Poetry translates badly:  granted.  A poem’s diction, tone, syntax, and sound—the things that make it memorable—cannot be fully reproduced in another language.  Agreed.  So, what are we to do?  Give up?  Limit ourselves to verse we can read in the original?  Such a decision seems foolish in an era when globalization has become an idée fixe.

For my first post on Arcade I thought I would introduce myself and my recent and current projects.  I graduated with a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford in 1988 and am Professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.  I blog at Bemsha Swing, mostly about jazz and contemporary Spanish poetry.

One way to fight an addiction is to try to substitute a second, healthier activity for the baleful one.  Lately, during the evenings, to prevent myself from playing World of Warcraft, I have been translating Russian verse. 

Pornographic literature is dismissed as an oxymoron by many scholars because we expect ‘literature’ to imply form, while the endless repetition of unproblematic sex acts denies us the comforting format of beginning, middle, and end.

I got interested, for obvious reasons, in reading Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush". There is a discussion about the poem, initiated by Robert Pinsky, going on at Slate's "The Fray" at the moment.