Letter from Birmingham City Jail

In honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.

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Weekly Review: January 8th to January 14th

Not much to say today that isn’t in the two articles below. They summarize much of my life right now.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Sorry, I think I nodded off there…
• No more carrots, thanks.

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Finding the Ferry-way

In This Essay

The Art of Sinking in Poetry by Alexander Pope

The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)

The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition (David Ferry, trans.)

“For poet, classics translate into success” by David Mehegan, The Boston Globe, July 7, 2005

The other day I found a copy of Alexander Pope’s The Art of Sinking in Poetry in Barnes&Noble. As I began to read it, I began to think of Horace’s “Ars Poetica”, how long it had been since I had read it, and thought about when it began to take on a special meaning for me.

I felt myself floating after finishing my undergraduate degree.

I found myself fighting against ideas that I did not want to accept. But I did not then have the strength to put them down.

I still don’t.

Then one day I was reading The Boston Globe — only good things come from reading The Boston Globe — when I came across a story about a translator trying to revive the classics of ancient Roman poet Horace.

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Pablo Neruda, a Few Sad Lines, and a Fight

In This Essay

Love: Ten Poems by Pablo Neruda (various trans.)

100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor (Bilingual Edition) by Pablo Neruda (Stephen Tapscott, trans.)

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry by Pablo Neruda in translation. And whenever I read Pablo Neruda, I wish that I were fluent in Spanish so that I could understand what he wrote.

I rediscovered, “Tonight I Can Write…”, a poem I have struggled with since college. My first reading of this poem lead to a fight with one of my favorite professors, Dr. K–.

And I learned a lot from the experience.

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