“dream of the guitar” ZJC (2008)
One of the draw backs of the book I have put out is that it is not a bilingual edition. It is wholly in English. I am not as knowledgeable as I should be with copyright law but there is debate as to how much of Garcia Lorca’s […]
This is a shout out to my friend, The Absinthe Review Network, a fellow Michigan resident who probably knows more about the French poet Charles Baudelaire and his love affair with absinthe than I do. However, my first exposure to Baudelaire was via Liam Clancy (of Clancy Brothers fame), when he read Charles’ famous […]
I took a wonderful Shakespeare course my last semester of graduate school and one of the text we examined was The Tempest. One direction of scholarship that proved extremely interesting was the re-examination of colonial literature not from the point of view of the colonizer but the colonized. In other words, what does […]
Let us look at an actual Baudelaire sonnet and see what makes it different from other sonnets? First, there is the rhyme pattern. ABAB ABAB CCD EED But form in itself is not enough to make this poem Modern. Let us look at the original French. What do you see […]
I have spent the morning trying to find an Armenian translation of Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat other than what I am working on. My tutor, Lucine, told me that she was familiar with the poem, having read a translation of it in high school. She could not recall who the translator was, or […]
One of the reasons I am keen on translating this poem is the sense of bright drunkenness Rimbaud crafted. I have been reading and re-reading “Arthur Rimbaud,”1 while one song plays endlessly on loop: “believe it now/ a wave is breaking/ I’ve been tracking you across the sky … look at you your hands […]
Translating a work into two languages simultaneously is hard work. I have been examining six French to English translations, Simpson, Sorrell, Mason, Spitzer, Cameron and Hill; all of them lacking. With the exception of Spitzer, what I take objection to is the various ways translators have butchered the poem simply in order to […]
All this translating gives me a heady feeling; as if I am gobbling on ballad mongering; omnivorous with Modernism and chewing up rhapsodism. There are several Armenian artists I would like to find on the Internet, not because I like to gab and blab over e-mail but that I am always curious if my […]
“… I think the world is so complicated that I can’t be so presumptuous as to justify pessimism or optimism, so I’ll stay agnostic. But I like waking up every day and I think breakfast is a fantastic thing.”
Moby, as quoted in Time magazine, 10/24/05
Thinking about the comments I made in yesterday’s post, I might […]
“I know you’re in there - I can smell your brain …” Return of the Living Dead (1985)
I suppose if I were forced by powers beyond my control to come back as a zombie, a flesh eating one might be of some interest. Yet it seems so stereotyped, commonplace, platitudinous. And why […]
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” […]