“The original is unfaithful to the translation.” Jorge Luis Borges, On Henley’s translation of Beckford’s Vathek, 1943 The ‘availability’ of Catullus is both a challenge and an opportunity. My original thesis in translating Catullus was that Catullus, the pleasure of…
Category: Essays
Donald Revell: Questions of Translation
In coming issues, OmniVerse will turn its eye toward translation, with works on and of the community of poetry across languages. We introduce these issues with this adaptation of a talk given by Donald Revell on “questions of translation.”
David Koehn: Catullus 32 Matching Quiz
Catullus 32: Match the year of publication on the left with the version on the right In the following listing the publication dates are mismatched with their versions. Can you arrange them properly? What number 1-32 in the right column…
Robert Creeley: “The Girl Next Door”
What follows is a transcription of the first 53 minutes of a trio of informal talks on Emily Dickinson given by Robert Creeley at New College, San Francisco in the fall of 1985 and recorded by David Levi Strauss. The…
Angela Hume: “An Ecopoetics of the Limit: Myung Mi Kim’s ‘fell’”
I have been thinking about the temporality of apocalypse as it relates to a series from the poet Myung Mi Kim’s volume Penury (which means: poverty, or dearth). Kim’s vision of living on after the onset of apocalypse challenges us…
Poetry and Translation: Ryszard Krynicki translated by Ewa Chrusciel
These poems and the essay following will appear in the anthology On the Endless Horizon: A Poet’s Field Guide to Literary Translation, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2014.
Poetry and Translation: Wong Yoo-Chong
One 一 Trading in “Cosmic Opulence” for “One?” My grandfather did just that by dropping the name given to him by his father in favor of “Emulating One,” the name he composed for himself, when he snipped off his braided…
David Koehn: On Arthur Sze’s Syzygy
The following essay is an extension of a review of Arthur Sze’s book Quipu, originally published in American Letters and Commentary. “Even without understanding intricate details of a theory, the fact that it has supersymmetry built in allows us to…
David Koehn: On Heaney’s “The Turnip-Snedder”
The full text of “The Turnip-Snedder” can be found in the link at the end of this essay. In my notes on Seamus Heaney’s “The Turnip-Snedder” I need be careful else I’ll turn the discussion into some paltry, gushing commendation.…
“Seeking a Form of Love Called Home”: Pepper Luboff reviews Shannon Tharp’s Vertigo in Spring
Vertigo in Spring, by Shannon Tharp, The Cultural Society, Brooklyn, New York, 2013 48 pages, $15.00 paperback, culturalsociety.org. Shannon Tharp’s second book, Vertigo in Spring, does nothing less than boil down the sense of becoming’s ordinary bruises—alienation from one’s chosen…