Category: Essays

David Koehn: “Reclaiming Catullus”

“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…

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…

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…