Nassau Weekly
  • Issues
  • Verbatim
  • Crosswords
  • About
  • Donate

Byline: Emily Lever

  • New
  • Old
  • Random

The Plague: A Double Translation

The following passage is adapted from the opening of Albert Camus’ The Plague, which is a description of Oran, a city in French Algeria, in the 1940s. I have translated it into English and into the setting of Princeton in 2013 (office jobs become classwork, going to the movies is replaced by the more common pastime of the Internet and so on), but those are the only changes I believe I have made.

by Emily Lever on November 30, 2013November 30, 2013

Dora’s Ghost

Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s most famous novel, Dora Bruder, is something like a ghost story, though not in the traditional sense. It is a ghostly story about a young man and a nation haunted by history. Modiano received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014, the fifteenth French writer to do so after the 2008 laureate Jean- Marie Georges Le Clézio. While Le Clézio’s writing is sensual and tinted with exoticism, Modiano’s is sparse, introspective, and heav- ily autobiographical, sometimes even termed “autofiction.”

by Emily Lever on February 15, 2015February 21, 2015

Lever Levre Lever

When I googled the meaning of my last name, I felt the same way I felt while visiting the museum at Gettysburg when a docent urged me to search the database and see if my ancestors had been involved in the battle.

by Emily Lever on April 11, 2013April 25, 2013

Post-Thesis Life

Your thesis will get written, I promise. It will never be as good as they told you it was supposed to be.

by Emily Lever on April 4, 2015June 10, 2015

Pandora Speaks

Who would have given a damn about me if not for that box?

As punishment for Prometheus’ gift of fire, the gods gave me to men. They gave me to men. I was a poisoned gift. But the importance of a poisoned gift is the venom it bears, not the gift. The box, not Pandora.

by Emily Lever on October 11, 2014October 12, 2014

M[]ss[]ss[]pp[] R[]ver

My hands that snatch and swat go numb.

by Emily Lever on February 14, 2015February 16, 2015

An Orientalist Fantasy

But the more I thought about this movie, the more I realized it simply gives an illusion of depth. A movie filmed with somewhat unconventional techniques, or featuring naturalistic dialogue and little plot, is automatically assumed to be “artsy” and thus philosophical, by association with the style of the French New Wave.

by Emily Lever on December 6, 2012March 22, 2013

Neighbors with Nazis

Fernand Lépinay is a friend of my grandparents who lives outside of the small town of Laigle in the rainy Orne department of Lower Normandy.

by Emily Lever on May 4, 2015August 11, 2015

Grammar and Power

The politics of slang, from Nabokov to Twitter

by Emily Lever on April 12, 2015April 12, 2015

The Unexpected Bodies

It was 9 a.m. Awakened, as I often am, by sunlight, I opened my door to go to the bathroom downstairs. Supine, to the side of my door, was a male form, blonde and muscular and naked. His hands were cupped over his genitals, his underwear crumpled by his head. His eyes were closed. I froze in surprise, but I had to pee, and out of some ingrained politeness didn’t want to disturb him. I stepped over him quietly and went downstairs.

by Emily Lever, Hannah Hirsh, Megan Tung, Nick Sexton, Olivia Lloyd, Susannah Sharpless on October 11, 2014October 12, 2014

J’ai Deux Amours

My parents put in uncommon efforts to raise my brother and me completely bilingual. Our mother (a Frenchwoman from Normandy) spoke only French to us, ever, our father (a New Yorker by way of Romania and Tunisia) only English. To build a wall of separation within us between French and English, they pretended not to understand when we addressed them in the wrong language.

by Emily Lever on February 15, 2014February 15, 2014

The Inheritance of Guilt

My father’s father flew free from the depths of the Russian Empire as an infant, for sticks and stones and angry Christians drove his family out. It was in 1916 or maybe 1917.

by Emily Lever on April 26, 2014July 5, 2014


  • Older
  • Newer

Submit a Verbatim

    Recent Posts

    • A Yoga Ashram, Donna Tart’s The Secret History, and Discobitch’s C’est Beau la Bourgeoisie
    • Balls Dropped: Full Design
    • Letter from the editor
    • New Year, New Me / I Was Cutting My Fingernails and Eavesdropping
    • Sorry About the Air Conditioners Being Off: Townes Van Zandt, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Aesthetic Signatures of Heat

    Popular Posts

    • A Yoga Ashram, Donna Tart’s The Secret History, and Discobitch’s C’est Beau la Bourgeoisie
    • Balls Dropped: Full Design
    • Letter from the editor
    • New Year, New Me / I Was Cutting My Fingernails and Eavesdropping
    • Sorry About the Air Conditioners Being Off: Townes Van Zandt, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Aesthetic Signatures of Heat

    Navigation

    • Home
    • Articles
    • Issues
    • Verbatim
    • Contact
    • Donate

    Categories

    • Campus
    • Reflections
    • Poetry
    • Podcasts
    • Fiction
    • Lists

    Join Us

    • About
    • Privacy Policy
    • Submit an article
    • Submit a verbatim

    © Nassau Weekly 2020 · All Rights Reserved