Episode 4: Kira Brunner Don and Nathan Brown

The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“They would take you around, introduce you to all of their contacts, translate for you, and help you put together the story,” says scholar-journalist Kira Brunner Don in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And I often felt like, you pay them, of course, a day rate, but there was this understanding that real news was made by American journalists who flew in and told you what was what. All of us were depending on journalists from the country, or writers from the country, who knew it far better than we did and really had the context and the sensibility. But there was this unspoken rule that they’ll be biased. I really felt like I wanted to create something that instead focused on the actual voices of the people who live in the countries we’re covering.” This week on the podcast Donovan Hohn hosts a two-part episode. First, he speaks with Kira Brunner Don, former executive editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, about the making of our first issue, States of War, from Winter 2008, and about the magazine Brunner Don edits now, Stranger’s Guide. In part two of this episode, Hohn speaks with Nathan Brown, translator of Verso’s new dual-language edition of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, about the history of Baudelaire’s magnum opus. Brown gives us a guided tour of “Recueillement,” the Baudelaire poem read at Lewis Lapham’s memorial service, which Brown has translated anew for Lapham’s Quarterly, under the title “Introspection.”