Her Majesty (1926-2022)

Literary services

I've been assigned to escort a famous poet to a public reading in Princeton, New Jersey. We are to meet in Grand Central Station before transferring across town to catch a southbound train, but I've neglected to arrange an exact rendezvous with Famous Poet, whose number isn't in my phone. I wander about looking for him, but the terminal is an enormous bazaar covering acres and acres, and it's hopeless to try to locate one person in such an intricate and crowded space. Parts of the bulding have been torn down or have fallen into ruins; on the levelled ground earth-moving machines are preparing the foundation for new structures to come. I select a name from my list of contacts, a colleague who would be likely to have Famous Poet's number, but the person who answers is a stranger who knows nothing about it. I call my boss but he can't help; he is alarmed that we aren't already on the way.

Finally I spy Famous Poet near the ticket booth. He is distraught and tears of rage are streaming down his face. There's no question of continuing; the reading will have to be rescheduled.

Report of the Committee on Agriculture (III)

It's been another unpredictable year in the squash patch. The acorn squash that I planted in the wake of last year's profusion of volunteers didn't come up at all, perhaps because the seed I saved just wasn't viable. It looks like I may have some Black Futsus coming (seed from Baker Creek), and I have some vines that are just starting to run but that I suspect may turn out to be butternuts. In general things are late, perhaps because the spring was a bit cool here and the summer has been hot and dry. I did get some nice gray zucchini before the vine borers wiped them out.

The big surprise (literally big) is this 15-lb. pumpkin, which I didn't consciously plant and which I suspect grew out of last fall's Jack O'Lantern. I've named it Rusty Staub, in homage to le grand orange.

Dominoes (Georges Perec)

Before the former child star Olivia Rorschach sets off on one of her frequent trips, she leaves instructions for her au pair, Jane Sutton, one sentence of which reads "Buy cooked Edam for Polonius and don’t forget to take him once a week to Monsieur Lefèvre for his domino lesson." Perec appends an explanatory footnote:

Polonius is the 43rd descendant of a pair of tame hamsters which Rémi Rorschach gave Olivia as a present shortly after he met her: the two of them had seen an animal-trainer at a Stuttgart music hall and were so impressed by the athletic exploits of the hamster Ludovic – disporting himself with equal ease on the rings, the bar, the trapeze, and the parallel bars – that they asked if they could buy him. The trainer, Lefèvre, refused, but sold them instead a pair – Gertrude and Sigismond – which he had trained to play dominoes. The tradition was maintained from generation to generation, with each set of parents spontaneously teaching their offspring to play. Unfortunately, the previous winter an epidemic had almost wiped out the little colony: the sole survivor, Polonius, could not play solo, and, worse, was condemned to waste away if he was prevented from indulging in his favourite pastime. Thus he had to be taken once a week to Meudon to his trainer, who, though now retired, continued to raise little circus animals for his own amusement.

Life A User's Manual (translation by David Bellos)

11 Rue Simon-Crubellier

When I first read this 1978 novel by Georges Perec in David Bellos's translation years ago I recall being entertained but also perhaps a bit underwhelmed. This summer I'm reading it in the original (with the translation on hand as a crib) as a way to keep up my French. In some ways it's ideal for the purpose. It's made up of fairly short, self-contained chapters that I can read at a relaxed pace of one or two a day, and it's not particularly slangy or conversational (street French not being something I'm up on). The grammar I can handle; the hard part is the vocabulary for material objects (clothes, home furnishings, tools) which Perec delights in ennumerating. (In fact the cataloguing of objects was part of his compositional method.) These are, as it turns out, the very things where my English vocabulary is weakest; thus when Perec refers to an aumônière, I am little wiser when I turn to Bellos and find that this is "a Dorothy bag." My eyes begin to glaze over when Perec, at his most maniacal, devotes several pages to the contents of a catalog from a hardware manufacturer. Fortunately, such extreme moments are rare.

For those unfamiliar with the book, La vie mode d'emploi captures a snapshot of the inhabitants and furnishings of a Paris apartment building at one instant in June 1975. In addition to describing them synchronically, he also moves back in time liberally in order to narrate the stories of the present and former denizens of the building. There's also a frame tale involving an expatriate Englishman named Bartlebooth who wanders the world for twenty years painting harbor scenes, which he sends home and has made into jigsaw puzzles. Puzzles and games fascinated Perec, and the writing of the novel was itself structured by the use of various constraints and procedures, such as a "knight's tour" in chess, in which the knight visits every space on the chessboard exactly once. But arguably the parts are more interesting than the whole.

