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Review: Down Below by Leonora Carrington
When I gave birth to my daughter eleven years ago I suffered from a severe bout of post-partum depression. About two weeks after she was born it was as if a cloud or a thick fog had descended over me...
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Review: Blindness by Henry Green
Blindness is the first of Henry Green’s nine novels and has elements of autobiography woven into the character sketch of seventeen-year-old John Hayes, a student attending British public school in the...
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Venit Ver (Spring Arrives)
The Latin poet Catullus had a passionate yet turbulent love affair with a prominent married woman named Clodia. When Clodia finally releases him for good, Catullus accepts a position on the staff of...
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An Addendum to my Personal Canon
When I recently wrote a list of the books that have had the greatest impact on my life, I naturally included several ancient authors. Each work on the list is something I have translated myself and I...
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Fato Profugus: Teffi’s Memories—From Moscow to The Black Sea
As I was reading Teffi’s memoir about her katabasis from Russia to Constantinople during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, two words from Vergil’s Aeneid kept coming to mind: fato and profugus ....
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If Only Sleep Would Come: One Night by Umberto Saba
One of my favorite literary bloggers, Tom from Wuthering Expectations, did a post on Modern European Poetry with a focus on the Greek poetry contained within this wonderful volume. If you haven’t had...
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Beware of reading too much Latin poetry: Stendhal’s Italian Chronicles
The nine stories in this collection are Stendhal’s translations and retellings of historical records from Italy in the 16th century which depict the upper classes behaving very badly: forbidden love,...
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Cycle of a non-person: The Castle by Kafka
Kafka’s final novel describes a land surveyor, simply known as “K.” arriving in an unnamed village, over which looms a castle and its mysterious bureaucracy. Through K.’s attempt to find out why he has...
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Lethe’s Cool Floods: Poetic Fragments by Karoline von Günderrode
As I read the poems and two dramas included in this translation of Poetic Fragments, I couldn’t help but think of a letter that Karoline von Günderrode wrote to her lover Friedrich Creuzer, a German...
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Bitter Healing: Poetry and Letters by Karoline von Günderrode
Karoline von Günderrode was born in 1780 to am impoverished, aristocratic, German family. At the age of nineteen she went to live in a convent of sorts, the Cronstetten-Hynspergische Evangelical...
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Love is War: Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist
As I was reading Klest’s tragic play, I kept thinking about Ovid’s imagery in Amores IX in which poem he portrays love as warfare. The Latin poet writes: Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra...
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The Bookshop and The Beach: My Vacation to Maine
My family and I went on our annual summer vacation this year to Kennebunk Beach in Maine. This has been our favored destination for the past few years and I thought I would say a few words about my...
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Evening Fantasy by Hölderlin (The German Library)
Volume 39 of The German Library is an anthology of poetry from 1750 to 1900 and the table of contents promises translations of poetry from Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Brentano, Heine, and Nietzsche,...
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Love Has Finally Arrived: My Translation of Sulpicia
Since it is Women in Translation month, I thought that it would be interesting to write a little post and offer my own translation of the only female poet from Ancient Rome whose work has survived....
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…And a Dream: Anna Soror by Marguerite Yourcenar
As I was reading Anna Soror, the third and final novella in Yourcenar’s Two Lives and a Dream, I kept thinking about the images of love that Ovid creates in Amores. The beginning poems in Amores Book...
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Pointed Roofs: Some initial thoughts on Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson
I was immediately drawn into the world that Dorothy Richardson creates for her heroine, Miriam Henderson, in Pilgrimage. Miriam is the third in line of four girls in a middle class English family who...
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Angulus Coeli: The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor
The setting of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s only novel entitled The Violins of Saint-Jacques is a tropical, volcanic island in the Antilles which is dominated by an old, French, aristocratic family that is...
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Joy and Freedom: More Thoughts on Pilgrimage
It’s intimidating to try to write anything coherent or thoughtful about a book like Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. The magnitude and depth of the narrative and language is impossible to capture in...
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How Do You Write About Mediocre Books?
There are three books I read over the summer that didn’t inspire me to write complete reviews or posts. If a book is really not resonating with me then I will abandon it, and I really don’t have the...
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When is the Right Time to Let Go?: Other Men’s Daughters by Richard Stern
The plot of Stern’s novel in which an older man who has a love affair with a younger woman and divorces his wife, could have easily turned into the typical, hackneyed plot that such a book often veers...
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