Moderating and Checking The Emotions: Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
One of my closest friends is always telling me not to take off hand remarks or things that people say personally. It’s a good piece of advice but one that is much easier said than done. I think he is …...
View ArticleLa Jeune Parque by Paul Valéry
In Roman myth the three Fates— Parcae in Latin Moirai in Ancient Greek— are referred to as sisters: Clotho, the youngest, is the spinner of a person’s life thread, Lachesis measures the final thread of...
View ArticleHomeo-Pharmacopeia’s Adagia: Geoffrey Hill’s Pindarics
Pindar, an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes, wrote a series of epinikia, odes to commemorate athletic victories in the Olympic, Nemean, Pythian and Isthmian games. His poems are notoriously...
View ArticlePone Subit Coniunx: Robert Hass and Vergil’s Aeneid
Robert Hass has been another American poet that I’ve discovered from literary Twitter. My favorite poem in his collection Time and Materials is entitled “The World as Will and Representation.” In this...
View ArticleHow to Pick up Women: Advice from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria
Yesterday I shared on Twitter a pick up strategy from Ovid that Pound alludes to in the Cantos. I’ve had a request to translate a few more. Here are some of my favorites: From I.139-142. A great...
View ArticleBody into Body: Lucretius De Rerum Natura 4.1096-1120
Just as when a thirsty man, in his sleep, attempts to take a drink but the moisture needed to extinguish the fire in his limbs is no where to be found; so instead he looks for images of liquids and …...
View ArticleDispelling our Fears: Aline and Valcour Volume 3 by Marquis de Sade
Contra Mundum chose wisely to publish the first complete English translation of Aline & Valcour in three volumes. Each volume is distinctly different in tone and focus. The first letters between...
View ArticleRespice Futurum: Reading Plans for 2020
It’s time for my annual Respice Futurum post about possible books and reading projects I am interested in for the new year. I’ve explained in previous years that the institution where I have had the...
View ArticleCommunication in the Midst of Solitude: My Year in Reading—2019
In his essay “On Reading,” Proust writes, “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” I try to make reading plans every year but I honestly never know where the year...
View ArticleAline & Valcour Volume 2 by Marquis de Sade
In a letter written from prison to his wife in 1784, Marquis de Sade complains about his discomfort and what he perceives as his ill treatment: You are also well aware that my dizzy spells and my...
View ArticleReading The Stranger via Camus’s Notebooks
The Stranger was one of those books I read at eighteen that left almost no impression on me. I’ve had no desire to revisit any of Camus’s writing until recently when a friend, who is one of the most...
View ArticleWe Mislead, but Sweetly: Aline & Valcour, Volume I by Marquis de Sade
This is the first English translation, expertly and smoothly rendered from the French by Jocelyne Genevieve Barque and John Simmons, of Marquis de Sade’s epistolary novel. Written in 1786 while he...
View ArticleShattered by War and Repulsed by Fate: The Troy Exhibit at The British Museum
The collection of papyri, sculpture, pottery, paintings and literature on display at The British Museum’s Troy Exhibit is, to say the least, mesmerizing. A large part of the exhibit is devoted to...
View ArticleLucretius on Dispelling Fear
De Rerum Natura 2.55-61 (translation is my own): Just as small children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so do we, as adults, fear in broad daylight things that are just as irrational...
View ArticleOtium Divos Rogat: Horace Ode 2.16
For @Noxrpm whose Tweet yesterday inspired me to translate this Horace Ode. 2.16 While being caught on the rough Aegean, as a black cloud hides the moon and the fixed stars are not shining for him, the...
View ArticleGrande Mortalis Aevi Spatium: Freedom and Servitude in Tacitus and Proust
After the death of the Emperor Domitian, the Roman historian Tacitus decides to write a biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, who suffered through this tyrannical, oppressive and cruel regime....
View ArticleLove and Transformation: My Translation of Ovid Amores 1.3
My reading of Proust has me thinking a lot about Ovid, especially his Amores. I offer here my translation of Amores 1.3: I pray for righteous things: may the girl who was just snatched away from me...
View ArticleMy First Encounter with Proust
Charles Swann, the eponymous character of Proust’s first Volume of In Search of Lost Time, is an old acquaintance of the narrator’s family and, although he has connections to the upper classes and the...
View ArticleWomen in Translation and Women Translators
I offer here some of my favorite women authors in translation from a variety of languages and periods of time. They are in no particular order: Teffi, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea translated...
View ArticleHave Some Good Wine: Horace, Ode 2.11
Another of Horace’s Carpe Diem poems (translation is my own): May you stop wondering, Quinctius Hirpinus, what the warlike Cantabrian or the Scythian, separated from us by the Adriatic Sea, are...
View Article