Comparing the two versions raises new puzzles. Why, for instance, in the list of paintings created by a tenant named Franz Hutting, did Bellos translate

14 Maximilien, débarquant à Mexico, s'enfourne élégamment onze tortillas

as

14 Maximilian lands in Mexico and daintily scoffs four nelumbia and eleven tortillas

and for that matter what on earth are "nelumbia"? Why does

21 Le docteur Lajoie est radié de l'ordre des médecins pour avoir déclaré en public que William Randolph Hearst, sortant d'une projection de Citizen Kane, aurait monnayé l'assasinat d'Orson Welles

become

21 Dr LaJoie is struck off the medical register for having stated, in front of Ray Monk, Ken O'Leary, and others that, after seeing Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst had put a price on Orson Welles's head

with the parts in bold (my emphasis) being apparently gratuitous additions by the translator?

As it turns out, there is method to Bellos's changes. According to a table available here, each painting description in the original conceals the name of one of Perec's friends and associates. Thus "s'enfourne élégamment" hides (Paul) Fournel, which Bellos has reproduced with the mysterious "four nelumbia." Similarly, "Kane, aurait" reveals (Raymond) Queneau, prompting Bellos''s "Ray Monk, Ken O." (Harry Mathews, by the way, is tucked into "Joseph d'Arimathie ou Zarathoustra.")

These diabolical devices, of which there must be many examples throughout the novel, add to the book's fascination, but also provoke some frustration. What else, one wonders, is one overlooking as one reads innocently along?

Demolition

Georges Perec:

Sometimes Valène dreamt of cataclysms and tempests, of whirlwinds that would carry the whole house off like a wisp of straw and display the infinite marvels of the solar system to its shipwrecked inhabitants; or that an unseen crack would run through the building from top to bottom, like a shiver, and with a long, deep, snapping sound it would open in two and be slowly swallowed up in an indescribable yawning chasm; then hordes would overrun it, bleary-eyed monsters, giant insects with steel mandibles, blind termites, great white worms with insatiable mouths: the wood would crumble, the stone would turn to sand, the cupboards would collapse under their own weight, all would return to dust.

Life A User's Manual (translation by David Bellos)

Fugitive lyrics

In 1975 I took a course taught by a folklorist who had a parallel career as the producer of a number of commercial recordings of folk music. Though the course was aimed at grad students and I was only a sophomore, I was allowed to enroll, which probably wasn't such a great decision all around as it turned out, but the semester did at least leave a few lasting impressions. In particular, I recall two songs he played us in class that came from recordings he had made in the course of field work in the UK. I still remember parts of them almost verbatim (no doubt because they were off-color), and since I can't find any trace of the exact lyrics (though they must be documented somewhere), I present them here.

The first was a version of the notorious comic song known as "Seven Nights Drunk" or "Our Goodman." The premise of the song is that the singer, a habitual drunkard, is being cuckolded by his wife. When he presents her with the evidence of this, which is increasingly unmistakeable as the song progresses, she blames it on his drunken befuddlement and comes up with one far-fetched explanation after another to account for what he thinks he sees. A typical first verse goes as follows:

As I went home on Monday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a horse outside the door, where my old horse should be
So I called me wife, the curse of me life, will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that horse outside the door where my old horse should be.
Ay you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool
As drunk as drunk can be
That's a lovely sow that me mother sent to me
Well it's many a day I've travelled, a hundred miles or more
But a saddle on a sow, sure I never saw before.

The lyrics go downhill from there, depending on the version, but the final one below is typical:

As I went home on Sunday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a thing in her thing where my old thing should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that thing in your thing where my old thing should be
Ah, you're drunk,
you're drunk you silly old fool,
still you can not see
That's a lovely tin whistle that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But hair on a tin whistle sure I never saw before

The last verse I remember was similar, but instead of a tin whistle it's "a rubber tree" or "a rubber tree plant," and the last line (which I've probably Americanized) was "But a rubber tree plant with hair at the roots I never done seen before."

I haven't been able to identify the other song, which was sung by two British sisters who weren't professional performers. With the tape recorder running the song had a refrain of "Just you remember when you're kissing your man / he's trying to get another kiss from you as soon as he can!" Only when the machine was turned off would they agree to sing the saltier version, which ran "Just you remember when you're kissing your man / he's trying to get another rattle out of your tin can!"

