She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not: the Love Poem and the Elegy
All of my attempted love poems sound like elegies, and so I’ve given up trying to write them for my beloved, lest I give the wrong impression. Occasionally, however, one will come to me like a windfall, a speck of gold in the pan.
#TravelBan: The Literary World Pushes Back
Within the international literary community, the group most aggressively working toward refuting the underlying inhumanity of the Trump administration’s travel ban is an international journal of translation, Asymptote.
American Poetry: Video and the Evolution of Language
The composition of poetry has taken on a new life. Poetry has evolved from oral and traditional forms, to print and performance, and to our present moment where an amalgam of all forms is possible with technology. Video is a revisiting of the oral and performative traditions of poetry
Round-Up: Ancient Egyptian Stories, Tom Hanks, and Walt Whitman
From newly translated ancient Egyptian stories to Walt Whitman's lost novel, here's the latest literary news.
“Mapping out the Moves”: An Interview With Poet and Translator Derick Mattern
Derick Mattern is an accomplished poet and translator of Turkish poetry. I spoke with him about his approach to translation, why he believes that all poets should translate, and how he wanted his time in Turkey to be very Turkish.
Women Who Open Doors: Bluebeard and Horror
Women in stories often get punished. In fairy tales, it’s often for greed or pettiness or vanity or a slew of other reasons. But the heroines of fairy tales also get punished.
The Three Percent 10 Years Later: An Interview With Chad Post
Since Chad Post, founding publisher of Open Letter Books, created The Three Percent blog in 2007, the term the “three percent” has become a household one to highlight the percentage of translated books published in the United States.
Why the MFA System Should Be Used to Subvert Cuts to the NEA
The scariest part of the proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities is that people seem to have accepted them already.
“Hyperconsciousness of the Historical Instability of Words”: An Interview with Monica Youn
Monica Youn’s poems are precise, sharp-edged and fleet-footed; they always seem to be moving in three different directions at once. She is the author of three books of poems: Blackacre, Barter, and Ignatz, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. A former attorney, she now teaches
How Does a Korean Debate Capitalism vs. Communism?
Choi In-Hun’s novel The Square is a modern Korean classic that might be called a bildungsroman of ideology. Originally released in 1961, the Dalkey Archive Press translation by Kim Seong-Kon was released as part of the Archive’s Library of Korean Literature in 2014.