In which I let Rabassa and Barnstone duke it out about memory, error, and the ethics of translation

In his book If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, Gregory Rabassa asserts lots of interesting and valuable stuff, then this clinker on pp. 61-62: The completion of work is best done in translation, where the translator can work at things denied the author in his own language, even the way Saint Jerome mistakenly [...]

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Tisha B’Av in Palestine

Tisha B’Av in Palestine Elliott batTzedek Homes destroyed. Orchards flattened. Buses and markets and buildings          and children bombed. Water tanks overturned, and water, the breath of life to the desert, spilled into the cracks of the dry and desperate Av earth. May I build a house on my land?          No May I travel from here [...]

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On Casey Anthony and Incest Statistics

On Casey Anthony and Incest Statistics Look, I don’t know what happened in Florida years ago. A child is dead. I wish for her sake that the death was a painless accident, one with no fear, violence, terror. I am not being callous when I say that so many many children are dead, ones the [...]

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But he could not stretch her spey, her spey, he could not stretch her spey

A slightly late International Women’s Day post – lest we forget that we are never the first generation of women to resist, to make our resistance public, and to celebrate it. This has been recorded by many of my favorite singers – Alix Dobkin, Peggy Seeger, and Karan Casey, whose version you can hear here. [...]

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More on Earth day

Bees are disappearing, dying in mass numbers from a disease that’s spread around the world. Bees are a main pollinator of many of food crops. Without them, blooms do not become food. To quote my friend Lierre Keith, “if you are putting the pieces together, you are starting to feel the cold chill of horror [...]

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and a small commentary on ongoing Obamania

“[This rhetorical structure] is surely not an effort at serious historical explanation, and like any utopian statement it is accountable to history only as a projection, from the scant historical grounds for hope, of how history might be transformed.” ok, it’s actually a quote from Robert Alter about the nature of critiques of social order [...]

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This, friends, is the central point

from a statement by Richard Silverstein and Jeremiah Haber: We affirm the rights of both Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination and self-defense, as we affirm the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This, friends, is indeed the central point. It is not a question of [...]

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Oy, such a Friday and Neko Case

So, after ten years, I was laid off today — my agency is hurting financially, and they decided not to do what I do anymore. Oy. Can’t really bear to say much more about that. In better news, Neko Case has released the first single from her new album, out in March. Download it via [...]

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Wednesday night

Too much work to do still, getting ready for tomorrow’s workshop, and kinda too overwhelmed, to begin to review everything that went past today. Maybe later, if I still have the ability to string prose together. Tomorrow morning I have a workshop (which is four students and one faculty discussing one poem by each student) [...]

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