CruelestMonth.com

Two translations

More pairing.

Damion Searls translates The New Novel by Robert Walser at n+1.

Andrew Bromfield translates Akiko by Victor Pelevin at Words Without Borders.

Janus Journalism (sort of)

This fall Ecco and Knopf will release two new translations of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.  PW examines both sides of the coin -- from cover treatment to translators to the prevalence of French -- and the choice facing readers as they decide which version to purchase.  The article, "It's War (and Peace), As Rival Translations Head to Bookstores", happily pits the two houses against one another, filtering in comments from each front (and a few other places).  It's a fun read and ends with the obligatory quote that promotes good sportsmanship and success to all.

Another head-to-head article appears in today's WSJ: "Fortune as Fate: The Story Of Two Poetry Magazine."  Willard Speigelman, Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, pays tribute to the literary magazine Parnassus, to which he contributed for the past 25 years.  The magazine will publish its 30th and last volume later this year.  The story compares the shoe-string travails of Parnassus to Poetry Magazine's current plenitude.  "As Wallace Stevens, insurance man and poet extraordinaire, once said: 'Money is a kind of poetry.'"

And for a visual treat, Wallace Berman photographs are up at Tam Tam Books.

Churm on Balaban

Oronte Churm of The Education of Oronte Churm acts a scholar writing a warm and informative article on his former-teacher John Balaban: "Vietnam, Penultimate".  Balaban, by the way, is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose and was nominated twice for the National Book Award.

Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems

Some very handsome galleys have arrived for John Ashbery's Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which selects from April Galleons (1987) to Where Shall I Wander (2005).  I wish I had an image to share with you, but none are yet available (to me, anyway).  As I have the tendency to do when a quantity of proofs come in, I'm giving some away.  The first three readers to e-mail [email protected] will receive a galley.  If you've received a book from me recently, your response time shall be staggered by an as-of-now undisclosed amount of time.  This poem happens to fit today:

"Still Life With Stranger"

Come on, Ulrich, the great octagon
of the sky is passing over us.
Soon the world will have moved on.
Your love affair, what is it
but a tempest in a teapot?

But such storms exude strange
resonance: the power of the Almighty
reduced to its infinitesimal root
hangs like the chant of bees,
the milky drooping leaves of the birch
on a windless autumn day--

Call these phenomena or pinpoints,
remote as the glittering trash of heaven,
yet the monstrous frame remains,
filling up with regret, with straw,
or on another level with the quick grace
of the singing, falling snow.

You are good at persuading
them to sing with you.
Above you, horses graze forgetting
daylight inside the barn.

Creeper dangles against rock-face.
Pointed roofs bear witness.
The whole cast of characters is imaginary
now, but up ahead, in shadow, the past waits.

--from Hotel Lautrémont (1992)

*The galleys go to Damion, Steve, and Mary.  Thanks for writing in!

Open Letter / Three Percent

As alluded to below and anticipated by many, Open Letter, the University of Rochester's new publishing house, has flung itself into the vast and unruly sea of publishing.  May their books float!  Here's an excerpt from the press release circulated on Friday:

In conjunction with its developing literary translation programs, the University of Rochester is launching Open Letter, a new publishing house dedicated to international literature.

Beginning in fall 2008, Open Letter will publish twelve works of international literature a year, focusing on modern classics and contemporary works of fiction.

"We are focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature from around the world--cosmopolitan literature, books that stimulate and provoke readers, and which we hope will be read for generations to come," said director Chad W. Post, co-founder of Reading the World and former Associate Director of Dalkey Archive Press.

Post is joined at Open Letter by E.J. Van Lanen, former Assistant Editor at Ecco, and Nathan Furl, former Marketing and Production Director at Dalkey Archive Press.

[read the full release here]

These brave and admirable souls will oversee Three Percent, "a new website featuring an international lit blog, reviews of untranslated books, sample translation, and a calendar of grants and prizes for translation."  Already they have some great reviews posted.  Nobody's Home by Dubravka Ugresic will be Open Letter's first publication. 

More of the "Best Poems..."

Final copies of The Best Poems of the English Language are in.  They won't be readily available for another week or so.  The on sale date is August 7th.  I may have a copy or two (or ten, or none) as it goes on sale.  Since the purpose of this collection was wondered about in the comments, I thought I would include an excerpt from the "Introduction" and let Mr. Bloom speak for himself:

Though arranged chronologically, this vast book is intended for every kind of personal use, so that literary history is essentially irrelevant to its purposes, as are all considerations of political correctness and incorrectness.  The best poems published by women before 1923 are here, chosen entirely on the basis of their aesthetic value.  Poetry is in the first place poetry, a high and ancient art.  It raises your consciousness of glory and of grief, of woe or wonder, as Shakespeare phrased it.  Shakespeare spoke of "wonder-wounded hearers": they are the readers this volume seeks to serve.

