American Views Abroad


Thursday, December 31, 2009
 
A decade of our discontent ends, limping out at midnight. Somewhere among the many articles written about these last ten years, one commented on the end of surprise. Certainly there are no surprises in politics where respect for the ideas of others, the art of compromise and working together are, well, Missing In Action. To be fair it isn't only the politicians who disgust but the finance world, big business, personal greed, and those who stubbornly refuse to get the facts straight, look at the bigger picture and demand higher standards in our dealings with each other.

There are those who try in their own way to change things. There is George in Washington, DC at www.planetrestart.org who has decided to take a good look at climate change and set up A Resource Center for getting solid facts.

There is a translation website at www.rochester.edu/threepercent which was portrayed in the IHT recently. Their aim is to bring non English literature to the US. US readers probably don't realize how much they are missing since literary translations tend to be a one way street much like TV programming or films. It's basically the US to the rest of the world market. Yet one of the most difficult tasks is to sit down and translate someone's literary work: its art, culture and sublime emotional message.

Surely there are many others out there. What this site will try to do in the new decade is find them out and pass it along.

Let's hope the new decade ringing in tonight is a more promising one.

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