In Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes about in the infirmities and isolation of his old age, circumstances which led him to take up botany as an exercise for his mind. The practice was delightful to him because it had no practical application. The apothecaries, he goes on to say, are disreputable people because “they tarnish the enamel of the meadows, cause the vivid dyes of the flowers to fade, and wither the freshness of the groves, rendering their shades and verdure not only insipid but disgusting. All those charming and beautiful statures which continually present themselves, are nothing to those who only wish to pound them in a mortar; and who would seek or imagine garlands for smiling shepherdesses, among the ingredients for a clister?”

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For my part, I do wish taking some brew or herbal tincture would make me feel better; I’d pick the flowers myself. The Tramadol I take for pain and fatigue isn’t gathered from the sap of poppies but synthesized I don’t know where—(in the not so recent past, synthesized in New Jersey or Nordrhein-Westphalia, and today, probably somewhere in China or India.) — (Someone with a better command of pharmacology, organic chemistry, and economic geography could write an interesting essay on the subject. — Anyway, I’m not as old as Rousseau was when he wrote Reveries—he was in his early 60s—but often feel geriatric, have the energy and agility of a geriatric. Anyway, I haven’t given up on making myself feel well. I’d pick a field of flowers to make myself feel well, leaving a reserve to pollinate themselves and go to seed.

Early-to-mid 60s isn’t that old anymore. 65—the age when Rousseau died—isn’t that old. But we live in an age of modern medicine. It might take a great deal of wealth, might take selling off a house or two, but life can be reliably extended past that point. Rousseau’s public had to wait until after his death to read Reveries. I find his incessant, wounded self-regard amusing rather than exhausting. That’s probably because—being a writer too, after all—I’m fairly egotistical myself. I doubt my patience would’ve been extended towards Rousseau as a living person. I’ve never translated a living person, and I don’t think I’ll start anytime soon.

Nevertheless, I believe Rousseau, think he’s being mostly sincere, when he expresses gratitude towards his enemies, credits them with destroying his reputation utterly, so that he can live out the rest of his life in peace. But I also don’t doubt that he would have gladly stepped back into the limelight had it been an option for him. Hermits love an audience. How else are we supposed to imbibe their wisdom? Rousseau knew full well that he had an audience for his work. The humility he expresses is transparent affectation—not the worst kind of affectation, since the writing is brilliant—transparent since those who are utterly ruined by life disappear completely from it. Their traces disappear in an instant, like grass springing up after someone has trodden over it.

I haven’t been ruined by life because however unpleasant it is to be me on a day-to-day basis, I can still share the earth with people that I care about, who care for me; an audience, no matter how large, would be a poor substitute for that. If there’s any psychological toll for the daily aches and pains it’s knowing how many people, most people, don’t have the resources to escape from it. I’m not forced, like my paternal grandfather, to work through that kind of pain. A recent acquaintance of mine, a feminist as she labels herself, once said that having a wife who earns more than you is “always emasculating”. I disagree, but even if that were the case, emasculation is a fair trade for paid hospital bills and being with someone who trusts that even if you hurt too much to hold them, you would hold them if you could. I wish the earth was always this gentle.

Personae: Steve and Steve, Outback, Kavya

Midnight. Light rain. Colonial tombstones. A convenience store along the municipal thoroughfare. Tire marks in the grass. Through the mist billboards can be discerned, for a casino, for a personal injury attorney. The latter holds an obsolete brick-style cellular phone in one hand and a bag with a dollar sign in the other. Discarded paper cups and pastry wrappers dissolve into a sodden translucence. In the alleyway to the rear, an orange tabby named Outback—“cause he lives out back”—eats wet kibble from a margarine tub. Either video slots must annihilate the democratic republic as a system of government or become one with it. Prediction markets, the seminaries and academies of our age.

The night has matured beautifully. The clouds part to reveal a few vague stars. Plushie Easter rabbits sit along rowhome windowsills. The charming simplicity of seasonal décor. The melody of the day has long settled into gentle oblivion. The cardinals have ceased the tropical piping. They sleep among the tentative early cherry blossoms. A fox crosses the street, staying within the bounds of the crosswalk markings. The traffic cameras duly register his presence. An automated female voice advises pedestrians, largely absent, to avoid a turning bus. The spirit of peace and wistfulness pours out over everything.

“I can get you next time,” Steve promises. The other Steve holds open the front door to the night, somewhat waveringly, causing the digital chime to sound out periodically. “I can get you next time.” Kavya, the clerk on duty, says he could take the hot dog if he wished. “But hasn’t this happened before?” Steve says, “It’s happened before. I think I do this all the time.” Kavya answers that “that”, meaning his inability to pay, has not happened, not to her. “You pay always,” she says, “I don’t remember—I don’t remember this happening—here, you can have it.” She gestures, openhanded, at the carton containing the hot dog in question, the gesture encompassing the packets of mustard and relish, the condiments of Steve’s choice, that lay beside the card reader. “You can take it.”

