When most of the city is asleep, warehouse workers at Amazon’s JFK-8 fulfillment center on Staten Island are just starting their day, ferried on buses to their early-morning shifts. Starting in the summer of 2021, workers were greeted as they began filling out of the bus by a set of coworkers asking them if they were interested in joining a union. This is how the Amazon Labor Union’s story began. It is also how a new documentary, Union, directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, begins: with a couple of union organizers handing out literature. From there, it follows the organizing drive that concluded with their victorious March 2022 union election. Reviewing the film for Books & the Arts, Ella Fanger notes that the film may end with their victory but it also examines all the new fronts opened up as a result and the complexities of the drive. “Union resists the urge to whittle down the ALU struggle into a neat David and Goliath arc,” Fanger writes. “In its raw depiction of an early episode in this fight,” it “tells a more complex tale, one lacking a single protagonist or, as yet, a satisfying ending.” Ultimately, Union shows how “Amazon’s union-busting narrative can’t extinguish workers’ determination to transform their conditions—the stakes are simply too high.” Read “Telling the Amazon Labor Union’s Story”
“Catullus’s enduring popularity can be explained, in part, by the apparent accessibility of his poetry,” Nicolas Liney argues in an essay for Books & the Arts on Stephen Mitchell’s new translation of the Roman poet’s work. Even many centuries later, Catullus’s “simple, confessional, often obscene” verse can give the impression “that he speaks directly to us, or that we can retrofit him, without much resistance, to meet today’s concerns.” Yet, “Catullus resists straightforward categorization, and the real difficulty—and attraction—in translating him is not so much the formal or linguistic problems, but rather capturing the many different modes that the poet adopts: not only the smut alongside the love poetry, but also the mythologically erudite and intensely self-reflexive, as well as the downright mundane.” Indeed, “the struggle with translating Catullus is to find ways of conveying the full range of meanings that he manages to cram in, without losing his economy of expression or completely unraveling the complex knot of his language games.” Mitchel’s translation is crip and elegant, but its portrait of the poet is an “attenuated, two-dimensional Catullus.” What it perhaps shows, unintentionally, is that “translating Catullus is always a flirtation with defeat.” Or as Ezra Pound confidently declared, “no one has succeeded in translating Catullus into English,” a claim he based on personal experience: “I have failed forty times, so I do know the matter.” Read “The Age-Old Struggle of Translating Catullus”
