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Recent Posts
Category Archives: News
At table, from “Grasses of a Thousand Colors,” by Wallace Shawn
“People so often begin their memoirs by talking about their earliest experiences, and I don’t, because—because if I force myself to think about my quote unquote ‘childhood,’ if I can even mention such a horrible, boring, unbearable time of life—if I force myself to think about it, the only thing that actually comes back to […]
In Memoriam: Margaret Weatherford
Los Angeles writer Margaret Weatherford died this week of cancer at the age of forty-six. She was a dedicated perfectionist and her output was tiny, but impeccable: funny, affectionate, intricate, and microscopically observant. She published a hilarious story in Zyzzyva, “East of the 5, South of the 10,” that mapped Greek mythology over the latitude […]
Tagged American, Fiction
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April Bernard: The Thoreaus at home
The family had refused to be impressed when Miss Fuller had left for Europe in 1846. All right that she had lived in New York and written for the reformist Tribune about the city slums; all right that she had traveled to the Great Lakes and deplored the mistreatment of the resettled Indians on their […]
Stig Dagerman on Guilt
“What was it you felt guilty about? What have you done, what crime have you been guilty of?” “Ah, that’s what’s so paradoxical about it all, you see. I haven’t done anything, or at least, I hadn’t done anything—not then. I was completely innocent—and yet I felt guilty. I thought I was responsible for everything […]
“There: An Epistle,” by Andrew Feld
And when I passed and drove away from there, The line of motorcycles in my rearview mirror Veered off the interstate in a smooth arc Distance streamlined the differences off of, as their dark Levis and leathers blacked out their pale skins And then their streaming numbers swallowed them. So the helmetless outlaw with the […]
Sergei Dovlatov
There’s a classic storyline that goes like this: a poor boy peeks through a chink in a wall on a nobleman’s estate. He sees the nobleman’s little boy riding a pony. From that moment on, his life is given over to one end—to get rich. He can no longer return to his former life. His […]
New Translations of Georg Trakl
Rilke said that for him a Trakl poem is “an object of sublime existence” and Heidegger considered him to have achieved a true poetry of unmediated being. Ludwig von Ficker, publisher of what Karl Kraus called the only honest periodical in Austria, arranged for Wittgenstein to support him with an anonymous stipend. Yet despite his […]
Tagged German, Poetry
3 Comments
Arrowsmith’s Montale: “Life in the Trojan Horse”
Life in the Trojan Horse was no picnic. We were packed in like anchovies in a can. When the others left, I stayed inside, unsure of the rules of war. Now I know what I didn’t then, when I hoarded my noblest powers for the final, the decisive act. Which was an act that had […]
Tagged Italian poetry
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Arrowsmith’s Montale: “Flood Tides”
Frantic with love, I knelt at the Castalian Spring but no freshet reflected my image. I have never seen the piranha’s native waters where swimmers wash back ashore, bones picked clean. And yet other waters work with us, for us, and on us, with an indifferent monstrous effort of recuperation.
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Arrowsmith’s Montale: Late poems first seen
William Arrowsmith’s hitherto unpublished translations of the last two volumes of Eugenio Montale’s poems are about to appear from Norton, in a collected edition lovingly prepared by Arrowsmith’s friend and student Rosanna Warren. The volume represents a life’s work for both poet and translator. Writes Warren: By the time Montale reached his fruitful old age, […]