Review of Songs We Learn from Trees: An Anthology of Ethiopian Amharic Poetry, ed. and trans. by Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje.

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: Translators almost always have a few calm and reasonable words about why their translations do not rhyme despite the fact that the original poems do. However, I don’t think I have ever seen a translator say the thing that should be said, namely: “My translation really ought to rhyme, and I would have made it do so if I had the skill. But I don’t, so I didn’t.” Instead, translators tend to hint that a rhyming translation would be a mistake no matter who did it, because it is now known that rhyme is simply inappropriate to English poetry.

[originally posted Thursday 12 November 2020]

New Madrid

At Blazing Stadium (scroll necessary).

Teaser quote: Today, if my dad were still alive…

[originally posted August new moon 2020]

“Bernadette Mayer Time Machine”: Review of Two Bernadette Mayer Books

At Fence Digital.

Teaser quote: When humorlessness in adults reaches a certain extreme, one begins to use words like morbid. In my opinion, Memory is morbid. Piece of Cake is largely morbid. Midwinter Day is morbid. But!! At some point in the 1980s something happened. Mayer’s The Sonnets were not written by the same mentality that wrote any of the books before it. There is wild humor, there is egotism, there are demands. A lot of it doesn’t make any damn sense, but it’s a different kind of not making sense. It’s more like, I wanna say, John Berryman. In other words it’s more beguiling.

[originally posted Saturday 25 July 2020]

Moneybegging

FENCE magazine, which a lot of you like, needs some choo-choo BAD. What about chipping in like $20 or whatever. Come up with some amount you’ll never notice the loss of. Or if you’re rich, go big. I’m one of FENCE’s online editors, so if you wanna put in one for the Gipper, that would be lovely. But really it’s just “F-M-N-D” (Fence Must Not Die)…

https://www.gofundme.com/f/campaign-for-fence-magazine

Review of The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 2: The Six Dynasties, 220–589

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: As of this writing, you still can’t purchase the entire set. Volume Four remains missing. But even if Volume Four came out tomorrow, no one, not even Bill Gates and Donald Trump put together, could afford it. Their checks would bounce. And suppose they broke into a research library and stole a set? OK, their brains would explode. They’d be dead.

[originally posted Saturday 11 July 2020]

Review of That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic (discourses and fragments by Musonius Rufus)

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: Everyone in my milieu has heard of Musonius through a story in Guy Davenport’s book Da Vinci’s Bicycle (1979). The piece is called “C. Musonius Rufus” (the “C” stands for Gaius). There, Musonius is a supremely tough, supremely crabby-craggy figure, attractive in the same way the character Caska is, in the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. His “rudeness is a sauce to his good wit.”

[originally posted Saturday 11 July 2020]