I’ve saved this passage by Kafka translator Ross Benjamin in my notes since early February. In re-reading it I realize anew how cogently it expresses my own experience of reading poetry, never mind translating it. It ends with a compelling … Continue reading
He was so handsome, so fine and flinty and long-boned, that he was a shock to be around — he made people stupid, or teary, or angry or skin-starved, sometimes all at once. (Dwight Garner) (Dwight Garner, “Sam Shepard and … Continue reading
This is a headline in USA Today: 3M fires long-time executive Michael Vale amid ‘inappropriate personal misconduct’ claims. We’re not savages. All misconduct, be it personal or professional, should be rigorously appropriate. This is from The New York Times: Ms. … Continue reading
Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent… The beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may … Continue reading
A disgraced politician once promised his followers he’d win so much they’d get tired of all the winning. “Always remember any idiot can win,” Hugh Laurie’s father, an Olympic rowing medalist, told his son. “What he meant,” said Laurie, “was … Continue reading
As a drawing curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ms. Rose organized exhibitions that showed how drawings were far more than preliminary works executed mainly on paper. “Bernice showed generations of curators and collectors that drawing … Continue reading
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A blockbuster list of hackneyed phrases has been amassed by Michael Massing (“Tip of the Iceberg,” New York Times, 4-27-23). Kick the tires on this bad boy, dear reader. It will make you realize no one is singing a new … Continue reading
The first person he befriended was Max, a man who was also an exile (from Quimper, in Brittany) and who was also weighed down by multiple identities: not only was he a Frenchman but he was also a Breton, a … Continue reading
The pioneering translator, scholar, literary historian, and poet Salma Khadra Jayyusi — the most prominent anthologist of Arabic literature in English translation and founder of PROTA, the Project for the Translation of Arabic– died yesterday in Amman, Jordan. She was 95. … Continue reading
EthicalDative 
A Compelling Rationale for Taking Up Versifying
Monet grew up in East New York in Brooklyn and started writing poetry when she was 8 because she was “fascinated by typewriters and people who would sit at typewriters,” she said. Monet fondly recalls her former college adviser: “I … Continue reading →