Yesterday I told you about a ridiculously rare signed copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem famously loaded with coldness and sterility and failed human intimacy. Later this month, some new letters will be published that reveal the depth of Eliot’s mental anguish over the breakdown of his first marriage with his wife, Vivien. Eliot has long been accused (maybe fairly) of treating Vivien with intolerable cruelty and attributing to her mental state, and these letters aim to complicate that narrative.
A Most Terrible State
Au Revoir, Harry
While we're on the subject of Harry Potter, I have some bad news. According to J.K. Rowling herself, Cursed Child is likely the last we'll ever see of the boy (now middle-aged) wizard: "He goes on a very big journey during these two plays and then, yeah, I think we’re done. This is the next generation, you know ... So, I’m thrilled to see it realized so beautifully but, no, Harry is done now.”
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One Award To Rule Them All
Over at Book Riot, Jeff O'Neal's asking readers to vote for their favorite literary award… based on the quality of each one's backlist.
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NYRB Classics Winter Sale
Have you taken advantage of NYRB Classics' Winter Sale yet? A whole bunch of their books are listed with 50% discounts! Why not check out The Radiance of the King, which was recommended this past Year in Reading by Deborah Eisenberg? (And also recommended by Junot Díaz back in our 2007 edition of the series, too.)
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The Baroque Era
“These poets foreground elaborate and mythically transgressive evocations of eros in which stylistic excesses counter the violent excesses of homophobia and racial marginalization. The queer Baroque is, fundamentally, a poetry of radical ambivalence.” On Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones.
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Wallace Stevens Week
Wallace Stevens Week(s) begin with a sprint today at Big Other, featuring an interview with poet and critic James Longenbach, an essay on Stevens' other work, in insurance, and a list of his “most maddening, funny and bizarre” titles.
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Poets and Tomatoes
“We are hermits, that is true. We live in tiny rooms, and we stay in those rooms hours upon hours every day, every month, every year. But we also like to walk around and throw ourselves into big crates of tomatoes, and roll around in them, and then get up all tomato-stained.” Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera talks about living life as a poet (which apparently includes a lot of tomatoes) in an interview with the Guardian.
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Translating on a Tether
"There are so many ways to look at translation. One that has recently occurred to me is that of a tether: the translator is tethered to the meaning of the original the way an animal can be tethered to a stake. You can’t take off and roam the hills, but you can definitely move around and experience a comfortable degree of freedom." Asymptote talks with Juliet Winters Carpenter about Japanese tanka poetry, Machi Tawara's Salad Anniversary, and the careful balance of translation.
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Pulp Saint
From The Atlantic comes the case for canonizing G.K. Chesterton, the "Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist."