Reflections on Belonging

On a warm afternoon in late April 2001, I walked down Gedimino, smiling at spring. I was jet-lagged from my first trip to America and still intoxicated by its nature, food, seemingly unrestricted personalities, and cosmopolitan vibe. A trolleybus rolling by slowly like a large yellow chunky caterpillar, its whiskers gripping the wires above, was […]

Metaphorically Speaking One of my hobbies is physics. I have a special interest in the origin and evolution of our universe, including the period of “inflation” immediately following the Big Bang. For non-science readers, “inflation” refers to a very brief and very rapid expansion of the universe from its very small (nuclear-scale) beginning. When I

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t see translation as a matter of course. Whenever I read something and decisively thought it was good, I just knew it had to be translated. Other people need to read this. An instant response, an urgency to share. There are many reasons for this, I suppose. A reader’s

Lord, if you wish for me to return, make it so that a fish would swim through my meadow, my eye swimming in pursuit until it reaches the fish’s refreshing embrace. G. Grass —  When the war broke out in Ukraine, I visited my grandfather, who is slowly approaching his centennial birthday, hoping that he

When I was asked to write an essay about translation, I knew I wouldn’t be able to elucidate upon the finer points of the craft and make a lofty defense of my profession and what it entails. Why? Because I look at the work of translation as simply work, word after word, sentence after sentence,

There are so few Greeks now in Leningrad. Joseph Brodsky There is probably no translator who has not encountered the dilemma of the untranslatable. I could say that, as a translator myself, such moments bring about existential dread and helplessness. Is the word (or saying, or the emotional or semantic charge) I am stuck on

The neighborhood grannies from my childhood used to grow dahlias near the fence: I was always afraid of the darkness and moisture between their leaves, even though their picked blossoms used to tickle me when I sniffed them. Late fall is the only time when I would sidle closer and observe through the net how,

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has been called the most unlikely of leaders—a stay at home mother of two and former English teacher with no political experience, no outside support, and with only her open heart and authenticity to rely on. When Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s husband, the political vlogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, was jailed for running for president, she stepped

I recently read in an article that it is a myth that the Inuit have fifty words for describing snow. The author of that paper delved into the linguistic subtleties of the Inuit language, but I thought about snow. Lately, I’ve been dreaming of it too much: of windows pasted in white, of the silent