UPDATES

I have a few publications to boast about.

First, the current issue of Twentieth Century Literature includes my review of Eric Hayot's Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. I think this might be my first official academic publication, at least judged chronologically from the time of printing.

Another review of mine was printed on the Zoland Poetry site, a review of two versions of the Laozi 老子, Thomas Meyer's translation titled daode jing, and David B. Axelrod's poetic re-configuration, Another Way: Poems derived fromthe Tao Te Ching. Both of these reviews give a bit of autobiographical detail from when my interest in learning Chinese first developed.

The most recent publication is in the new Rain Taxi, of Keith Waldrop's The Flowers of Evil, a verset translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. My favorite thing about review is the serendipity about the fact that in the review I wrote for the previous Rain Taxi, of Jacques Roubaud's The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart, translated by Rosmarie & Keith Waldrop, I wrote “Roubaud can lead to Baudelaire, for instance, just as Baudelaire leads to Roubaud.” And the next review I write is of a Waldrop translation of Baudelaire. If I were in a Pynchon novel, I’d come across Waldrop's translation of “the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal heart” in Flowers of Evil and think it was more than a coincidence.

Also in the new issue of Rain Taxi is an interview with Steve Bradbury done by Shin Yu Pai. They even mention CipherJournal, and me by name! Steve was the one who introduced the Taipei Poetry Festival to me, giving me a chance for extra pay and more translation publications. The translations were published in the festival volume, Images of the World, Songs from the Soul: Selections from the Taipei International Poetry Festival, edited by Hung Hung 鴻鴻.

I'm also adding two new blogs to my links list, to the right. The first is an academic blog I enjoy, Culture Industry (or Kulturindustrie). The second is one I think will turn out to be very important, the International Exchange for Poetic Invention.