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Pablo Neruda: Greatest pick-up artist evah?
The conversation erupted on my Facebook page, debating the eternally recurring subject of unjust Nobel awards. It’s recently been revealed that J.R.R. Tolkien had been snubbed by the Nobel committee...
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Another souvenir from Paris…
My charming host I’ve received another souvenir from Paris, following last month’s talk at the American University on “Old Wine in New Bottles: Literary Journalism as Cultural Translation.” This time...
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Who knew that Stalin was a lit critic?
Everything you wanted to know and lots, lots more. (1902 photo) Just can’t get enough of Jozef Stalin? Yale University Press is putting lots more online. Two decades ago, who would have thought that...
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Brodsky and Donne in the Arctic: “the image of a body in space.”
At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1972. In the mid-1960s, a colleague asked George Kline what he thought of the young, little-known poet Joseph Brodsky. George replied that hadn’t seen...
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George Kline: scholar, translator, and chronicler of Soviet bugaboos
In 1974… “George L. Kline is someone you’ve likely never heard of, unless you have an interest in Russian philosophy,” writes Michael McIntyre over at “Extravagant Creation.” Well, that’s not quite...
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“It matters to hear speech on the streetcar”: a new interview with Joseph...
No principles, just nerves. A few days ago, all the social media were atwitter with a newly published 1987 interview with Joseph Brodsky. The piece opened with a comment on his leaving the American...
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Defending the “Eros of difficulty”
Every schoolkid in Mexico knows her poems. One of the grace notes in my long career was writing for the Los Angeles Times Book Review when Steve Wasserman was its editor (I’ve written about him before...
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“I should be drinking you from a mug, but I’m drinking you in drops, which...
Beginning on a High C: Marina Tsvetaeva in 1914. Too few Americans know the oeuvre of Muscovite poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) – partly, I think it’s because of the translations. How can one...
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Brodsky and Donne in the Arctic: “the image of a body in space.”
At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1972. In the mid-1960s, a colleague asked George Kline what he thought of the young, little-known poet Joseph Brodsky. George replied that hadn’t seen...
View ArticleClik here to view.
George Kline: scholar, translator, and chronicler of Soviet bugaboos
In 1974… “George L. Kline is someone you’ve likely never heard of, unless you have an interest in Russian philosophy,” writes Michael McIntyre over at “Extravagant Creation.” Well, that’s not quite...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“It matters to hear speech on the streetcar”: a new interview with Joseph...
No principles, just nerves. A few days ago, all the social media were atwitter with a newly published 1987 interview with Joseph Brodsky. The piece opened with a comment on his leaving the American...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Defending the “Eros of difficulty”
Every schoolkid in Mexico knows her poems. One of the grace notes in my long career was writing for the Los Angeles Times Book Review when Steve Wasserman was its editor (I’ve written about him before...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“I should be drinking you from a mug, but I’m drinking you in drops, which...
Beginning on a High C: Marina Tsvetaeva in 1914. Too few Americans know the oeuvre of Muscovite poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) – partly, I think it’s because of the translations. How can one...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Do Nina Kossman’s new translations of Tsvetaeva capture her “doom-eager...
Kossman at the Tsvetaeva Museum in Moscow. Twenty years ago, critic Harold Bloom wrote to the young poet Nina Kossman to tell her that her “intensely eloquent” translations of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva...
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