Reading Wildly
My scenario is not a happy one, because sometimes I am awash with unconfidence: all those years of scribbling, and all those stages in the itinerary thereof, but where on earth has one got, nowhere? It’s all very well to suppose that one has put into poems, now & then, the intensity, the truth to … Continue reading Into the Light →
But I, bearing in mind my limitations, give my work off-hand, without premeditation, and indeed almost in rustic fashion, the caption of Attic Nights, derived merely from the time and place of my winter vigils; I thus fall short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care … Continue reading Modesty →
There are exceptions, perhaps foolish exceptions, and the writer of this paper is conscious of proving the rule. But I venture to think anyone who cares passionately for abstract discussion, be his hair never so grey, his hand never so palsied, is in spirit young. I do not say this is an advantage. It is … Continue reading Never So Grey →
Radiant Terminus took me somewhere I didn’t want to leave. Like Thomas De Quincey in the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis, Volodine treats landscape as a state of consciousness, though stripped of De Quincey’s grandeur. In the endless taiga time dilates, nights last centuries, the dead walk among the living and among those who can’t … Continue reading Beginning Volodine →
Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus (2014, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, 2017) names dozens of plants growing on its irradiated steppe. A few are real. Most are not. The list below is an exercise in botanical glossolalia: French folk-naming, Russian loanwords, mock-Latin coinages, and invented hagiography. The real ones A few genuine herbs to establish credibility, so … Continue reading Sorting…