Looking back now, I wonder how much my memory has distorted the details. (Did I, perhaps, borrow the "rubber tree plant" from "High Hopes"?) But in a way that distortion is the whole point: that's how oral tradition twists and preserves material from one generation to the next.

Ambition (III)

Georges Perec:

She’d have done better to sell up and go back to the farm where she’d been born. Rabbits and chickens, some tomato plants, and a couple of beds for lettuces and cabbages -- what more did she need? She would have sat by her fireside amongst her placid cats, listening to the clock ticking, to the rain falling on the zinc drainpipes, and the seven-o’clock bus passing by in the far distance; she’d have carried on warming her bed with a warming pan before getting into it, warming her face in the sun on her stone bench, cutting recipes out of La Nouvelle République and sticking them into her big kitchen book.

Life A User's Manual, translated by David Bellos

The woman in question, Madame Moreau, is the sole proprietor of a prosperous hardware manufacturing business employing 2,000 people.

Articles of Faith

Things as I see them.

There is no God.

There is no Heaven, no Hell, no Devil. There are no angels or demons or ghosts. There are no miracles.

There is no afterlife, no reincarnation. Whatever the "soul" can be said to be, it dissipates when the body dies.

There was no Original Sin, no Fall, and thus nothing to redeem. There was no Incarnation. Whatever the truth about his sayings and doings, Jesus was an ordinary human being. His mother was not "conceived without sin" any more or less than everyone else, nor was he the product of "virgin birth." He did not "die for our sins," he was not resurrected, nor will he return.

The universe is not concerned with our existence. In fact, even to say that it is "indifferent" is to engage in indefensible metaphysics. The universe is not capable of having an attitude towards our existence or its own. It simply exists. Why and how there is something instead of nothing is a question that neither theologian nor scientist is capable of illuminating.

Morality and ontology have nothing to do with each other. A godless universe is no more or less moral than a universe with a god in it. I once heard an Episcopalian priest, in the aftermath of one human-produced atrocity or another, say that if he thought for one moment that what had happened was God's punishment for our sins, he would put aside his priestly garments and walk out of the church forever. And so, in his place, would I.

The only true "sin" is cruelty, and the most fundamental virtue is compassion. There are more virtues than sins, because all sins ultimately come down to the same thing.

Religious institutions and religious leaders are susceptible of the same virtues and failings as everyone else. Many do good work, but many are corrupt and hypocritical. Much of the cruelty in the world is the outcome of religious belief, but much is not.

If religion gets you through the night, keeps you off the sauce, and maybe makes you a slightly kinder person, then more power to you, but if it serves as a cover for hatred and oppression, you'll get no respect from me.

Effingers (Coming Attractions)

One to watch out for: a promised English-language translation of Gabriele Tergit's family saga Effingers, which was originally published in Germany in 1951 but only recently "rediscovered" and reissued there to general acclaim. Robert Normen has a description on the website of The German Times:

In the best way, this epic 900-page novel resembles another historic family saga: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Mann’s story of four generations runs from 1835 to 1877. It may be no coincidence that Tergit’s book begins the very next year. Effingers is set against the backdrop of a changing German society steeped in the comforts of Bismarckian Prussia. Modernization and an economic boom bring affluence and changing norms, which are reflected in the contrasts between the city of Berlin and Karl’s and Paul’s small hometown in southern Germany. After World War I, anti-Semitic sentiment slowly but surely takes hold and the Effinger family must reluctantly learn that they are not the German clan they aspired to be.

NYRB Books has previously published a translation by Sophie Duvernoy of Tergit's earlier novel Käsebier Takes Berlin, and they have signed Duvernoy up for Effingers as well, though apparently no date has been announced. In the meantime, a snazzy-looking Spanish-language version has just been issued by Libros del Asteroide in Barcelona.

More information is available at The German Times.

