314. (Yves Bonnefoy)

As a translator of Shakespeare into French, Yves Bonnefoy has reckoned with the chasm separating the French and English poetic … More

262. (Theodor Fontane)

When Christine dies at the end of Theodor Fontane’s No Way Back, it is felt less as a consequence of … More

I write as a novice, an initiate into Racine’s imaginative world, and I enter with just enough French to feel … More

Kafka’s The Trial revolves around the parable of the law; it is the hermeneutic puzzle that promises to be a key … More

To understand a work by Kafka, only a comparison with another work by Kafka will suffice. To make sense of … More

The 2014 Ice Roses: Selected Poems of the German poet Sarah Kirsch, published a year after her death (Kirsch was … More

Effi Briest: a nineteenth-century European bourgeois world that doesn’t have the melodramatic horrors of hell or the hopeless delusions of … More

This morning, I deleted, for the first time, one of the posts on this blog, the most recent, on Marguerite … More

And, in part, 143. (Elaine Feinstein), since it is Feinstein’s translations (written with the assistance of Angela Livingstone) from the … More

Italo Svevo, whose talent was recognized and whose career was partially rescued by Joyce, is not much read nowadays. Joyce’s … More