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The Deleted Mind
David Orr dressed for workas the NY Times Poetry Columnist I found this review online a few weeks back, in which David Orr focuses mostly on Robin Robertson‘s versions of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, gathered under the title The Deleted World. After pointing out numerous mistranslations*, Orr makes these odd statements: The Deleted World is pleasurable whether or not it’s a good translation of Tranströmer. […] Is that enough? In some ways, certainly — we read poetry for entertainment, not nutritional value.Read More
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Marginalia on My Birthday
Roman mosaic of the Greek poet Alkman(2nd Century BCE) After Davenport’s Alkman* June 26, 2013 Nostalgia for the ancientdays which had I lived thenI with my childhood illnesseswould not have lived to see ______________________________* 7 Greeks: Translations by Guy DavenportRead More
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Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural
Mural by Mahmoud DarwishMy rating: 4 of 5 stars I won’t “review” the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural, which contains the gorgeous 45-page title poem and a second, shorter poem, “The Dice Player,” both brought over into vigorous English by Rema Hammami and John Berger. “Mural” was written after Darwish underwent a life-threatening surgical procedure, and the poem bears the scars of that crisis; “The Dice Player,” his last poem, the poet read publicly in Ramallah just a month before his death on August 9, 2008.Read More
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Göran Sonnevi’s First Book in English
The Economy Spinning Faster and Faster by Göran Sonnevi My rating: 4 of 5 stars I thought I’d done fairly well with keeping up with one of my favorite poets, Robert Bly—both with his own books and his translations—so I was surprised when I read, in the recently published Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, that Bly had been working on translations of poems by Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi, whose work I became a fan of when I encountered it in 1993, in A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, beautifully translated by…Read More
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César Aira’s Ghosts
Ghosts by César Aira My rating: 4 of 5 stars I find it nearly impossible to describe a César Aira novel. This is because his effects operate in mysterious ways, somehow underneath plot and characterization. But let me nutshell Ghosts without spoiling the arc, which begins in a typically wandering Airaesque way before firming up and acquiring the character of Fate. Raúl Viñas and his family live on the site of a luxury condominium building under construction.Read More
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A Lot of Funny Things
So what in the world’s worth anything?Poetry is priceless (or at least that’s what they pay me).Explaining, clearly, deeply, Love, and Duty,what monkey-hearted men will never learn. —Wang Fan-chih My poems are poems,even if some people call them sermons.Well, poems and sermons do share one thing:when you read them you got to be artful.Keep at it. Get into detail.Don’t just claim they’re easy.If you were to live your life like that,a lot of funny things might happen. —Shih Te Both of the above translated by J. P.Read More
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The Stuff By Which We Live
Harry (Heinrich) Heine A quote here from Max Brod‘s biography of Harry (better known as Heinrich) Heine, Heine: The Artist in Revolt. It has about it the very strangeness that makes Heine, for me, more rewarding to read than the currently influential Friedrich Hölderlin: Now that I come to discuss [Heine’s] masterpieces it is no more than fitting that I should make due acknowledgment of the way in which he trampled over every inner and outer barrier and crushed all difficulties.Read More
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Adios, Daryl Hine
It’s sad to lose Daryl Hine, even though I never became a fan of his poetry, because his translations are wonderful. I especially appreciate his versions of The Homeric Hymns. The originals come a period between 600 BCE to 400 CE—a thousand years during which Homer’s epic diction was turned to more personal uses.Read More
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Sky Lanterns
(Double click image to see full size.) SKY LANTERNS:New Poetry from China, Formosa, and BeyondEdited by Frank Stewart and Fiona Sze-Lorrain18 illus., 158 pp., US $20University of Hawai’i Press and Manoaavailable in July / August 2012 Purchase link:http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-8932-9780824836986.aspx Sky Lanterns brings together innovative work by authors — primarily poets — in mainland China, Taiwan, the United States, and beyond who are engaged in truth-seeking, resistance, and renewal. Appearing in new translations, many of the works are published alongside the original Chinese text. A number of the poets are women, whose work is relatively unknown to English-language readers. Contributors include Amang,…Read More
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My Interview with David Constantine at Cerise Press
David Constantine is a wonderfully articulate poet with a scholar’s complexity of vision.We conducted this interview by email, and he was unfailingly generous with his time—as generousas Cerise Press was with space in their publication! You can read the interview here.Read More