Instead of answering, Steve turns away, exiting, barely able to squeeze himself through the door, as the other Steve was in the act of pulling the door shut, the chime sounding again. He looks at his departing companion, then at the clerk, shrugs, takes his leave also, the hot dog in its carton, the packets of relish and mustard remaining on the counter. All three are, unbeknownst to the others, picturing a hillside of well-appointed vineyards drawing down to a teeming riverside, a scene not in springtime but in fall, the opposite end of the year, a scene during some past era or epoch, when teams of mules or teams of men drew barges along the river, all transport against the current, against the winds, by means of muscle, the fatigue of labor relieved by the consumption of cured meats, fermented beverages. In lives there is effort so strenuous it can only be relieved by the pause in between lives, a palliative caesura. Meanwhile, the cat, hunched in the alleyway outback, munches down on his wet kibble.

• Ancient World: monarchy

• Middle Ages: constitutional monarchy

• Modernity: various nations, franchising, a universal priesthood

My thoughts were nowhere near as elevated at the tail end of January, when the Northeast was locked in a weekslong ice storm, my wife and I, having been cooped up too long in the house, took a walk to the local beer store. Despite the inclement conditions, the pavement slick with ice a local drunk (a drunk as yet unfamiliar to me) launching himself at the doors, banging on the windows, all to be let inside. The shop owner, dressed in a robe and slippers, came down from the apartment upstairs, and opened the doors for us. If had come a minute later, so the drunk, assured us, then he would have kicked the doors in. I must have made a face, grimaced or something, because he turned to me, and, after sizing me up, seeing my scarf and cowboy hat, said: “What the fuck are you looking at? You look like you’re from the Revolutionary War.”

There is, I think, a certain type of Philly person—a certain type of Philly lowlife if we’re being ungenerous—who associates anything old-fashioned with the American Revolution, but the hat I was wearing is more —the oil baron Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, in There Will Be Blood wears a similar hat, specifically a Western fedora. Mine was purchased for my sister’s wedding in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, which, coincidentally, has one of the highest concentrations of Buddhists in America. Analogous geography and celebrity philanthropists led to a group migration of Tibetan lamas starting in the 1970s.

There are no stories of saints like Milarepa in Colorado, at least as far as I know. Among the mining, ranching, and beer-brewing magnates of that state, Élaine Radigue would be hard pressed to find anyone that fit to inspire her devotional minimalist compositions, but the landscape of the Rocky Mountains is worth that, worth that certainly. It was the first inspiration of Radigue’s friend and collaborator La Monte Young—still alive at 90 years—who was born in a log cabin in Idaho. In both, we find tones stretched into geologic immensity. It was equation—landscape= music, music=landscape—that I lached onto immediately when I first encountered minimalist composition through bands like Earth and Sunn0)). Anything on a smaller scale didn’t really interest me.

As it happened, I was listening to a lot of Éliane Radigue before she died in February. The trip to the beer store turned out to be my last, at least for the foreseeable future, since the anticonvulsant medication I take for fibromyalgia interacts badly with alcohol—booze means problems. But, as it turned out, I didn’t necessarily need to mix beer with pills to feel terrible, since one of the other medications for fibromyalgia, Duloxetine, an antidepressant, triggered a dangerous drop in sodium levels, which left me delirious and racked with spasmodic pain. During that time, laid out on the floor of my home office—the only place quiet enough to sleep in my hypersensitive state—I would listen to Jetsun Mila on repeat.

I can’t say I was in a morbid, or even a reflective state of mind; more than anything I was annoyed by my compounding health problems. Radigue’s music was comfort during an illness, but not because of any spiritual theme, nothing about samsara, the Buddhist cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth, but just a sentimental attachment to empty quiet landscapes, the kind that sit in the background of a Fredric Remington painting—the gold of aspen leaves, newly fallen snow—early in the autumn, or late into spring—and purple mountains—yes, they can be purple. More than any devotional importance, the steady, seemingly infinitely sustained tones of Jetsun Mila was a sop; I’m not sure if Éliane Radigue would have approved of such a use for her music, but am grateful for it nonetheless. It made downing glasses full of saltwater much easier. Thank you Éliane.

LeClair: Would you name some writers with whom you have affinities?

