Babel

THE Japanese segment of the new movie "Babel" was by far the most troubling, confusing and disturbing part of it and contained some of the most controversial yet emotionally powerful movie scenes I have ever seen ["Fairy Tales for a Mean New World," Nov. 19]. Did this underage teenage girl act in sexually obscene and inappropriate ways, particularly toward adult men, because she was rebelling against adult authority, or was it due to the way that she was discriminated against because she was deaf?

Grammy Awards voters gave their top honor to British roots music band Mumford & Sons for their album "Babel" on Sunday at the 55th awards ceremony. Other top honors were distributed to a broad array of younger acts, including indie trio Fun., electronic pop artist Gotye, rapper-R&B singer Frank Ocean and rock group the Black Keys. "We figured we weren't going to win because the Black Keys have been sweeping up all day - and deservedly so," Mumford & Sons front man Marcus Mumford said after he and his band members strode to the stage at Staples Center in Los Angeles to collect the award from last year's winner, R&B-soul singer Adele.

Your Aug. 31 story, "Agencies Serving Public Told to Provide Interpreters," contained the quote, "It sends a strong message." Having interpreter services for every agency that doles out federal benefits does indeed send a strong message, i.e., that there is no reason to bother with learning English to be a part of American society. The talk these days is all about inclusion, but this policy has more to do with encouraging separation. The tax money spent on interpreters could much better be used for more English-language classes.

High-energy arena-folk act Mumford & Sons triumphed over relative newcomers such as Frank Ocean and Fun. to win the most prestigious Grammy prize, album of the year, for its "Babel. " The turned-to-11 folk of "Babel" was the only album of the year nominee currently in the top 10. "Babel," at No. 7 heading into the Grammys, has sold more than 1.7 million copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. T he sophomore album from Mumford & Sons was released on Glassnote Records in September and at the time had the biggest debut sales week of 2012, selling approximately 600,000 copies.

High-energy arena-folk act Mumford & Sons triumphed over relative newcomers such as Frank Ocean and Fun. to win the most prestigious Grammy prize, album of the year, for its "Babel. " The turned-to-11 folk of "Babel" was the only album of the year nominee currently in the top 10. "Babel," at No. 7 heading into the Grammys, has sold more than 1.7 million copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan. T he sophomore album from Mumford & Sons was released on Glassnote Records in September and at the time had the biggest debut sales week of 2012, selling approximately 600,000 copies.

Using characters from the Spanish alphabet on California street signs is a great idea (Aug. 21). However, this is only the beginning. In order to be fair to the people from other ethnic backgrounds we need to start printing street signs using Chinese characters, Arabic characters, Hebrew characters, Russian characters, Greek characters and on and on. Eventually, the state of California can simply change its name to the state of Babel, printed in...

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything David Bellos Faber & Faber: 384 pp, $27 When it was announced that the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was going to Tomas Tranströmer, Americans could be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the name of the 80-year-old Swedish poet. His most recent U.S. books come from two niche independent presses - New Directions and Green Integer - and his only collection with a major American publisher is out of print (Ecco, a division of HarperCollins, has announced it will be reissued)

We found Peter S. Greenberg's article on lawsuits against the travel industry (Aug. 3) most interesting. We are in the midst of attempting to settle a claim, in an amicable fashion, with a Spanish tour group. We traveled to Spain at the end of April and found ourselves involved in a combined multilingual tour with another tour group. We were never told this would occur. The tour guide spoke Spanish 95% of the time and we could not understand anything, nor could we tune out. We felt as if we were on the Tower of Babel.

How do you admit that a trip to Europe is your first--at your, ahem, age? Might as well face it head-on and have a few answers prepared for the inevitable: "Your first !?" "I can't believe it--I always thought you were so . . . civilized." I know. I've been a hick all this time. But now, with a chance to see the newest crop of films from Hungary and the invitation to be a juror at the Berlin Film Festival, three weeks in all, my experience will, for once, be firsthand.

