“[T]here are no rules. What I think is that you start with materials. You start with matter, not rules.” —Clark Coolidge “And the matter is language or, more exactly, words or, more exactly still, the material of words…” —Gerald Bruns... Continue reading

Translation apparently can be a dangerous activity. In Javier Marías’ novella Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico, a 22-year-old Spanish-born man assigned to Elvis during the making of a film in Acapulco nearly gets killed for translating an insult.... Continue reading

“Les jugements sur la poésie ont plus de valeur que la poésie.” (“Judgments on poetry are more valuable than poetry.”) —Comte de Lautréamont “It is easy to treat poetry as if it were engaged in the language-game of giving information... Continue reading

“The translator invades, extracts, and brings home.” —George Steiner, After Babel “Nothing takes us faster to the heart of matters linguistic and metaphysical than translation.” —Nikolai Popov, “The Literal and the Literary” Translators of poetry, like poets, often agonize over... Continue reading

Yesterday I wrote about how chance can influence how we respond to a poet’s work—specifically, how the first book we read by a poet in translation can become our favorite even though there are more authoritative, thorough, or exacting translations... Continue reading

I wonder if this is true for others: the first book I read by a non-English-language poet often remains my favorite, even if the book is not his or her most popular, most acclaimed, or most widely available. This is... Continue reading

For Monday and Tuesday, I'll be writing about the Slovenian poets Edvard Kocbek and Srečko Kosovel. But for today, here's the video for the instrumental song “Srečko Kosovel” by the Štefan Kovač Marko band: And here’s a punk version of... Continue reading