Recommendation

Despite the arbitraryness implied by its title, '99 Poems in Translation' ed. Pinter et al is a beautiful little volume, with a coherence and timbre of its own. The poems are typically melancholy, clinging on to moments of earthly beauty before those moments become merely monuments. Humour is dark and belly deep. Few of them are gnarled with verbal ambiguity; many are radiantly simple. Leopardi is a presiding tutelary presence. I offer you this (conveniently short) example:

'No'

It's not because I'm now too old,
More wizened than you guess..

If I say no, it's only
Because I fear that yes
Would bring me nothing, in the end,
But a fiercer loneliness.

Lady Ki No Washika, 8th Century.

May I also note in passing the depressing inanity and crabbed anti-intellectualism of so much of the reports of Derrida's death in the English speaking press. . Some interesting stuff, though, on the weblog-sphere, including, reliably, Wood's Lot.

N.b., a couple of talks organised by the LRB (in my email):

'To mark its 25th anniversary, the London Review of Books is organising a series of public discussions to be held at Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, Thornhaugh Street (off Russell Square), London WC1.10 November: Europe: What is the Problem?
Moderator: Stephanie Flanders , Panelists: Anatole Kaletsky, David Runciman, Stephen Wall, Martin Wolf, Slavoj Žižek
19 November: What is Literary Criticism for?
Moderator: Andrew O’Hagan Panelists: Terry Eagleton, Frank Kermode, Zadie Smith, James Wood
.'