check out the latest issue of AGNI, to see my translations of the late, great esenin and gumilev bookend a very fine interview with donald hall, some mediocre charles simic ('the ubiquitous'), and cetera.
i've been thinking a lot of the terrible political power of ghosts. notice how esenin has used me to channel marvell and frost, and--most touchingly--brodsky. his own poem, in my translation, is pulling them all forward through time. they are his precursors now. he is my coy mistress, he eulogises me.
summer is over and it is time to return to old, unfinished projects: the silver generation of russian poets has been so strangely defined and poorly represented in my own language and country that i am constantly revising it--first with the groundbreaking work of UDP and one eugene ostashevsky; also by the fulcrum founders, philip nikolayev and katia kapovich, and their quiet advocacy; and the peaceable philip metres. but there is still a spectral myopia after their visions are confused, and two of the poets i love are still left out. i am going back to konstantin vaginov and anatoly mariengof to see what i can do...
also, new translations of pasternak and tsvetaeva at Action, Yes
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