A review by bibliocyclist
Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet by Mael Renouard

4.0

There are authors.  There are texts.  There are readers.  And there are translators.  What is a translator, and what is their role?  Does the ideal translator see what the author sees and place themselves “in the place of the author in order to rewrite the text in another language as if it had been written in it in the first place”?  Moreover, what is a text, and what is the role of text in our ultra-connected, internet-saturated society?  What, indeed, is the role of memory and of our individual brains and thoughts?  To participate in this inquiry, check out Fragments of an Infinite Memory by Maël Renouard—itself a work in translation.  Question whether “we are on a firmly established, well-traveled path” of history and civilization and progress or “simply following our own ever more numerous tracks,” whether it’s possible anymore to forget or to be forgotten, whether it ever was, or whether “what has once been thought is never utterly lost, even when it no longer possesses a material inscription.”