In translation

A translator, like a novelist, needs to have not just a talent for languages. A translator also needs talent.

- Adam Thirlwell, The Delighted States

Favourite footnotes: 7

This was written in response to a request from BBC Radio for a new poem. It has not been broadcast.

- Wendy Cope, 'The Poet's Song' (a poem about the second-rate poetry you hear commissioned for the radio), in Serious Concerns

Samuel Palmer - in context

Wise men make proverbs, but fools retweet them.

The lives of other writers

Or - Two friends record their recent experiences in the book 'business'.

William Brown, author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age



Howard Male, author of Etc Etc Amen

And other things never overheard at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst*

As a Marine* lieutenant, I had always been told in times of uncertainty to go to the library.

- David J Morris, The Evil Hours: a Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

--
* don't bother.

How to use the hyphen

It seems to me that an electronic text cannot emotionally engage its owner as can an actual book ‒ paper, papyrus or vellum, airport paperback or Daunt Books hardback or super-luxurious lavishly-illustrated limited-edition coffee-table tome.

- Josh Spero, Second-Hand Stories (imminent)

Less is more or less

'Life is too short for Martin Amis.'

Amen to that, motherfucker.

Also, Will Self.

Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 13

chin chin - (Italian/French/Spanish) the sound of glasses clinking together, i.e. 'cheers!'

(Amusingly, though, 'chin chin' means something rather different in Japan.)

West Country small ads

'To write a beautiful ya' / Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 12

- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

Books I've actually finished lately: 66

(Courtesy of the Saison Poetry Library)

These things also happen

These things happen

InDefinition - 74

e-quaintance, n. person you only know through e-mail/social media activity

How it's done

HANK: His cum prob'ly tastes like hummus... [beat] ... 'cummus'!
KAREN: Oh my god...
HANK: ... This is not going as well as I'd hoped.

- Californication, 7:1

Favourite footnotes: 6

Editor's Note: As of August 14, 2006, we are no longer accepting sestina submissions.

- Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency

Books I've actually finished lately: 65

Why did the garbage have to be personally delivered to the Dumpster at the moment the truck arrived? I don't know, but Old Uzbek does have one hundred different words for crying.

- Elif Batuman

Books I've actually finished lately: 64

Things I did NOT see myself doing (just yet)

#377  Attempting to paraphrase a Ferdowsi - via Basil Bunting - story about the division of the world between Afaridun's sons to a 7-year-old on a train stuck somewhere outside London Bridge.

(Also, why I can write on my books... but he probably shouldn't.)

Books I've actually finished lately: 63

There seemed nothing to do but learn Persian and read Ferdowsi, so, I undertook that... It's an easy language if it's only for reading that you want it.

- Basil Bunting

Greatest line ever dropped casually into a curriculum vitae

I continued my education as an infantryman in Vietnam.

- Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States

An apology

Whatever the facts in this particular case, the whole thing has the rather suspicious whiff of litigiousness about it.

"Also, make note of the word 'gobbledygook'..."

Ten words we should all be using more often - apparently.

Personally, I use 'Philistine' (and even 'subtopia') just plenty.

One way to improve JD Salinger

... I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page 

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil -
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet -
'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.' 

- from Billy Collins' 'Marginalia'

Substitution

Liz Weston: A nanny is not a substitute for a parent.
Jed Bartlet: I thought that's exactly what a nanny was...?

- The West Wing, 5;3

'Trepverter'

Because the French have no word for 'l'esprit de l'escalier'.

(With thanks to the Guardian's 'education' pages...)

Running 'free'

A brilliantly wrong sentence from an Esquire article on how to not hate running:

If you are determined, though, to invest some cash into your new pursuit – so as to guilt yourself into committing to it, because that technique has never not worked – free running shoes are a worthy investment.

- Adam Baidawi, Esquire

Tremendous author bio

At foot of gchq and other poems.

Found in books - 6

In a second-hand copy of Louis Zukofsky's Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of... (expanded edition), the quite considerable but not at all unpleasant aroma of (consumed) cigars.

James Joyce - in context

I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of socially better-adjusted women.

Acknowledgements

... [A]ll the poets who ever were before me, particularly those I have read: but the editors who bought some of these poems at inadequate prices or printed others without paying anything I need not thank. On the contrary, they should thank me.

- Basil Bunting, Caveat Emptor

Books I've actually finished lately: 62

Favourite footnotes: 5

I took some liberties.

- Dave Eggers, on 'The Animal of the Church', his translation of 'Los Murmullos' by Alejandro Zambra, a translation of 'The Creature in Our Shul' by Nathan Englander, a translation of something I can't read in Hebrew by Etgar Keret, a translation of 'In Our Synagogue' by John Wray, a translation of 'Das Tier in der Synagoge' by Franz Kafka, in Multiples (ed. Adam Thirlwell)

Fair dos to Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg has started a book club, and the publishers are running out of nominated books already.

Keystroke twins - 31/32 (for my Sri Lankan brethren)

contests
converts

election
ejection

Books I've actually finished lately: 61

As inscribed by Dominic Scott Hilton, from his death-bed:

For the lowest life of them all. 

Love,
YOUR MUM's lover 

Wellington Hospital 25.11.14

Books I've actually finished lately: 60

In those days [Pathak] earned much less from his own work than from the [James Hadley] Chase translations. Translating a Chase book was easier work, too, since he could do it in three or four days while sitting at his day job in the telephone company.

- Sudarshan Purohit, intoduction

Books I've actually finished (again) lately: 59

I read the Iliad a long time ago but I was too young to appreciate it.

- Ludo, aged 11