The idioms of a language—its jokes, expressions, and well-worn wordplay—are windows into its speakers’ values and points of view. In both French and English, certain phrases—métro, boulot, dodo (“commute, work, sleep”), for instance, or nose to the grindstone—reflect a shared assumption about labor: that work is drudgery, eating up time and hindering happiness.
“To a true collector,” the German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted in his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library,” “the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.” This is an apt way to describe the many lives a single volume may live. On its initial printing, it may receive a flurry of attention from readers and reviewers—or none at all.
“Cancer,” Susan Sontag observed in Illness as Metaphor, “is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease.” Though she wrote this in the late 1970s, her point still stands. When it comes to descriptions of cancer, in real life or in books, many people struggle to stretch beyond the limited range of accepted, often military metaphors. You’re supposed to “battle” cancer, not prettify it.
In the fall of 2021, the American writer and translator Jennifer Croft published an essay in The Guardian that provoked a spirited conversation within the English-speaking literary world. Why, she asked, were translators expected to remain coyly, politely invisible, with their names more often than not cast off from book covers by publishers? This practice, she pointed out, overlooks the labor that goes into these books: It is the translators, after all, who “choose every word they will contain.
Certain books have the potential to extend beyond their covers: They can affect readers so dramatically that they spur change, whether in readers’ heads or across society. Some of these titles are well known.