On the 50th Anniversary of Nelly Sachs’ Passing
The great Jewish German-Swedish poet & playwright Nelly Sachs passed on this day, 12 May, 1970. Raised in Germany, the rise of nazism in the thirties terrified her so much that at one point she...
Category: Translation
Paul Celan: Fifty Years Later: Tenebrae & 5 More
It was exactly 50 years ago, on the night of 19 to 20 April 1970 that Paul Celan left his apartment on the avenue Emile Zola, and succumbed to his psychic demons: the Pont Mirabeau...
Abdellatif Laâbi’s ” Perishable Poems”
A pleasure right now here in the turmoil of virus to sit down & read through the latest Abdellatif Laâbi collection of poems, excellently translated by Peter Thompson, & published by Dialogos in Nola....
In Celebration of Amjad Nasser, a Poet Who ‘Mourns Himself While Still Alive’
Via the always excellent ArabLit came the news this morning of Amjad Nasser’s illness. I met him many years ago, in Paris, & he & his writing were immediately very close to me. It was...
Nicole Peyrafitte & Pierre Joris @ Austin International Poetry Festival
We are almost in Austin after an exhilarating drive through America and some memorable visits — special mentions to Serpent Mound and to Paris, Kentucky; you can find the documentation of these moments on...
Speechgrille — A Celan Poem for World Poetry Day
Yesterday I finished reworking my translation of Paul Celan’s poem “Speechgrille |Sprachgitter,” from the eponymous 1959 volume. Let me offer it here on World Poetry Day (as — rare occasion! — a second post...
On Mahmoud Darwish Day, 13 Poems
via the always excellent ArabLit (Arabic Literature and Translation): The towering, generation-defining Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was born on this day in al-Birwa. To commemorate his entrance into our world on a March...
Dante, Sollers, Paradise & A Neologism
Sunday afternoon reading in Philippe Sollers & Josyane Savigneau’s Une conversation infinie which Nicole brought back for me from Paris. Page 18, Sollers speaks of Dante: “In the Divine Comedy, Dante often invents new...
6 Poems: The Self-translations of Sargon Boulus
via Arabic Literature and Translation: The poet-translator Mona Kareem has an essay up in The Babel Review of Translations, issue D9: The essay, “He Goes to the Place: Sargon Boulus Translates Himself and Others,” is accompanied by...
Foucault: the Words, the Things, the End of Man.
When, in 1967, I came to the US, I carried with me a relatively small number of books, but among them was Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, published the previous year by...
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux