A review by jpowerj
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos

3.0

Meh... it's basically a guy ranting about translation, throwing out a bunch of sweeping generalizations, hyperbolic statements, and literary references without much justification/explanation. For example, tons of "one could never capture [X] in a translation!" and heaping praise on like Flaubert and Chekhov and stuff. Also there's a weird thing where he talks about translating "UP" vs. translating "DOWN" and as far as I can tell this is just arbitrarily constructing a hierarchy where western languages (English, French) are "UP" and non-western languages (Swahili) are "DOWN"... lol?