The first patient I ever wrote about wasn’t actually my patient; as a first-year medical student, that possessive grammatical construct—“my patient”—hadn’t yet entered my consciousness, much less my lexicon. In any case, by the time I met him, he was already dead. I’d followed my fellow-students into the bowels of the medical examiner’s office, just north of Bellevue Hospital, past the silent storage areas of unclaimed bodies and into the clamor of the autopsy room. There he was—a boy, maybe twelve years old, claiming hardly any space on the metal table.
His jersey was pushed up to reveal a smooth preadolescent chest. His pristine basketball sneakers were oddly bright in a room that has since receded into shadow in my memory. I hardly registered the narrowness of the gap between our ages because I was blindsided by how small the bullet hole was. I didn’t have the language to articulate how something so tiny could carve such devastation.
I seem to have spent years in archives. I seem to be endlessly drawn back to them, to places of beginnings and places where stories end. These are archives with filing cabinets, microfiche, with ledgers on shelves, with manila envelopes of photographs and carousels of books, letters and receipts and wills and photographs and account books.
Lists of acquisitions and lists for deportations, catalogues of objects and the lives of those who owned the objects. I try to make an appointment and hope someone will reply.
Choi has been creating high-protein, egg-focused snacks since 2022, but it wasn’t until she started slicing and topping her hard boiled eggs that the idea of “egg flights” came into fruition. The trend itself garnered significant online attention during an unlikely time.
Over the decades, Burke has built up a distinctive and glorious body of work, and Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie is a notable addition to the canon and possibly his most comprehensive. This is James Lee Burke’s world, after all, hell and heaven included.
For Elizabeth Bishop, a successful translation was, in large part, a matter of luck. As someone who published translations of poetry and supervised the translations of her own poetry, she had definite ideas of what made for a good one. “You really should repeat a line exactly if the original repeats it exactly,” she told her Portuguese translator, urging her to avoid taking liberties. “You shouldn’t put in words that aren’t there…. You should pay attention to repeated words and phrases—etc.” Her punctiliousness about formal and semantic equivalence made luck loom all the larger. Yes, you needed skill and sensibility, but they weren’t enough. Translation was worthwhile when “a poem just happens to go into English without losing too much of the original.”