Poet in Spain

Poet in Spain by Federico García Lorca
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stunning to explore Spain's explicator of poetic duende in this new translation from Sarah Arvio reviewed by Dwight Garner in The New York Times:
"Lorca’s poems from Spain are a poetry of dreams and journeys and glimpses from balconies, of sunbaked meadows and realms of erotic yearning. He went to the well often for the same elemental imagery: the sea, the wind, the moon, flowers and trees. His mind worked feverishly enough to induce hallucinations."

Having a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, I was troubled by some of Translator Sarah Arvio's decisions to drop punctuation. Garner offers samples:
Lorca has been tamped down. His poem “Cazador” (“Hunter”), for example, begins with these words: “¡Alto pinar!” Arvio translates this, with a vast diminution in energy, as “High grove of pines.”

Lorca wrote in an exclamatory style that gave his work a flamenco brashness missing from some of these translations. García Lorca uses exclamatory sequences to mimic the effect of a chorus singing and beating their palms to the music of a flamenco performance.
Look at the first stanza of “Árboles” (“Trees”) from 1919:

¡Árboles!
¿Habéis sido flechas
Caídas del azul?
¿Qué terribles guerreros os lanzaron?
¿Han sido las estrellas?

Per Garner, "Arvio renders this in telegraphic yet somewhat lobotomized fashion:"

Were you once arrows
falling from the sky
What terrible warriors shot you
Were they the stars

Lorca's fascination with 14th-century Persian poetry in The Tamarit Divan to his idealization of Andalusia’s Romani history in Gypsy Ballads may be questioned nowadays, but overall these English translations stand up and render the book invaluable to any English-speaker smitten by Lorca’s work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/bo... and https://yalereview.org/article/poetry...



View all my reviews

The Dog of the North

The Dog of the North by Elizabeth Mckenzie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Dog of the North had some fine reviews and a Women's Prize nomination, but I found the writing and dialog clunky, although the story buzzed right along and the humor and certainly the Santa Barbara setting reminded me of early Sue Grafton. At the mercy of every character in the book, the protagonist bounces back and forth in her efforts to help everyone and avoid her soon-to-be ex-husband, her cantankerous, creepy father and her erratic mentally challenged grandmother while trying to find her missing parents who disappeared years ago in Australia. Age is well represented in this story with Arlo, the 93-year-old grandpa game to scour the outback with her and avoid his first wife and his shrewish second wife. There is also a cardiac event and a sinkhole and a mysterious corpse and a piñata to keep you turning pages, pages which for me were a bit ho hum.

View all my reviews

The English Understand Wool

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The English Understand Wool's take on the writing/publishing game is easily one of my top books for this year for writing, topic, size (67pp), plot and wit "like a dry cork," as a blurb pointed out. Dewitt is at her best.

View all my reviews

My Phantoms

My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not my favorite book this year due to the poisonous relationship between mother and daughter which made me want to look away, it was painful to be there for their infrequent meetings, but the writing is stellar. It is a slim, spare novel which moves right along.

View all my reviews

2022 Reading in Review

2022 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A satisfying year meeting my goal and reading a few extra volumes (69 total) mostly due to pandemic quarantining. My most generous reviews were of my husband's book Southern Voices: Biet Dong and the National Liberation Front (about the Vietnam War), several poetry volumes (discovered Robert Wrigley and Larry Levis, revisited Octavio Paz), and fiction: Still Life, Fight Night, The All of It, The Fell, Recitatif,Burntcoat, Trust, The Lovers, Companion Piece, The Passenger, and Small Things Like These; and non-fiction include Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Deborah Levy's memoir trilogy, Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir, Suppose a Sentence (on favorite sentences), In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(on death with dignity), The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (on endings), Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, and A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, both memoir hybrids and Figure It Out (on art and life). A satisfactory collection but this year I would like to strive for more classics, read more books in translation and finish Ducks, Newburyport. Certainly, something can be found in my TBR pile of 1,093 titles the oldest and highest rated of which is The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I am already looking at a maxed out library holds list and an ample in-house collection.

View all my reviews

Vertigo & Ghosts: Poems

Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first half of the book addresses Zeus and his rapist ways and it blew me away, captivated and chilled me. The second half deals with motherhood and nature and was less interesting, but her gifts of word choice made every poem worthwhile. Recommended by Andy Miller from Backlisted.fm where I hear about the best books.

View all my reviews

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice," and Bobby Western is a man in misery broken by the loss of his sister, several close friends, sought by government agents he knows not why, unemployed and unhoused much of the book allowing for extravagant descriptions of weather ("It had rained earlier and the moon lay in the wet street like platinum manhole cover.") nature, birds ("In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers."). The idea of the missing passenger from the downed plane is never clear, but I let it go as government chicanery. I meandered through the author's digressions on physics, math, war, atom bombs, guns, cars and Kennedys, what is a photon? I did not love the hallucinations and dream segments, but I would not, could not, stop reading because of the dialogue, rich descriptions and settings especially New Orleans and Ibiza. Is Bobby's future a "nameless burial in the hard caliche of a potter's field in a foreign land?" Reminded me of past reading treks with Robert Stone or Jim Harrison.

View all my reviews