Cardboard Box of Batteries

The death of Kelly Joe Phelps on May 31st got me thinking about my favorite Kelly Joe song, so I've dug out and updated some notes I made back in 2005. First, here are the lyrics, based on the liner notes for Tap the Red Cane Whirlwind, with a few minor changes to punctuation.

make a dent in the shovel
run the mud through a sieve
paste your hopes on a windmill blade
and plant 'em up on the hill.

a pencil sharpened with a putty knife
a pretty girl as a pretty nun
maybe you wake and think this is great
i just want somewhere to run.

oh, the walls blend into ceilings, and the faces they disappear.
never enough time to think it out only time to forget i'm here.
oh, and the bill is on the table but i've got no coins for pay
a beer half circle around her name, and what the hell did she say?

ah, the wise are playing tetherball and the ball's eyes they look like mine
rollin' around all on the end of the cord i can't make up for down
oh, i'm a streamlined engine with a cog chipped out of the wheel
i remember a dirty joke or two but i can't remember the feel.
i remember a dirty joke or two but i can't remember the feel.

too much time alone i spend, a miser with a nickel worn
starving like a mother, well, but i can't let go.
i'll spit the hours across the room and I'll kick 'em out that door
hell, you can have them. another thing i've got no use for.

well and it's funny that this comes out dark, it is not that bad
Oh, there's still a sparkle of silver in my cavity that plays music in the winter
i've a cardboard box of batteries hidden in a tire swing
a miner's hat with a light on top and a handful of wedding rings.
a miner's hat with a light on top and a handful of wedding rings.
a miner's hat with a light on top and a handful of wedding rings.

It doesn't quite "tell a story," but as a mood piece or character sketch it's about as precise as you can get. Memories, regrets, hopes — they're "all in the bag with the coins" (to quote another KJP song). I've highlighted everything that refers to prospecting, money, metal; it's a vein (so to speak) that runs through the whole thing. Some of the imagery is homely and eccentric — has anyone else used the word “tetherball” in a pop song? — other bits (“a pretty girl as a pretty nun”) just raise questions.

It's a melancholy picture, but there's that little "sparkle" at the end. The looseness in the fit between the lyrics and the tune adds something when Kelly Joe sings it, making it seem more spontaneous and conversational. And then there's the acoustic guitar, which after the intro mostly stays in the background but then bursts into extravagant arabesques at the end of some of the lines.

Kelly Joe was clearly a complicated guy, both personally and musically. He had a jazz background that shows in his playing, but his well-received first record, Lead Me On, was a collection of acoustic blues covers featuring slide guitar. He could probably have stuck to that indefinitely and made a career out of it and session work, but instead he repeatedly reinvented himself, abandoning the slide for fingerpicking (and occasionally, banjo) and becoming a gifted if sometimes frustratingly cryptic songwriter. In what turned out to be his final record, Brother Sinner & the Whale, he created a kind of unassuming Old Testament gospel music (if that's not a theological contradiction).

About ten years ago Kelly Joe said he needed a break and stopped touring and recording. At the time there was some mention of ulnar neuropathy, but as the years went on it was clear that something else was going on. His fans waited to see what new iteration of Kelly Joe Phelps might eventually emerge from the ferment, but for whatever reason it never happened. Maybe we'll know more in time, but maybe Kelly Joe just preferred his privacy.

Kelly Joe Phelps 1959-2022

And it's funny that this comes out dark, it's not that bad
There's still a sparkle of silver in my cavity that plays music in the winter
I've got a cardboard box of batteries hidden in a tire swing
A miners hat with a light on top and a handful of wedding rings.

Word is that Kelly Joe Phelps died on Tuesday. The Guardian has an obit. A fine guitarist and singer — and eventually, songwriter as well — whose career encompassed jazz, blues, original songs, and gospel, he took a break from the music business about a decade ago and sadly never came back. Few details are available at this point.

Maybe I'll have more to say when this has sunk in for a bit. For now, here are two examples of Kelly Joe in happier days.

Stepping up to the plate

Two forceful and anguished statements in the wake of yet another mass shooting indicate that the stereotypical image of the American professional baseball player is seriously out of date or simply wrong. First, Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle:

It just feels like we’ve reached a point where if not now, when? We should have done something after Sandy Hook; we should have done something after Vegas; we should have done something after Pittsburgh; I mean, you can go down the list. We should have done something after Virginia Tech. How far back do you want to go? And then the conversation inevitably always changes to mental health or bulletproof backpacks. We’re talking about ballistic blankets. We’re talking about renovating schools so there is only one entrance and one exit. We’re talking about arming teachers.

