His next-to-latest book is Pandemia & Other Poems (2021), which features work written just before and during the first year of COVID-19 — composed, he says, in order to heal, during a period when some people couldn’t write and some people couldn’t do anything else.

“Poetry,” he recalls, “was all written by dead people, as far as I could tell.”

as if to shore up authority in a world where they (we) may still be seen as interlopers and to demonstrate “fidelity” to the dead male original.

the position of being a woman translating one of these dead, white men creates a strange and potentially productive sense of intimate alienation.

to shift the canon to a different and unexpected place.

We are in a bull market, especially in the US, for new translations of classical texts.

The novel serves as a strong reminder of the galvanizing effect writing can have on one’s life: “the more I write,” says Xiomara, “the braver I become.”

She feels like her silence is a “leash yanking her in all directions.” Amid this chaos, Xiomara finds her bearing in writing, where she learns to hear herself and strengthen her inner voice.

Throughout the novel, her poetry acts as a confession, a prayer, and a sermon, tracing her changing views on religion, family, romance, and poetry itself.

whose “body takes up more room than [her] voice.”

Xiomara “can’t wait to go anyway.”

The resulting conflicts form the plot of the novel and serve as the springboard for Acevedo’s astute musings on the difficulties of an adolescent girl fighting for control over her body, voice, and life.

“Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement.”

To read a translation is like looking at a photo of a sculpture: It shows the thing, but not from every angle. Like every translator, Wilson brings out some features more clearly than others.

But Wilson aims for a direct equation: one line of English for one of Greek.

Wilson sets herself the challenging task of translating the poem into the same number of iambic pentameter lines as there are hexameters in the original. Since there are often 15 syllables or more in a Homeric line this commits her to reducing its syllable count by around a third. In order to achieve that level of compression she has to rely heavily on monosyllables, and to make sharp and sometimes simplifying decisions about which of Homer’s implications to make explicit

Indeed, poetry is something that is subject to loss. But, at each stage of loss, it’s possible to create something new.

There is no original — and if there is, it more closely resembles Plato’s theory of the idea as born somewhere in the mind of the author, or as arriving from far away — and never fully realized — since, after all, isn’t the poem simply a translation of the author’s mental state into human speech?

A multiplicity of angles allows for a stereoscopic image.

Which is exactly why reading (even in silence) is giving voice. The voice interprets the text. Without interpretation — as anyone who has ever tried to translate anything more than a list of ingredients on a package of vegetable salad knows — there is no translation.

because in order to gain the necessary interpretation for their decisions, they must perform work similar to the work of the poet. Follow in the poet’s footsteps, even if they lead into the air, into ephemeral and spiritual spaces. The translator is on the move, searching for poetry in the footsteps that were left — or not left — for them by the poet.

In other words — what an absurd calculation — to subtract the translation from the original, and there you have it, what’s left, poetry.

Then, poetry crosses the borders of language as the translator translating crosses another barrier. After all, the translator is simultaneously a reader and a poet in their own language, if you trust the origin of the word translation — to carry across, to bring across. So, the most important thing happening is in the movement and in the crossing, in the transcendence, and the translator is someone who carries goods across the border, someone who, despite even their greatest moral fairness, will, in the process, smuggle more than what is written on the page, who will participate — whether they mean to or not — in contraband activities.

the increasingly widespread possibilities of giving voice and having freedom of speech, so a growing awareness of the end of humanity is beginning to speak in each and every language.

After all, globalization and the great Tower of Babel of Western civilization are, in the end, largely to the credit of translators.

Dobbs created a two-tiered class of American citizenship: one for those who are trusted to plan their families and control their bodies, because they are male, and one for those who are not, because they are female. It is a generational tragedy.

Though she did not take up the concerns of women, both white and of color, who already had outside jobs and whose paychecks were essential to a family’s survival, the book’s revelations of discrimination against all women reverberated through the culture.

What are the structures producing Asian American unwellness in this period of Asian American life? And how do we dismantle them?

We are all differentially unwell.

The ubiquitous usage of “trauma” does not mean the word has become meaningless. It means we are constantly undergoing and/or recovering from and/or anticipating some kind of siege. It also means we need both to expand and to refine the vocabularies we use for identifying different kinds of woundedness.

Instead, I want to point out the cultural bias against women’s voices and the domestic truths of women’s lives and the deep role this has played in painting Plath as both a pathetic victim and a Cassandra-like, genius freak.

In this way, we end up with another now well-tested literary trope: Plath the crazy girl, and the crazy girls who love her, all of whom are seen as young, starry-eyed fools in need of scolding.

But alongside their universal awe at Plath’s Ariel came another universal sentiment: that she was crazy, and that Hughes had been her long-suffering husband. When Plath’s journals, with their claims of abuse, began to be published, many of these same critics pointed out these claims as not only false but also proof that Plath was paranoid, crazy.

Plath’s reputation as arguably the most famous poet in America and England was born posthumously, and partly constructed by Hughes,

Summer Agarwal in her book Sylvia Plath

Although this is not some conspiracy against Hughes, merely facts strung along.  However, there appears to be a trend in this silencing. As a result, one may suggest that the reluctance to enjoy the work of Sylvia Plath may be a product of the patriarchy, the silencing of women in general and the mockery of teenage girls whatever their interests may be. The fact is, even if Plath is loved by teenage girls, why does that make Plath less valid as an artist?

I ponder this insight alongside Galt’s attention to the surface decoration of the “pretty” in cinema history as offering a specifically feminine, even queer, alternative to masculine imagery.

Indeed, unlike some other girls in the archives of the girl, Coppola’s young women are rarely rebels in the conventional sense of the term. Lux, Charlotte, Nicki—not one of these girls is high-minded like Sophocles’s Antigone, or courageous like our contemporary Antigone, Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games (2012). Ariella Garmaise’s insight, that a “poor-little-rich-girl magnetism” courses through Coppola’s films, speaks to the confusing mix of sympathy, blame, and disgust that Coppola’s girls generate in viewers.