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This is the second half of the conversation I had last autumn with Polly Barton, a translator from Japanese and the author of a terrific memoir cum reflection on language and translation, Fifty Sounds. In the first part we talked about Polly’s early fascination with Japan and language, and her decision aged 21 to go to live and work on a remote Japanese island and her experience of learning the language. In this part we talk about her decision to become a translator, some of the challenges that presented, and presents, and also about her book.

Fifty Sounds has fifty chapters, each of which takes a single Japanese word as its starting point or leitmotiv. All of these words are so-called ‘mimetics’, a distinctive and richly expressive class of word in Japanese that merits its own chunky dictionary, but which in the English language we generally pay little attention to. They’re words that give colour and individuality to storytelling; the kind of words that convey the speaker’s sense of being an embodied person in the world, alert to its texture and feel. In choosing to build her book around these words, Polly seems to get to the heart of Japanese, or if that is too grand a claim, to capture the essence of what it meant to her to learn Japanese and to begin to glimpse the world through the lens of Japanese.

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'Music somehow seems to be natural, to exist as something apart – and yet it is suffused with human values, with our sense of what is good or bad, right or wrong. Music doesn't just happen, it is what we make it, and what we make of it. People think through music, decide who they are through it,' says Nicholas Cook, my guest in this episode. His quest in his recent new edition of his highly influential Very Short Introduction to Music (Oxford, 2021) is to explore those human values. In this podcast he talks about how the world of music and our relationship has changed since the first edition appeared in 1998, in an era before smartphones and streaming...

Nicholas Cook was until his retirement in 2017 the 1684 Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge.

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In this episode, we delve deep into clutter with Jennifer Howard, author of a recent book entitled Clutter: An Untidy History.

This book is for you if you have a closet that will no longer close because it is so crammed with clothes, or a garage piled with boxes you keep meaning to sort, or a storage unit that you pay for every month without having an exit strategy. Maybe it’s especially for you if you have an older relative with a house piled high with belongings that you know they will never get rid of and you have a growing sense of dread that one day you are going to have to roll your sleeves up and tackle it... Jennifer talks about her own experience of clearing her mother's house and, more broadly, why we seem to have an increasingly vexed relationship with our (many) possessions.

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Rob Tempio is Princeton University Press’s publisher for the ancient world, philosophy & political theory. He says on the Press’s website:

'I believe passionately in both the inherent and enduring fascination of these subjects and in the ways in which they perpetually speak to the present.' In this interview he talks about his career and his books, including the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series.

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In this episode, I talk to Dean Smith, who’s been director of Duke University Press for almost a year and a half, and before that was director of Cornell University Press. Earlier in his career, Dean held posts at Chapman & Hall as director of electronic publishing and the American Chemical Society as vice president for sales and marketing. Earlier still, he was the director of Project MUSE at the Johns Hopkins University Press. So a wealth of experience in the university press world. When his departure from the Cornell University Press, I read on their blog:

Dean leaves us at CUP with an emboldened mentality. He has given us the spirit and desire to fly ever higher, to dream ever bigger, and to achieve ever more.

So when I spoke to him during his convalescence after hip surgery, I wanted to know more about how Dean saw the role of university press director. I also wanted to find out a bit more about his hinterland.

Dean was born and raised in Baltimore; that city is clearly still close to his heart, as are its sports. He wrote about the Baltimore Ravens’ 2013 against-the-odds Superbowl triumph in Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season.

Dean’s also a published poet and when we spoke a few weeks back, we talked about his debut collection, American Boy, which draws on his 1960s Baltimore childhood.

In this interview, you’ll also hear what Dean thinks are the lessons of the recent Jessica Krug affair, as that author was published by Duke, and why he compares his press to a spaceship in the desert.

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This episode is another in the series of Conversations with Publishers, which aims to find out more about the people who decide what gets published. Our guest is Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, a post he has held since 1998, and in the interview we talk about his career both before and after his arrival in Minneapolis.

The University of Minnesota Press was established 1925. On its website, it says: ‘Minnesota is a midsize university press.’ If so, it would be fair to say it punches well above its weight in terms of reputation and impact...

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In this programme, we’re exploring the life and music of Francis Poulenc, in the company of writer and musicologist Roger Nichols. Yale University Press recently published Roger’s biography of Poulenc, who was the pre-eminent member of the group known as Les Six and remains probably France's best-loved and most-performed 20th-century composer.

One reviewer wrote of Roger's book: ‘I don’t think anyone writes better about classical music than Nichols, his wry humour and gift for surprising connections never losing touch with scholarly erudition.’

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This week we explore the life and work of the master of the 19th-century short story, Guy de Maupassant, in the company of his recent biographer Christopher Lloyd, who’s emeritus professor of French at Durham. (The TLS called Chris's book ‘a crisp, witty, balanced and well-informed guide.’)

Depending on your age and background, you might have read some Maupassant at school, or maybe encountered him on a literature survey course at university. He’s much anthologized. But that has proved to be a mixed blessing. The same pieces crop up again and again, representing just a tiny fraction of his 300 short stories. In France, by some estimates, he is the best-selling classic author, thanks to continuing educational sales. So his name is well known. Many people feel they know him, without really knowing him.

As Christopher Lloyd’s book shows, most of us have barely glimpsed the full extent of Maupassant’s writing, which includes half a dozen novels as well as the short fiction, and a wide range of themes which one French edition meticulously catalogued. It included ‘devil’, ‘divorce’, ‘double’, ‘duel’, ‘strangling’, ‘fantastic’, ‘madness’, ‘drunkenness’… which maybe already gives some insight into the often dark and dangerous world Maupassant’s characters inhabit.

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Babette’s Feast, released in 1987, was the first Danish submission to win the Oscar for best foreign language film and it’s the subject of Julian Baggini’s recent book in the BFI Film Classics series. A short, engaging essay on the film that won’t take you much longer to read than the film’s running time.

Babette’s Feast is based on a short story by Karen Blixen, best known as the author of Out of Africa. It’s set in the 19th century an austere part of northern Denmark in an equally austere Christian community, into which comes Babette, once a celebrated Parisian chef, now fleeing the counter-revolutionary violence of the Paris Commune in 1871.

What could have been merely a pointed satire on the rigidity of a certain kind of religious life or a gentle culture-clash comedy, is, Julian suggests, something much deeper and much more thought-provoking: an example of film as philosophy.

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