IT'S HERE! we spent 2 hours talking to Pulitzer Prize Winner & gentleman philologist Benjamin "Ben" Moser about translation, being hot, the Canon, writing, Adidas and much much more:
Conversation
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0:00 - Opening remarks: Drew is moving to New York City (lol); Ben was initially confused about Drew's gender; Lauren opens up about her passion for Adidas
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29:20 - Ben outlines his theory of hot people in literature. How important is being hot when it comes to writing (and more importantly getting published)? Can you tell if a hot person wrote a certain text in a blind test? How did being extremely hot benefit Clarice and Sontag?
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Also: Lauren and Ben bond over their shared appreciation of Knausgaard's hotness (this is the closest we get to discussing My Struggle in this episode sorry not sorry)
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1:03:03 - We have a very interesting discussion about literary translation using Ben's experience translating Lispector and also one page of Lauren's grandfather's novel "Antonio" as examples. We tackle some thorny questions at the heart of translation/translation studies,
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of which boil down to: is translation an art or a craft? Ben comes down on the latter side and pushes back against "tenure-track mystifications" of the work of the translation, which Ben argues is actually pretty straightforward*. Also: some spicy takes on Sapir-Whorf.
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1:37:10 - Ben encourages Drew to implement a rigorous traditional canon for his high school English class. What follows is an arch-reactionary discussion of the Canon and how good it is.
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Also Ben says he would cast me as the Wife of Bathe in The Canterbury Tales and I don't know whether to be offended or not because I can't remember anything that happened in there.
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*here is the quote from Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of the Good Over Other Concepts that I botched:
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