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...

In May 2017, during the tense weeks leading up to the opening of negotiations on the terms of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker delivered a speech in Florence which drew applause from his audience, and scorn from British right-wing media Halfway through his speech, he switched language ‘I’m hesitating between English and French,’ he said, ‘But I’ve made my choice I will express myself in French because slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe’   The move was mostly gestural – calculated, and delivered with a glint in his eye – but revealing nonetheless: our split from Europe would begin first through language The EU had once been happy to extend itself towards us, and to translate its edicts into our language Now, we would need to do the translating; the burden to understand and to be understood would be ours But why had we ever assumed it should be any other way?   In contemplating Brexit, and its questions of language, identity, nationalism, cooperation and compassion, we found we were in fact contemplating the issues of translation Our roundtable is a chance to grapple with these ideas and to explore how language, and by extension translation, has the power both to let in and keep out Or, as Khairani Barokka describes it, to be ‘absence, sanctuary and weapon’   During the course of the roundtable, participants talked about Brexit, colonialism and xenophobia, representation and accessibility, vulnerability and empathy Alongside a consideration of the work of professional translators, they discussed the often unrecognised (care) work of interpretation that happens in immigrant communities every day They noted the importance of oral cultures and multilingual texts, and the liberating power of not translating a text They recognised that we all live in translation   In her book-length essay on translation, This Little Art, Kate Briggs describes a somewhat similar language ‘switch’ to Juncker’s In Helen Lowe-Porter’s English translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, two characters suddenly start speaking French to one another, drawing the reader’s attention to the artifice of their reading experience ‘I come up against the belief I

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

poetry

October 2013

Transylvania

Jon Stone

poetry

October 2013

The rabbit darkness just beyond the headlights’ sprawl and parcel darkness stopping up the drivers’ mouths like oaths or...

poetry

September 2012

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend

Cutter Streeby

poetry

September 2012

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend     [SEAside          Gra-                         –i.m. Ronny Burhop 1987-2010                                                                      ffiti]...

Interview

Issue No. 8

Interview with Deborah Levy

Jacques Testard

Interview

Issue No. 8

‘TO BECOME A WRITER, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required