postcard Every verse is surrounded by a repeated border of flowers that have long since been abstracted beyond recognition of anything natural The paper is sleek; a biro slides over it without leaving much more than an oily smudge   This Rubáiyát is special to me because it is a dual translation of the original Persian verse into French and English While I couldn’t appreciate the Persian, I was being given a double window of opportunity in both French and English, my maternal and paternal tongues It acted as a playful reminder of my inability to master Arabic, let alone Persian, despite moving to Kuwait to do so   I often compare my pidgin Arabic to my pidgin HTML These languages intrigue me but I am locked out of their possibility Despite my best intentions I am never going to master them I recognise forms, sequences, ways in which they coagulate to have meaning They both contain a fundamental logic that I admire and wish I could possess What kind of person might I be if I did read and write in Arabic and was proficient in computer programming! We can only shudder at the thought But the reality is that despite these languages being constantly

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

READ NEXT

fiction

January 2017

Peace

Patrick Cottrell

fiction

January 2017

Every morning as I walk to school through the dark blue decrepit world, I feel like I’m coming down...

poetry

September 2012

Mainline Rail

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

Back-to-backs, some of the last, and always just below the view   a sunken tide of regular sound west...

Art

Issue No. 2

From Back Home

J. H. Engstrom

Art

Issue No. 2

In his collection From Back Home the Swedish photographer JH Engström traced his childhood memories back to the province...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required