Around five years ago, while living in Las Vegas1 I fell in love with Carcharodon carcharias, the Great White Shark. It happened in the same manner other people fall in chocolate, Jesus and pet rocks “Obsession,” might be a better word. Sharks appeared in my dreams, my poetry, even my magazine subscriptions. […]
I turned on my local NPR station, WKAR (our motto: “Nostalgia for 1965 is Not a Crime”) a station I was raised on and which I love, only to find another bitchin’ harpsichord solo underway. Why, Gurus of Classical Music, with the wide range of exquisite, carnal, mesmeric classical music in the world, does […]
It was about a year ago I started my search for the Armenian Sonnet. It was a description of the work of Vahan Tekeyan (1879-45) by Diana Der-Hivanessian, poet and translator, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: “… his painstakingly honed sonnets have earned him a reputation as a visionary” (page […]
Self-portrait at 35. After many years of spiritual beggary and lackadaisical destitution I recently saw Akira Kurosawa’s Ran again. According to the DVD box the title translates into chaos. And why should chaos interest us? We value order, or at least the idea of order, and yet it is chaos, easygoing and […]
One of the aims for this website is to generate a new home for translations. The whole concept of the power of good translations was brought home to me during one of the conversations held at the 2004 Dodge Poetry Festival at the Duke Farms. I attended “The Mysterious Life Within Translation” […]