Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my family, I occasioned enormous merriment, as a nineteenth-century humorist would have put it, by confusing two Italian words. I thought I had, very suavely, ordered for dessert fragoline—those lovely little wild strawberries. Instead, I seem to have asked for fagiolini—green beans. The waiter ceremoniously brought me a plate of […]
Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, left, jokes with United Nations Secretary General Frederick H. Boland, right, during the UN General Assembly session at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on Oct. 3, 1960. At center is Khrushchev’s interpreter, Victor Sukhodrev. Legendary Russian interpreter Victor Sukhodrev has died in Moscow at the age of […]
If you have read any of Gabriel García Márquez’s books in English, what you read was actually composed by one of two people: Gregory Rabassa – who translated “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” and “Autumn of the Patriarch” – and Edith Grossman, who first worked with him on “Love in […]
