On Translating Antonio Tabbuchi
The book is a pastiche of literary, philosophical, and pop-culture references, all made by a dying man who is at times lucid, at times hallucinating. It’s a thrilling book… More
On Translating Li Shangyin
To read Li Shangyin’s poetry is to be beautifully disoriented. It is to encounter a unique lyricism comprised of layer upon layer of mythological, historical, and symbolist imagery all… More
Five Poems from Derangements of My Contemporaries
For no reason: bitter envy, lingering resentment towards others. / Drunkenly calling on ghosts, spirits. / Grieving sons reciting song lyrics. / Dressing in deep mourning at a cock… More
Beauty is a Wound
[U]pon her departure, the nineteen other girls followed her into her room, gathered on top of her bed, and resumed their conversation about how to amputate a Japanese soldier’s… More
On Translating Eka Kurniawan
Beauty is a Wound is pointed about the havoc appetite has wreaked upon a place and people of idyllic beauty...Kurniawan implicates his readers, who can’t help but take pleasure… More
Selected Poems of Anna Piwkowska
They’ll bury us, bury, scatter to dust, / and you, little girl with the blue jump rope, / and the boy who likes to look at the portrait /of… More
On Translating Anna Piwkowska
t is easy to identify with Piwkowska’s poetry, but it is also easy to become enthralled by the incantatory rhythms, to want to stay forever in her world of… More
At the Burning Abyss
No one who studies Trakl can fail to notice his penchant for colors, and some of his interpreters point out that Trakl’s colors express and evoke opposing sensations: White… More
On Translating Franz Fühmann
Fühmann had discovered Trakl’s apocalyptic poems as a soldier, and they shook his faith in Nazism. On furlough at the very end of the war, Fühmann learned that his… More
On the Frontiers of Plaster (A Few Notes on Sleep)
Take a man at noon. He stands erect. Overhead is the sun. I won’t say this man has no wish to maintain this position for all time, but it’s… More