So anyway, now that the question’s out there, what is the status of translation as poetic activity? Certainly it’s a form of “making,” and therefore poiesis if you want to go that route. Translation is poiesis of the target-language replica, and there is a poetics to it shared by court interpretation, medical, technical, and diplomatic translation, and literary translation considered as a fine art. And anything done wonderfully well can be called “poetry.”
“Mouth to Mouth” has overtones of a murder mystery, though it is more of a caper crossed with a moral parable told by an unreliable narrator. Whether it is about a murder is, well, up in the air. Perspective is everything, as Wilson demonstrates during a Zoom call from his home office in Brentwood, when he turns off his blurred background and reveals himself surrounded by mounds of tinsel and torn giftwrap — the detritus of holiday season.
There are two optimal strategic approaches to Wordle, depending on what’s more important to you: trying to get the answer within the allotted six guesses but not really trying to win any quicker than that, or trying to win with as few guesses as possible, which almost necessarily means a higher risk of sometimes losing completely. (If you take the third strategic approach—“just have a good time for three minutes, and maybe question your impulse to optimize everything in life”—you have our sincere congratulations.)
Not long after the end of World War I, American Sylvia Beach opened an English-language bookstore and lending library in Paris. “The Paris Bookseller,” Kerri Maher’s historical novel based on Beach’s remarkable life, imagines her impromptu speech to the war-weary crowd at the 1919 opening of Shakespeare and Company. “Here, a place of exchange between English and French thinking, we get to enjoy the spoils of peace: literature, friendship, conversation, debate,” Sylvia declares. “Long may we enjoy them and may they – instead of guns and grenades – become the weapons of new rebellions.”
But Lost & Found is as much a philosophical reckoning with the experiences of losing and finding as it is a record of Schulz's personal grief and love stories. It is that philosophical turning over of loss and discovery that makes this memoir extraordinary, for it unlocks existential meaning out of the utterly mundane facts of human life.
This is a book about fatigue (“and she wipes weary from her eyes/ still glued to the no-good/ glued to the high-definition glare/ of low-definition life”), about holding indefinitely at the limits of anxiety, acknowledging that the people you know best often drive you to your wits’ end, followed by the catharsis of seeing and hearing them anew, relearning to see and hear yourself through them.
Chan’s ideas are livid, but her prose is cool in temperature, and the effect is of an extended-release drug that doesn’t peak until long after you’ve swallowed it. One test of speculative fiction is whether or not it gives you nightmares, and when mine came — I knew they would — it was a full week after I’d finished this time bomb of a book. “This is a safe space, ladies,” a faceless captor was telling me in my sleep. Terrifying.