At Guernica, Crystal Hana Kim reflects on translating her grandmother’s poetry from Korean into English and how the work changed her relationship with her family. “The more I tried to translate the poems, the more intimidated I became. I wanted to be exact and precise, but inherent in translation is interpretation, the translator’s own agency,” she writes. “There will always be much lost in the gaps, where one tongue does not transfer cleanly to another, but that loss can be valuable; it can help us work harder to understand one another.”
Mary Ruefle has been named poet laureate of Vermont.
Nieman Lab analyzes the impact that impeachment proceedings against Trump might have on the US news landscape. Reporting on Trump’s possible impeachment “will likely feel increasingly personal, passionate, and irritating to people,” particularly if readers are getting their news from social media, which intensifies emotional reactions. “Because an emotionally polarized public opinion might discourage citizens from different forms of civic engagement, to us, an angry and overwhelmed citizenry does not seem a good recipe for a healthy democracy,” they conclude.
For n+1, Matthew Zeitlin looks at the changing media coverage of WeWork and former CEO Adam Neumann.
The New York Times reports that at least eight Deadspin writers and editors have left the website after management ordered them to only write about sports. “To watch the way they punched and screamed and clawed on the way out the door is truly inspiring, and as true to the spirit of Deadspin as anything I could have ever imagined,” founding editor Will Leitch said in an email. “They refused to give in to the bad guys. During a time when so many people have made a profession of that very thing, I find it downright heroic.”
The Times’s Jennifer Schuessler looks at Apple TV Plus’s new series based on the life of poet Emily Dickinson. “Forget baking bread and making friends with flowers. This is a Dickinson, played by Hailee Steinfeld, who takes midnight carriage rides with Death (the rapper Wiz Khalifa), and denounces the patriarchy as — to use a genteel paraphrase — bunk,” she writes. “It’s also one who throws raging parties (complete with a hip-hop playlist and twerking), experiments with opium, makes out with her bestie (and future sister-in-law) and gets her period.”