"get a feeling of independence and individuality on the web" ... novo mundo 29

Springerin 4/2007
Georg Schöllhammer, editor in chief of the Austrian art journal Springerin, was the brains behind the documenta 12 magazines project. Springerin now takes stock of this communicative networking project which set out to link up art journals from all over the world. Keiko Sei, one of the editors of the project, discusses the situation of online media in Southeast Asia. In cities such as Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, or Jakarta, she writes, people make use of the possibilities of the Internet. This also goes for Rangoon in one of the most repressive countries in the region. They "get a feeling of independence and individuality on the web which stands in contrast to what is presented in the mass media." This virtual public space is approaching Habermas's idea of the public space, she finds. However, just as democracy in these regions is very young, so is this sphere of independent information and debate, with everyday dangers lurking, such as personal attacks and repression of those who think differently. (read more in:http://www.eurozine.com/journals/springerin/issue/2007-10-30.html)

"Gorgias is dying" (VH)... novo mundo 28

Vicente Herrasti from The Death of the Philosopher
Translated from the Spanish by Sylvia Sasson Shorris

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: In 1996, a group of young Mexican writers published a manifesto about a new wave of Mexican writing in reaction to the Latin American Boom. They called themselves the Crack Generation. The name was a complex pun. The Mexican Nobelist Octavio Paz had described a new school of Mexican painting in reaction to the muralist tradition as La Ruptura (the Break). The Crack Generation used English, not Spanish, and made a pun on crack cocaine. No one among them was either a crack cocaine user or a traditional Mexican novelist. Several of them wrote about Central Europe. Vicente Herrasti set a novel, Diorama, in Scotland. Along with his novel Taxidermia (Taxidermy), it marked the beginning of an important career. Herrasti (b. 1967) recently published La Muerte del Filosofo (The Death of the Philosopher) to what can only be called rave reviews from Mexico's important critics. The novel covers the last days of the rhetorician and philosopher Gorgias, best known perhaps for the Platonic dialogue by that name. Relatively little is known about Gorgias and only a small amount of his work survives. The opening chapter, translated below, sets the scene in ancient Greece for the story of intrigue, treasure, philosophy, and murder that follows. In Spanish, Herrasti's style is complex, using a vast vocabulary. As is the custom set by Gregory Rabassa's translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the English used here is Anglo-Saxon rather than Latinate, although great effort has been made to hew closely to Herrasti's language rather than trying to "give the sense of the story in English." The Spanish for "banging their jaws" becomes "laughing their heads off" in English, but it is only such idioms that have been converted. Herrasti, who lives in Mexico City, is a translator as well as a novelist and the editor of one of the Mexican imprints of the Spanish firm Santillana. He is at work on another novel. (read more in: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=DeathOfThePhilosophe)