You’re describing a prison, and you’re bargaining and negotiating with people’s lives instead of just addressing the common denominator in every single one of these issues. It’s really frustrating, and I would like to think that in this country we’re capable of some common-sense reforms that a majority of Americans support that don’t infringe on your Second Amendment rights ... Who am I? I’m on the injured list. I’m a middle reliever on a team that unfortunately is in last place right now ... But we’re still members of societies and our communities, and there are people who look up to us as athletes, who listen to what we have to say as athletes.

And I think if you could start some of these conversations, or you can participate in some of these conversations and maybe get people to listen or put pressure on elected officials to do something, the reality is that you have a little bit more sway than the average person. And when it comes to making changes in your community, you can help move the needle on any number of issues that are important to you.

Source

Perhaps even more remarkably, San Francisco Giants manager (and former player) Gabe Kapler, on why he won't be coming out of the dugout during the playing of the national anthem:

I’m often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents ... We stand in honor of a country where we elect representatives to serve us, to thoughtfully consider and enact legislation that protects the interests of all the people in this country and to move this country forward towards the vision of the "shining city on the hill." But instead, we thoughtlessly link our moment of silence and grief with the equally thoughtless display of celebration for a country that refuses to take up the concept of controlling the sale of weapons used nearly exclusively for the mass slaughter of human beings.

We have our moment (over and over), and then we move on without demanding real change from the people we empower to make these changes. We stand, we bow our heads, and the people in power leave on recess, celebrating their own patriotism at every turn.

Source

Turtle Diary

Two days, two eastern box turtles. This mostly terrestrial chelonian, considered a "species of special concern," is widespread in our area but probably not all that common numerically. I see maybe one a year, often in more or less the same spots. The empty shell above may be the remains of one I saw on two occasions a few years ago. It appears to have succumbed to a predator strong enough to pierce its armor. No such grim fate as yet for the red-eyed male below, which I observed when he was, improbably, in the process of climbing over a stone wall. I kept my distance and he held his ground.

Nobody's business

That the Supreme Court is poised to overturn settled law and reverse the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade should surprise no one, given the steady rightward drift of the court, but it should appall anyone who cares about fundamental human rights.

I'll state my bias: human beings don't procreate spiritually, we procreate as bodies. We are no different in this regard from other animals, and anyone who thinks differently has a lot of special pleading to do. There is, therefore, no more basic level of individual rights than that which pertains to the body and to reproduction. The recognition of those rights, in the face of determined opposition, has been one of the most important advances of modern society. It is, paradoxically, the defense of the fundamental dignity of the physical, of our nature as animals, that defines us as modern human beings.

To deny a woman the right to control her reproduction is as outrageous an affront to human dignity as can be imagined. We pride ourselves — rightly — on the declared principles of freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion, but what is more intrusive, forcing others to keep their thoughts and beliefs to themselves, or telling a woman that even her own body is not hers to control? Defenders of abortion rights often point out — rightly — that it would be unthinkable and cruel to force a rape victim to carry her rapist's child to term, but that argument, legitimate as it is, is ultimately superfluous. It is for women to decide under what circumstances they are willing to bear a child. And it's no one else's business.

Roe v. Wade established a reasoned balance, informed by medical science, between the interests of society and a woman's rights. That balance has been steadily undermined by legislation and previous court decisions, but the essential principle underlying it has been preserved — until now. There is little short-term prospect, given the nature and dire condition of or political system, that the overturning of Roe can itself be undone. The damage will be profound, both to women and to American democracy.

It has to be understood that those who would deny a women's right to decide when or whether to have a child, and who more generally reject the whole idea of a right to privacy, don't really believe that human beings have inherent, independent rights at all. They recognize only power and its privilege to compel those who are subject to it. The fact that the right to abortion has long been acknowledged and supported by a majority of Americans will count for little. I have no doubt that reversal will be robustly cheered in the states that will be lining up to enact restricive legislation and competing to see how extreme that legislation can be made.

This country has been morally problematic from its inception, but it's hard to see how it will survive in any real sense. Even before this decision, we have come as close to fascism as we have ever been, and the danger has in no way receded.

Owl report

A few years ago I had a good run of luck with owl sightings, but last year there were none at all and I hadn't seen any this year until now. Two days ago when I was walking the dog I heard the telltale whistle-hiss of a barred owl in an area where I'd seem them many times in the past. I couldn't get a definite visual on it and didn't have my camera with me, but I made note of the place so I could return. Yesterday it rained but this morning I headed for the same spot, with camera this time but sans dog.

