David Stromberg, Author at Public Seminar

Sex & Gender

A Dose of Forever Feelings

On Sex, Emotion, and Translating What You Feel Into Reality

February 20, 2020 • by David Stromberg

As a young man, this sense of clunkiness spread to almost everything I did, including my youthful attempts at romantic affairs. I often found myself surrounded by images of love and romance that split emotions from sex without realizing how influential they were to a psyche still very much in formation. On the one ...

Literature

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism

When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

October 26, 2019 • by David Stromberg

Whatever you are, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.––Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) The essay below is the third part of a series and is most profitably read in sequence after parts one and two -- comprising a kind of memoir that participates in a literary genre that has become obscured: ...

Feature

On Hate and Boycotts

How We Choose What We Believe

September 26, 2019 • by David Stromberg

It took me about six months to start interacting with people I perceived as "white." It took me a lot longer to reflect on how I could so readily use the word hate. With time I realized it was because, where I came from, hating white people -- which mostly meant ...

Feature

On Race and Repair

A Güero Reads Plato in Jerusalem

August 15, 2019 • by David Stromberg

I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood with mostly Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan kids, along with a few from Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam, and Korea. In some cases, their parents or grandparents had come as migrants to America, where they had been born, and in other cases they had themselves ...

Feature

A Different Way of Reading

Samuel Beckett, Melanie Klein, and the Voices of Intuition

June 10, 2019 • by David Stromberg

It's not that I'd never tried before. But something had to have happened, it seems, to make it possible to read the novel -- and that something appears to have been a period of depression. The reasons were complex -- to repeat someone else's phrase, a cocktail of circumstances -- and I’m not ...

Feature

Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt

On Rethinking Our Thoughts

April 19, 2019 • by David Stromberg

As political camps grow increasingly extreme in their messaging – with Democrat and Republican views both turning less nuanced, with the Right and Left seeming to need each other in order to justify their political survival -- it may be helpful to recall a person who tried to make a ...

Feature

How Jewish Was Polish History?

David Stromberg Interviews Magda Teter About I.B. Singer, Jews, and Poland.

September 3, 2018 • by David Stromberg and Magda Teter

Magda Teter [MT]: Soon after Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Literatura na świecie, a literary monthly predominantly interested in world literature, devoted a portion of its April 1979 issue to Isaac Bashevis Singer. This marked a turning point for a discussion about Polish Jewish history and culture, ...

Feature

Translating Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Work

An interview with David Stromberg

April 30, 2018 • by David Stromberg

You can read the translated essay "Socrates and His Teaching" here on Public Seminar. Q & A with David Stromberg 1. How did you come to be a reader and translator of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work? How did you find Singer, or how did Singer find you? I don’t know when I ...

Translating Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Work

Feature

How We Review Translations

In defense of an endless task

April 10, 2018 • by David Stromberg

How much more are translators faced with the finality of their task! Having deferred authorship to their source, translators still carry the full burden and responsibility of carrying not only the text on the page, but the living choices that an author made using one word, phrase, or sentence instead ...