Sorry for the radio silence, folks. I've been pretty busy lately, so I don't even have an off-the-cuff translation to share at the moment. In the near future I hope to put up another of Pessanha's elegias chinesas, though.
So what have I been up to? Meeting with a Chinese tutor again, only partially because I'll be visiting Taiwan in the fall. Grinding my way through the cases of 包公 Judge Bao in Chinese. Reading Erik Davis' awesome High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, about which I'll jaw more in another post. I'm about to start Paul Swanson's translation of the magisterial Tiantai Buddhist text 摩訶止観, which he calls Clear Serenity, Quiet Insight, and getting back into deeper Buddhist practice in general.
On the translation front, two things. I had the honor of talking to Goan poet Vimala Devi on the phone a while back, too, which was awesome. She gave me the rights to translate her first volume of poetry, Súria, which I'm working on right now. I don't know when it'll come out, or who will publish it, but I hope to do her justice. She's pushing 90, and I'd like the translation to come out before she leaves this world.
The book about the Santa Mónica nuns I mentioned a while back is going to be published in the near future, probably 2020, and that's been eating up most of my time. Me and my colleague are pretty stoked, even if revising our translation is a total drag. The working title is To Serve God in Holy Freedom.
I turn forty this month, but who cares about my birthday when today, August 1, 2019, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of someone who reflects America in all its complexity and, no matter how often his work might appear on high school or college syllabi, will never get the respect and understanding he deserves: Herman Melville.
So go read Moby-Dick, or The Confidence-Man, or Clarel, or any other Melville work, and I'll catch you again soon, caro leitor.
DAS
1 comment:
Happy birthday, Herman Melville!
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