Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Sounding the triangle: Sarah Stickney & Diana Thow on collaboration, translation, & the poetry of Elisa Biagini
As a kid, you might have made a new pal on the schoolyard—over a game of kickball, say, maybe even after you'd kicked someone, or they kicked you. Such are the strange shifts of human relationships. The friendship of Sarah Stickney and Diana Thow began far less traumatically, though impelled by a similar desire to connect—if not on a playground, far from their respective home turfs.
In her essay, "Translating Writing/ Writing Translation," Cole Swensen articulates the sensation of palpable contact brought about by the process of translation, "the collision of … deep structures, assumptions, and traces" that simultaneously inhabits the translator and influences the yet-to-be-written. "The foreign here is the agent that prevents stagnation."