If you’ve ever wondered if all this folderol is worth doing—blogging, I mean—consider above all the way it helps to open us up to people and views we might otherwise never encounter. How well these things serve as crossroads….

Case in point of : James Stotts, a recently added “follower” of this blog, has a blog of his own, where he muses on the Muse and issues of translation. Regarding translation, there’s one post in particular I recommend—a brief translator’s manifesto, which includes this tantalizing statement: “the translator sacrifices both languages to the translation.” I’ll be sitting with that one for some time!

James also has a rich, extended meditation (I would call it) on translating Osip Mandelstam in an online journal called Reconfigurations. (Scroll down a bit after you land to reach his essay.) He’s also at work on translations of Marina Tsvetaeva and others.

If not for his dropping in on this blog, how would I ever have discovered him?