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A National Anthem
This extraordinary poem by Mahmoud Darwish appears in the new (October 2008) issue of The Progressive. Many thanks to Darwish’s American translator, Fady Joudah (see here and here), for bringing Darwish to us in such supple English.Read More
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Entering the Mystery
Why is it that a poem such as this, composed in a language I don’t know and translated into mine — losing what and gaining what, I can’t pretend to say — … why is it that this speaks so much more powerfully than the hundreds of American poems I’ve read this summer? (Their considerable brilliance has struck me as being like sunlight dazzling off the surface of a swimming pool: surface flashes, sparkling words on vacation.) It can’t be this poem’s artistry, which I can experience only through the translator’s screen; it can’t be some personal resonance in the…Read More
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Mexico Books 2008: Installment 3
500,000 Azaleas: The Selected Poems of Efraín Huerta, by Efrain Huerta. Translated by Jim Normington. Edited by Jack Hirschman. I first encountered Efraín Huerta in the mid-seventies, in the Dutton anthology New Poetry of Mexico, where he was represented by two poems in clear but slightly flat translations by Philip Levine—and I’m embarrassed to say that my Spanish at the time was so poor that I failed to appreciate Huerta’s virtues: a fearlessly critical social vision combined with lyric intensity and fierce wit. Jim Normington admirably captures all these qualities and smuggles them into English.Read More
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Mexico Books 2008: Installment 2
Ten Thousand Lives, by Ko Un. Introduction by Robert Hass. In Mexico I read this other book by Korean poet and former Buddhist monk Ko Un. It’s a selection of poems from his vast project, Maninbo, or Ten Thousand Lives. After several years as a leader of the resistance movement against the Korean Republic’s military dictatorships in the 1970s, Ko Un was imprisoned four times, enduring torture and extreme deprivation.Read More
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Mexico Books 2008: Installment 1
I’m finally getting around to mentioning some of the books I read in Mexico back in May. Please indulge me. Just thinking about them brings back the thrash and occasional boom of blue green Caribbean waves on that raw sugar sand…. What?: 108 Zen Poems, by Ko Un. Foreword by Allen Ginsberg. Introduction by Thich Nhat Hanh. The Korean poet and former Buddhist monk Ko Un is one of the great masters of the playful insight.Read More
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The Protestant Canoe
This post is a thank-you to Linh Dinh’s blog posting of Henri Michaux’s poem “Future” (which I encourage you all to read)…. From Henri Michaux’s sequence “Ravaged People”: On a vast expanse of liquid plain, in a colossal, ponderous, Protestant canoe that has come down from the North, he stands, stiff and alone, alone as a man can be when he is not on the path to salvation, when, in the dark zone, he has forced his way through the forbidden passage.Read More
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Knott’s Basho Gives You Get-Up-And-Go
Bill Knott’s various visits to Bashō’s pond are about as entertaining as poetry gets.Read More
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Lvov to Telos to Me to You
A new collection by the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, entitled Eternal Enemies, has just appeared from Farrar, Straus and Giroux—and it will knock your socks off.Read More
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Hugo Claus—A Goodbye and a Poem
“Belgian writer, poet and artist Hugo Claus has died aged 78, ending his life by euthanasia, his wife has said.” I knew Hugo Claus’s poetry only from anthologies until recently, when I stumbled upon his Greetings: Selected Poems.Read More
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Robert Fagles’ Last Translation
“Robert Fagles, the renowned translator of Latin and Greek whose versions of Homer and Virgil were unlikely best sellers and became fixtures on classroom reading lists, died on Wednesday at his home in Princeton, N.J., where he was an emeritus professor at Princeton University.Read More