My chronological limits are set by Geoffrey Chaucer, born around 1343, and Hart Crane, born in 1899.  If poets born in the twentieth century were included here, many would be from Canada, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, but because of the span covered, everyone here wrote in Great Britain or the United States.

I have included no poem or excerpt from a longer work that does not meet (in my judgment) the highest aesthetic and cognitive standards that poetry can exemplify.  There are 108 poets represented in this book (aside from Anonymous), with about 24 given in something like their full abundance.  Essentially, this is the anthology I've always wanted to possess.  It reflects sixty years of deep and passionate reading, going back to my love of William Blake and Hart Crane, of William Shakespeare and John Milton, that vitalized my life from my twelfth year onward.

Those may seem like cut and dry guidelines, but Bloom writes in the "Author Note" that his "introduction explains the concept and purpose of this book, but the center, for me, of my commentaries here is to be found in the essay "The Art of Reading Poetry."

As the on sale date nears, I'll share some choice selections from his commentary.

Events this Week in the NYC

Yes, things here have been a bit slow recently.  I blame the heat.  Breathing is like giving mouth-to-mouth to a hair dryer.  If you can bear it, there are a few outdoor events happening this week.

The Academy of American Poets presents: Catherine Barnett, Matthew Lippman, and Geoffrey G. O'Brien.  They'll read tonight at 6:30pm in the Bryant Park Reading Series.  The series will continue August 14 when Monica de la Torre, Katie Ford, and Evie Shockley gather at the same place and time.

The literary magazine A Public Space will host a reading in Fort Greene Park.  Helen Schulman and Martha Cooley will read on Wednesday, July 11, 6:30pm at Washington Park, Fort Greene.

Also, Wed: Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires, reads from and discusses the book with David Henry Hwang, the Tony-award winning playwright of M. Butterfly and the OBIE-award winner for Golden Child.

Then on Thursday, the final Upstairs at the Square of the summer happens: Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight and Love Without, and Teddy Thompson, Brit singer-songwriter raised in a Sufi commune will convene to entertain and engage at 7pm.

And there's always a ton going on at The Bowery Poetry Club.  I tried to pick one thing to recommend.  I couldn't.  There's a lot.

The first four events are as free as sunshine.  Events at the BPC vary.  I hope to blog again soon.

The Best Poems of the English Language

Whew!  I was off the grid for a few days.  I headed down to DC for one of the strangest weddings ever; or, more accurately, for one of the strangest post-wedding parties ever.  I'll let the following suffice as a description: hot pink lipstick; tatooed make-up; tiger-print cowhide; 10' x 12' headshots in master bedroom; fruit chandeliers; The Beatles; Kazakhstan. 

Or maybe it was the best post-wedding party ever?

While I ponder why not read about cool librarians?

Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass, translated by Micahel Henry Heim (an Ecco favorite translator) is reviewed in the Times.

And, coming in August, the Harper Perennial edition of The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost Selected and with Commentary by Harold Bloom.  Bloom's outstanding essay The Art of Reading Poetry, also avaliable separately, will serve as the collection's introduction.

The 4th of July

Here's wishing you and yours a Happy Fourth of July:

"Fourth of July Night"

The little boat at anchor in black water sat murmuring to the tall black sky
A white sky bomb fizzed on a black line.
A rocket hissed it's red signature into the west.
Now a shower of Chinese fire alphabets,
A cry of flower pots broken in flames,
A long curve to a purple spray, three violet balloons--
Drips of seaweed tangled in gold, shimmering symbols of mixed numbers,
Tremulous arrangements of cream gold folds of a bride's wedding gown--
A few sky bombs spoke their pieces, then velvet dark.
The little boat at anchor in black water sat murmuring to the tall black sky.

- Carl Sandburg

Two Galley Giveaway

I meant to do this Friday.  I have some galley copies of Day In Day Out by Terézia Mora and Time and Materials by Robert Hass.

Day In Day Out is the latest installment in the Ecco7 line of paperbacks dedicated to international literature.  Terézia was born 1971 in Sopron, Hungary.  Since 1998 she has worked in Berlin as a freelance writer and translator of contemporary Hungarian novelists, notably Péter Esterházy.  She published a story collection, Strange Material, in 1999.  Day In Day Out, published in German as Alle Tage, was chosen as the best novel of the year at the Leipzig Book Fair.  There are plenty of reasons to get to know Ms. Mora.

Time and Materials I have already told you about.  The first five readers to e-mail [email protected] with "Two Galleys" as their subject will receive copies of both.  Don't forget to include your address!

*The galleys go to Akilah, B.B., Milo, Noah, and Ann!