Brit­ish roots mu­sic band Mum­ford & Sons took the top hon­or for its album "Ba­bel" at the 55th Grammy Awards ce­re­mony Sunday. The night mostly dis­trib­uted hon­ors broadly to an ar­ray of young­er gen­er­a­tion acts in­clud­ing New York in­die trio Fun., Aus­trali­an elec­tron­ic pop artist Gotye, rap­per-R&B sing­er Frank Ocean and Ak­ron, Ohio, rock group the Black Keys. See the complete list of 2013 Grammy winners and nominees below. #story-body-text h2 { font-weight: bold !

The music industry has been grappling with the following question for much of the last few years: Do streaming services such as Spotify, which allow users to listen to albums for free, cannibalize sales? Leave it to a banjo-wielding English folk-rock band to provide one very loud answer. "Babel," the sophomore album from Mumford & Sons released on Glassnote Records last week, has had the biggest debut sales week of 2012, selling approximately 600,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The religious overtones on Mumford & Sons' sophomore album come as no surprise. Though he's now known as the most visible figure in an international folk revival that also includes North Carolina's Avett Brothers and Iceland's Of Monsters and Men, frontman Marcus Mumford first circulated in the scene around the Vineyard, an international network of evangelical Christian churches (Mumford's parents are leaders of the community in the U.K.). So when he notes that "this cup of yours tastes holy," as he does here in "Whispers in the Dark," you figure the guy knows what holiness tastes like.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything David Bellos Faber & Faber: 384 pp, $27 When it was announced that the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature was going to Tomas Tranströmer, Americans could be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the name of the 80-year-old Swedish poet. His most recent U.S. books come from two niche independent presses - New Directions and Green Integer - and his only collection with a major American publisher is out of print (Ecco, a division of HarperCollins, has announced it will be reissued)

Pirozhkova's memoir 'At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel' recounts their love and the author's arrest and disappearance under Stalin. Pirozhkova, an engineer, helped design Moscow's subway. Antonina Pirozhkova, who was the common-law widow of Russian literary giant Isaac Babel and wrote a well-received memoir that provided a rare glimpse of the persecuted writer's final years in the 1930s, has died. She was 101. Pirozhkova died Sept. 12 of natural causes at her home in Sarasota, Fla., said her grandson, Andrei Malaev-Babel.

In any language, Sonja Elen Kisa was depressed. The world was overwhelming, and the thoughts that swirled through her mind in French, English, German or Esperanto echoed that. So Kisa, 28, a student and translator in Toronto, decided to create her own language, something simple that would help clarify her thinking. She called it Toki Pona -- "good language" -- and gave it just 120 words. "Ale li pona," she told herself. "Everything will be OK."

Hard feelings have intensified between "Babel" Oscar nominees director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, whose partnership yielded a highly praised trilogy of movies about the connections among diverse people and situations. They had already accused each other of trying to steal the spotlight.

Brad Pitt's "Killing Them Softly" suffered the kind of deadly hit at the box office this weekend that its protagonist might have admired. A wide opening from The Weinstein Co. yielded a paltry $7 million, barely enough for seventh place in a crowd of holdovers. It was one of the lowest-ever wide openings for Pitt, and could wind up as his second-lowest grosser in nearly 20 years. If dismal attendance wasn't enough, the people who did come out to "Killing" wanted to whack it: The movie averaged a rock-bottom "F" CinemaScore.

Hard feelings have intensified between "Babel" Oscar nominees director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, whose partnership yielded a highly praised trilogy of movies about the connections among diverse people and situations. They had already accused each other of trying to steal the spotlight.

POOLSIDE at the Beverly Hilton, Rinko Kikuchi gathered up her quilted leather handbag, a mini-mechanical pencil and a small notebook. Then she waved a shy goodbye to "Access Hollywood" host Nancy O'Dell. The Oscar-nominated actress, her translator, Tamaka Takefushi, and a Paramount Vantage award strategist huddled post-interview, as they usually do. Kikuchi wrote in the notebook the Japanese translation of O'Dell's question, for future reference: What are you going to wear to the Oscars?