The writer at The Marginalian remembers arriving in Patagonia with three things: a big blue backpack, a broken heart, and a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda's love poems. That last item is the one worth stopping on. Bilingual editions are honest objects — they print the seam. Neruda's Spanish sits on one page and somebody else's English sits on the other, and you can see, line by line, exactly where a stranger stepped in so the poem could reach you at all.
Most books hide that seam. This week, a run of otherwise unrelated literary stories kept pulling at it.
Open Culture resurfaced a piece of Christopher Hitchens from 2000, when he argued for why Homer's Odyssey still mattered. The detail worth noticing is the occasion: he was writing because a new English translation had just appeared. A quarter-century later, Open Culture points out, the question of why to read the Odyssey is tangled up with having an opinion about Christopher Nolan's new film adaptation. Two eras, two reasons to talk about the same poem, and both times the trigger was somebody remaking it.