On my way out I thought I heard the same hissing sound but it was too faint for me to be sure; on the way back, though, there was no mistaking it. I walked off the trail a few yards in that direction until I located the owl high up in a very tall tulip poplar. I wasn't close enough to see it well, but since I didn't want to spook it I let my camera zoom in and do the looking. After a few minutes I moved to a slightly different angle, then started to walk away. A single distinct "hoot" from nearby stopped me in my tracks. I looked up: a large adult owl was perched, by itself, in another large tree about fifty yards from the first, keeping a wary eye on me. I took some pictures and headed home.

I thought there might have been a second owl in the first tree, but couldn't tell for sure. It was only when I downloaded the images that I realized that there were no less than four, probably all juveniles. (One is largely concealed behind a limb in the shot below.) Had I known they were there, I would have made a better job of getting them all in the frame.

The Norway maple and tulip poplar leaves are coming out this week; the other trees are a bit behind. I'll give the owls a week's worth of privacy before I check in on them again, but by then I suspect they'll be harder to spot. Still, it's good to know that this family is thriving.

Non-buyer's remorse

When you really should have bought the book: the Taschen edition of the Augsburg Book of Miracles, published in 2014, is now out of print and available in the second-hand market only at prices starting at $250 (and increasing steeply from there). Oh well.

Earlier post: Signs and Wonders. The Marginalian has a selection of the illustrations.

Night haul

The tackle creaks as the net is pulled in. On the lantern-lit deck the crew plant their feet and strain at the rope.

Spilled out on the boards, the finned and tentacled creatures blink and gape, but even as the men gather around them their irridescence fades and their jewel-like colors dim. Outlines blur. The seething multitude becomes still, then melts away into brine and breeze.

They cast the net out again and sail on, dragging the dead dark sea towards morning.

Honest Things

Eleanor Clark, on the Oysterman's Cooperative building in Brittany, where "there is just about everything there you could ever need in oystering, from women's dark blue canvas pants and the beautiful fishermen's blouses up to the heaviest cable":

A lovely store, in which nothing has been advertised, nothing is packaged, no patronage is solicited, no brainwashing is done, no profit is to be made and therefore it is most unlikely that anything bought will break or otherwise go to pieces the first time it is used. Oh, the long-lost delight of this decency! For the general American public there is nothing left that begins to approach it but the small-town hardware store, where a nail is still a nail and had better be a good one, and there is apt to be a good deal of junk and vanity even there. Besides, in this place with its crude heavy counters and air of a warehouse, the aura of the single trade, of the beau métier with all its sea-depths and adventure, hangs around every item, for not a bolt or rope or pair of gloves there is meant for any other purpose, and it is remarkable what beauty it casts over everything. Beauty depends after all on what you come from, what you are being cleansed and relieved of, and in the pass we are in nowadays an American lady of the buying type might be tempted to come away from this place with a batch of pulleys, the way her grandmother acquired a little replica of the Venus de Milo.

But no, that wouldn't do, would it? The beauty of all these honest things, aside from their fine conjunction of textures, is in their being together and being there, not somewhere else, in the above-mentioned association, in the simple appropriateness of it all. It is not to be bought; the poor lady will have to go back to the square, with its tasteless souvenirs.

Clark was writing in the early 1960s, and no doubt many things are different now. Except for The Oysters of Locmariaquer and Rome and a Villa, her books seem to have gone out of print. She moved in Trotskyite circles for a time and apparently knew the man himself, if briefly, in his Mexican years; later she married Robert Penn Warren. The Vassar Encyclopedia has what seems to be the best summary of her life and work.

"This is my city"

Sergio Borschevsky, the translator of Borges, Cortázar, Neruda, García Márquez, and other writers into Ukrainian, is staying put in Kiev with his wife. From an interview with the Argentinian news website Infobae:

Why should we have to leave? This is my city. It doesn't belong to Putin or to his general staff or to the Russian Ministry of Defense... This is my city and my apartment. I live here. When I was a boy I saw all this destroyed by German Nazis. I saw it, because I was born in 1946 and I saw Kiev in ruins, I was born a year after the war. And now when I see these images of cities destroyed by the Russian Army, I remember my childhood. And I can tell you that I'm not thinking of leaving. I will die in this city. Now or later? I don't know, but in this city.

The full interview (in Spanish) is available here.

Update: A version in English, though imperfect, can be read here.