Bosman and Kidd Response - Suis

I used to covet aesthetically pleasing book covers but as I’ve gotten older, I started to appreciate a more minimalist lifestyle especially having moved cross-country recently. Books have always been the heaviest things to transport in my moves and possessing so many has felt like a burden. I found myself downsizing my book collection and I plan to purchase Ebooks from now on so I don’t find the marketing strategies that Julie Bosman writes of so effective (personally). Still, it is interesting to know what thought goes into making a book more visually pleasing for a consumer. Moreover, Chip Kidd’s take on the experience of a physical book as an olfactory and visual experience was interesting.

I found Kidd’s analogy for visual translation enlightening. Kidd says of book cover designing as “a distillation, [...] a haiku of the story” and that it is the designer’s job to be an “interpreter and a translator” for the text. I found his book covers to be excellent visual translations for the texts in question, especially his cover for 1Q84. This allows me to view translation from another creative perspective–translation as an endeavor to make the text more immediately (and visually) attractive to an audience. Translation is art, and a form of art that must consider the audience in order to sell. Furthermore, Kidd says it is his “job to put content into form”–something I find applies to translating creative texts as well. I’m currently translating a poetry book, and I begin by transliterating the text (content), then finally attempting to put it into a more concrete form that reads as poetry for an English audience.