Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Lethem

“Disreputable” is Lethem’s perfectly chosen little sneer at the way Anglophone literary culture polices its borders. In English, “fantastic” writing still gets treated like it’s sneaking in through the side door: genre, fandom, adolescent wish-fulfillment, the stuff you’re supposed to outgrow if you want to be taken seriously. Lethem isn’t conceding that hierarchy so much as naming it with a raised eyebrow. The word “kind of” matters too: it’s the shrug of someone who knows the stigma is real, but also flimsy, enforced by taste-makers more than by art.

Then comes the pivot: “in translation is the summit.” Suddenly the very same qualities that get fantasy and speculative work dismissed in English become, abroad, a mark of literary altitude. The subtext is less about the intrinsic value of translation than about the prestige machine. When the “weird” arrives with a foreign passport, Anglophone readers tend to read it as serious: surrealism becomes philosophical, myth becomes modernist, impossibility becomes metaphor. Translation adds friction and aura; it signals effort, cosmopolitanism, and curated importance. You’re not reading a dragon story, you’re reading “Borges,” “Calvino,” “Kafka” - the canon’s permission slip for the unreal.

Contextually, this is Lethem (a writer who’s spent his career braiding pulp with literary ambition) needling a culture that pretends it hates the fantastic while quietly outsourcing its appetite for it. It’s a critique of snobbery disguised as a compliment to world literature: the summit isn’t higher; we just climb it more reverently when the signs are in another language.