Liberties X Interintellect Inaugural Salon: Benjamin Moser and the Upside Down World

For the inaugural salon of the Liberties X Interintellect series, Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize Winning author of the biography Sontag and renowned translator of Clarice Lispector, joins Celeste Marcus to discuss his upcoming book The Upside Down World.

Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize Winning author of the biography Sontag and renowned translator of Clarice Lispector, joins Celeste Marcus, managing editor of Liberties, to discuss his upcoming book The Upside Down World. Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser was overwhelmed by the language, people, and culture. The great painters of the Dutch Golden Age —Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer among them— offered him entry into his strange new universe. This book is a portrait of seventeen of these artists, and of Moser’s peculiar conception of each of them. Moser and Marcus will discuss life in translation, the differences between adopted and inherited identities and how to honor both, what art is, what it is for, and what makes an artist significant.

Recommended Readings: 

Benjamin Moser has written three essays for Liberties each of which provides excellent background for this discussion:

• The Shadow Master considers Rembrandt van Rijn’s strange darkness
• Hals at Nightfall offers a portrait of the famed and misdescribed Frans Hals
• Against Translation a provocative essay by a celebrated translator about the limits and pitfalls of translation

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