jayoctodot

[jayoctodot]

when whitman said “i contradict myself. i am large… i contain multitudes” and wilde said “what are you? to define is to limit” and sumney said “i insist upon my right to be multiple”

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hello! hope the new year is treating you well (so far!) i decided i wanted to read more in translation this year, especially poetry, and i was wondering if u had recommendations for works translated into english (or french) from living or 20th century poets. it’s not a strict preference i just really want to expand my horizons ! anyways i love your blog it’s a much appreciated resource ❤️

Hi! Aw, that’s such a lovely idea. Honestly I mostly read English-writing authors (you must have noticed...) but I do have a few things to recommend.

• Rainer Maria Rilke’s works, most notably Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies trans. by Martyn Crucefix, but also The Book of Hours trans. by Babette Deutsch.

• Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. by Jane Kenyon, though I also like Stanley Kunitz’s take, and Marina Tsvetaeva’s Selected Poems, trans. by Elaine Feinstein.

• Odysseus Elytis’ What I Love, trans. by Olga Broumas, and my favourite The Sovereign Sun, trans. by Kimon Friar, who also translated Sodom and Gomorrah by Nikos Kazantzakis. Also, C. P. Cavafy’s The Complete Poems, trans. by David Mendelsohn or Poèmes, trans. by Marguerite Yourcenar (what??) and Constantin Dimaras.

• Federica Garcia Lorca’s A Season in Granada, trans. by Christophe Maurer, and Octavio Paz’s Collected Poems, trans. by Eliot Weinberger, others (including Denise Levertov and Elizabeth Bishop) and Octavio Paz himself. Also, Kelly Martínez-Grandal’s Zugunruhe, trans. by Margaret Randall, and of course Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Poems, trans. by several translators (among others, W. S. Merwin and John Updike.)

• Speaking of W. S. Merwin, he translated a lot of poems, spanning centuries and languages, and he’s a beautiful translator; I’d recommend his Selected Translations. 

• Edith Södergran’s We Women, trans. by Samuel Charters, and Matilda Olkinaitė’s Matilda, trans. by Laima Vince. 

• Adonis’ Selected Poems (trans. by Khaled Mattawa) and Saadi Youssef’s Without An Alphabet, Without a Face (by Khaled Mattawa too). 

• I’m also thinking of Women of the Fertile Crescent: An anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women. You can find a lot of beautiful excerpts on @soracities blog.

• I know it’s not 20th century, but I have a soft spot for modern translations (some more interventionist than others) of classic poetry. My very favourites include Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter (obviously), Mary Barnard’s Fragments of Sappho, Renée Vivien’s Sapho, Marguerite Yourcenar’s La Couronne et La Lyre, Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Japanese (some of them you can find in this one—though be careful! Sometimes Rexroth claims he’s translating for shits and giggles when he’s really the writer, like in The Love Poems of Marichiko), A. K. Ramanujan’s The Interior Landscape: Classic Tamil Love Poems and the gorgeous Andal’s Autobiography of A Goddess, trans. by Priya Sarrukai Chabria and Ravi Shankar. 

• In the same vein, though they’re plays rather than poems, I’d recommend Oliver Py’s very cheeky take on Shakespeare’s Roméo et Juliette, and Anne Carson’s Bakkhai (Euripides) and An Oresteia (Aiskhylos, Sophokles, Euripides). 

Aaaaand... that’s that! Sorry, this is severely lacking in contemporary poetry, but I hope this helps—oh and happy new year to you too ♡

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concept: there are lots of different worlds and all of them have different levels of access to magic. Some are just all over the place and some have no magic at all.

You would think that we would be one of the strictly non-magical worlds, but actually, that’s not the case—we don’t have like, a huge excess of magic, but we have, like, dreams, and the placebo effect, which puts us pretty solidly in the “Numinous” world category.

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it fucks me up that tolkien only died in 1973. dude has the vibe of a victorian scholar who wrote all his manuscripts by candlelight but then you look him up and realise that he knew what color tv was. what the fuck.

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i know we all rag on MCU movies for being the most soulless pieces of garbage to grace theaters in the past few evers, but i think the music in those movies really doesnt get enough credit for being the least memorable or emotional music ever heard

every single piece sounds like placeholder music to give an idea of what someone might want for a scene but then they accidentally sent it off without ever actually getting a score composed

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Guide to Figuring out the Age of an Undated World Map.

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Can’t believe I went to 6 months of 12 step meetings to learn this wisdom when I could have just watched this

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every english class ive ever had has reaffirmed my belief that english is one of the most necessary classes we have actually

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TL;DR: Nestle argued they could not be sued for funding, overseeing, and profiting from a system of child slavery in Africa because the conduct did not occur in the U.S. The Supreme Court ruled in Nestle’s favor.

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Random Lines From Bo Burnham’s “Inside” That Live Rent-Free In My Head

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You say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did. BO BURNHAM: INSIDE (2021)

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big fan of situations where nobody gets hurt 

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Her name is Katalin Karikó. Hungarian. Daughter of a butcher. Her thesis work became the basis of the mRNA vaccine technology. Read the article here.

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The strongest correlation to crime rates is the inverse correlation to income.