‘Gilgamesh’ Review: Love and Death in Mesopotamia The epic of Gilgamesh is more than 40 centuries old. Simon Armitage’s new translation feels thrillingly alive. By William Giraldi, WSJApril 24, 2026
Much as I admire Simon Armitage's translation, I must say that I am overwhelmed by the excellence of the reviewer, William Giraldi. He is much plauded for his fiction, literary criticism, and journalism. Reading though this review, I often find myself celebrating his uncanny ability to find the mot juste at the very moment when I was wondering how he would extricate himself from a difficult, intricate sentence / thought.
There is something almost absurd about attempting to appraise “Gilgamesh,” as though one were asked to appraise wind, or love, or that first human thought that trembled toward language. And yet here comes Simon Armitage, the poet laureate of the U.K., with his stunning new verse translation, not as a vandal of antiquity but as a lucid accomplice to its endurance. As he does with his unimprovable versions of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (2008) and “The Death of King Arthur” (2012), Mr. Armitage understands that the oldest stories are never old, only waiting for a new singer.
‘If This Be Magic’ Review: A Great Feast of Languages Shakespeare has resonated with audiences in Swedish, Swahili and beyond. But translating the Bard requires some difficult choices. By Henry Hitchings, WSJ (April 22, 2026)
Transferring Shakespeare's works into another language is hard work:
Samuel Johnson complained, more than 250 years ago, that William Shakespeare’s style was “ungrammatical, perplexed, and obscure.” Many students and theatergoers since have shared that view. Yet even if we agree with Johnson, it has become customary to celebrate instead the playwright’s linguistic resourcefulness and dazzle: his flair for coining words and twisting old ones into new shapes, his taste for double meanings and calculated ambiguity.
The obscurity condemned by Johnson derives in part from Shakespeare’s readiness to draw on vocabulary that would have struck even his contemporaries as bewilderingly nonstandard. Today many of us are as likely to be disorientated by his fondness for folklore and myth, his assumptions about religion and social order, and his immersion in the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.
For the last few years, I've been noticing that Chinese archeologists and scientists publishing in English consistently refer to jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 as "oracle bone scripts" (note the plural), when I think they mean "oracle bone inscriptions" or "oracle bone texts".
I'm wondering if I should make an attempt to correct this usage, or whether it is so well entrenched in Sino-English that nothing can be done to change it.
For those who don't know what "Chinese Text Project" (CTP) is, here's a:
Brief introduction:
The Chinese Text Project is an online open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. The site attempts to make use of the digital medium to explore new ways of interacting with these texts that are not possible in print. With over thirty thousand titles and more than five billion characters, the Chinese Text Project is also the largest database of pre-modern Chinese texts in existence.
New book in the Cambridge Elements Series Yuanfei Wang and Victor H. Mair Early Globalism and Chinese Literature Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2026
The entire book, richly illustrated in color, is available open access online.
Summary
Exploring 'early globalism and Chinese literature' through the lens of 'literary diffusion,' this Element analyzes two primary forms. The first is Buddhist literary diffusion, whose revolutionary impact on Chinese language and literature is illustrated through scriptural translation, transformation texts, and 'journey to the West' stories. The second, facilitated diffusion, engages with the maritime world, traced through the seafaring journey of Cinderella stories and the totalizing worldview in literature on Zheng He's voyages. The authors contend that early global literary diffusion left a lasting imprint on Chinese language, literature, and culture.
This is a story about the love between a man and a woman who don't know each other's language and haven't learned it either. The man is an American from New Haven, and the woman is a Chinese from Xi'an, China. He speaks English and she speaks Mandarin. They converse through Microsoft Translator.
They met in Xi'an in 2019 when the man went to see the sights (Terracotta warriors, Buddhist temples, and so on). After he came back to America, they continued to communicate through messaging. But then Covid struck and they were cut off from each other. After Covid restrictions were relaxed, she decided to come to America in 2022 on a one-way ticket and stayed here.
A Reddit thread beginning with a complaint from a student taking Spanish at a U.S. high school hinges on whether the teacher should call the student by his preferred name in English or translate it into Spanish. I never really thought about the practice of using or assigning Spanish names in Spanish class, or French names in French class, even though I did not have a French name in French class (possibly because my junior high French teacher was Puerto Rican and my high school teacher was a Hungarian refugee who had studied at the Sorbonne). But since I was in high school in the 1960s, sensitivity about names, naming, pronunciation of names, "dead names," and other assorted naming issues are a much more prominent part of advice/grievance columns and forums.
I had an interesting Rorschach encounter with the oracle bone graph for woman a couple of years back. Oddly, this experience came in a rather roundabout way through an investigation into the character for interpretation, yi 譯. At the time, I was starting my Chinese translation business and wanted to come up with a meaningful logo for the business. I thought that an investigation into the character yi 譯 might help to inspire some ideas, and so I tried to do a little bit of digging into why it was written the way it was. Of note, the Liji (Book of Rites) has four characters for interpreting officials, as James Legge wrote in his elegant translation:
To make what was in their minds apprehended, and to communicate their likings and desires, (there were officers) – in the east, called transmitters (ji 寄); in the south, representationists (xiang 象); in the west, Di-dis (didi 狄鞮); and in the north, interpreters (yi 譯).
As editor of Journal of Chinese History, Sarah Schneewind asked me if I would do a review of this book: Documents géographiques de Dunhuang. Having done over three hundred reviews during my career, I try to decline them as much as possible at this stage. However, I succumbed to her offer because it was about Dunhuang and was by a French author, for both of which I have soft spots in my heart..
Jokingly, I wrote back: "In honor of your surname in these arctic times, Sarah, I will do the review."
She replied, "Vielen Dank, Victor! Ganz schön, dass meine Name etwas gilt!" ("Thank you very much, Victor!It's really nice that my name means something!")
Our colleague and teacher, Prof. Matsumoto Akirō, passed away on January 6, 2026, at 82 years of age.
Prof. Matsumoto graduated from Waseda University in East Asian history in 1966, received his Master’s degree, also from Waseda, in philosophy in 1972, and thereafter studied at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran. He taught at International University of Japan and at St. Thomas (Eichi) University and held visiting professorships at Durham University (UK) and the University of Virginia (USA). He originally specialized in Islamic theology, working in Persian and Arabic texts under the mentorship of Prof. IZUTSU Toshihiko (井筒 俊彦) in Japan and Prof. Sayed Jalaluddin Ashtiani at Ferdowsi. His research included the mystical thought of Ibn ‘Arabi, Ibn Sina, Jami, Rumi, and Mulla Sadra and the 20th century Twelver Shi’ism of Ayatollah Khomeini. He also published numerous translations of Persian philosophical works into Japanese.
This morning I received the following link without any accompanying explanation: link is embedded here. As soon as I started to read through the text, it seemed as though it were Hindi-Urdu, or some other northern Indic language, but it was so jumbled with English and jargon that I couldn't really make full sense of all that it was saying. Moreover, it was written in romanization, not Devanagri or Perso-Arabic. I had studied a summer of Hindi-Urdu about 60 years ago, but that was in the two native scripts, and I had become quite proficient in Nepali from having lived in the eastern Himalayas from 1965-67. Nepali was also written in Devanagari and was full of Indic cognates, but also had plenty of Persian and Arabic borrowings.
