Eliot Weinberger

The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty—from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth's loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, "Eliot Weinberger's commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei's little poem illustrates, with succinct...

Weinberger's essays are like encyclopaedias in miniature, crammed with curious details that make you wonder at the strangeness of creation, and the ability of humans to make it even stranger. Wildlife is a collection which celebrates birds and fish, dogs and flies, ticks and mole-rats, and those two legendary creatures the tiger and the rhinoceros—both highly prized, both now almost...

Unpredictable and uncanonical, Eliot Weinberger's essays are the outside stories of cultural migrations. The fifteen pieces collected here range from the history of the Salman Rushdie affair to the dream of Atlantis, from the turf wars among ethnographic filmmakers to the unlikely romance between poetry and espionage, from the pilgrims in Plymouth to the students in Tiananmen Square. Above all,...

During the past several years, Eliot Weinberger's inventive prose has earned him a reputation as a candid social observer and penetrating essayist. Works on Paper is the first collection of his writings, comprising twenty-one pieces that juxtapose the world as it is and the world as it is imagined—by artists, poets, historical figures, and ordinary people. "Inventions of Asia," the...

With An Elemental Thing, Weinberger turns from his celebrated political chronicles to the timelessness of the subjects of his literary essays. With the wisdom of a literary archaeologist-astronomer-anthropologist-zookeeper, he leads us through histories, fables, and meditations about the ten thousand things in the universe: the wind and the rhinoceros, Catholic saints and people named Chang, the Mandaeans on the Iran-Iraq...