179. (Theodor Fontane)

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

150. (Cao Xueqin)

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

143. (Marina Tsvetaeva)

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

115. (Italo Svevo)

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

110. (Eugenio Montale)

Montale’s best translator, William Arrowsmith, writes of the collection La Bufera e altro: “these are love-poems, both personal and cosmological, without … More

81. (Joachim du Bellay)

Not a name that gets much English or American attention these (or other) days, Joachim du Bellay made his way … More

75. (Émile Zola)

Here is the second part of the Zola post; undoubtedly shorter, as the fire of fresh reading has sputtered. But … More

74. (Émile Zola)

In the spirit of a reading journal, here’s the first of a two-part attempt to say something coherent about Zola’s … More

66. (Dante Alighieri)

No poem rivals Dante’s Commedia in providing so many opportunities, so many temptations, for a poet (both as the poet recollecting and … More

20. (Marcel Proust)

Still reading, slowly, the second volume of Recherche. I’ve leapt from the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright to the new James Grieve translation without wincing. … More