Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…It’s an incredible, incredible essay. The short stories are really lovely. The short story of “The Road” is from the perspective of a donkey, which is interesting. Tolstoy wrote a wonderful short story called “Pacesetter” that is life from the perspective of a horse. I assume Grossman was riffing on that in some way. This idea that this dumb — meaning mute — creature, that its observations of the human being might be more accurate than our own and give us insight, is really a beautiful idea. It’s also peppered with lovely pieces from Chandler, with biographical detail. I can’t imagine what it was like to — I’ll ask him — but to translate a book of this size, which, of course, Russian translators are doing this all day long. Constance Garnett and others are translating very large books from a very different language. It must be a fascinating experience. I’m sure it took longer to translate than it took me to read it, so I’ll be interested. I want you to ask him, how funny is the book in Russian? In English, it’s basically not funny, but I hear my wife tell jokes in Russian to her friends all the time. Everyone laughs. I get an English translation; it’s not funny. I suspect the joke, in fact, was funny. The Russian jokes don’t translate well. That’s what I want you to ask him. Will do.…

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