DeLillo: This is the great bar mitzvah question. Probably the movies of Jean-Luc Godard had a more immediate effect on my early work than anything I’d read. Movies in general may be the not-so-hidden influence on a lot of modern writing, although the attraction has waned, I think. The strong image, the short ambiguous scene, the dream sense of some moves, the artificiality, the arbitrary choices of some directors, the cutting and editing. The power of images. This is something I kept thinking about when I was writing Americana. This power had another effect. It caused people to walk around all day saying, “Movies can do so much.” It’s movies in part that seduced people into thinking that the novel was dead. The power of the film image seemed to be overwhelming our little world of print. Film could do so much. Print could only trot across the page. But movies and novels are too closely related to work according to shifting proportions. If the novel dies, movies will die with it.

That last line seems like a throwaway, a bit too pat, but considering how bad most movies are nowadays—made by and for nonreaders—I think DeLillo might have been on to something. Narrative art, at least as most people experience it, is sinking further and further into the anoxic slurry of franchises and reboots. Short form video threatens to devour our capacity for all but the most simplistic and derivative storytelling. AI-boosters have been hyping up various text-to-video services, making outsized claims about how “Hollywood is finished” because of vacant reels like, to give a satirical but nonetheless representative example, “Iron Man at Dunder Mifflin”; but as laughable as those claims are they’re also not much of an exaggeration when we think about the culture industry writ large. Just ask a video editor where the jobs are at: feature films or short form content?

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For my part, it’s difficult to think of an active filmmaker that has influenced me more than any writer has. I’ve been inspired by aspects of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s work: his artful but unabashed use of genre forms, his absolute control over the narrative tone, his restrained but nonetheless visceral depictions of violence. But I could also credit the novelist and short story writer Fleur Jaeggy with a similar influence, at least when it comes to tone. As for translation, which is the majority of my published work, I can’t say that any particular filmmaker has influenced me at all. Film images are simply not a useful resource in the mundane activity of rendering a German novel into an English one. Watching Steve Coogan’s adaptation of Tristram Shandy tells me nothing about how to translate Jean Paul Richter, but reading Laurence Sterne, a huge influence on Richter and many other 18^th and 19^th century German writers, tells me a great deal.

The dominant media forms of today—gaming, live streaming, short form video, et cetera—have little or nothing to offer a writer; the movies of today, much more than in 1982, offer much the same; but I would reject what is often given as a corollary: that writers, especially fiction writers, cannot adequately represent contemporary reality. Such assertions ignore the many 20^th century fiction writers— Philip K. Dick, Iain M. Banks, E.M. Forrester, Jorge Luis Borges to name a few—who anticipated systems of infinitely available media and the stultifying effects such systems would have.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about JR, William Gaddis’ massive 1975 novel about a child savant—the titular JR—who manipulates the US government and stock market through various investment schemes and shell companies, which he manages via pay phone calls. I’ve never been able to make it more than halfway through, but not due to lack of interest. Life keeps intervening. At some 770 pages (my NYRB Classics edition) it’s a significant investment of time, compounded by the novel being told almost entirely in unattributed dialog. My last readthrough faltered because I needed to finish up with another Jean Paul translation. Somehow that was easier than reading a fellow American who was active during my lifetime.

Still, whenever I’m lost trying to think about how to depict reality as it is in 2026, more often than not, instead of borrowing a library Blu-Ray of Kiyoshi Kurosawa or David Cronenberg, I take JR down from a high shelf and wipe the dust from the cover. Despite its midcentury trappings—the TVs, the payphones, the magazines, the money orders—the enervating style and structure of the novel, the dozens of characters who constantly interrupt each other, mishear or deliberately misunderstand each other, and, above all, demonstrate an oceanic level of drooling credulity;—despite me not having read through more than half of that book, I come back from perusing JR confused and humbled but also energized by the plain fact by that AT LEAST SOMEONE COULD COME CLOSE TO DEPICTING HOW CRUEL, HOW GREEDY, AND HOW STUPID THE UNITED STATES IS, a feeling that is counterbalanced by another plain fact: THE UNITED STATES HAS BECOME EVEN MORE CRUEL, EVEN MORE GREEDY, EVEN MORE STUPID THAN GADDIS EVER IMAGINED.

This righteous and necessary condemnation of our culture, difficult to stomach for manifold reasons, is made even more righteous and necessary, and difficult to stomach, because of its messenger. No glib liberal or maladroit leftist, Gaddis was a perpetually embarrassed patrician who understood that America’s cruelty, greed, and stupidity foreclosed the possibility of authentic conservatism, at least a conservatism that upholds dignity, restraint, and the value of tradition in art. Being a child of the 1920s, a time swiftly passing from living memory, It’s difficult to know what Gaddis would have made of the Trump administration, whose senior positions, not even counting the President himself, are filled by television presenters and podcast hosts. It’s difficult to know what he would have made of Elon Musk, who last year, while nodding out on ketamine during a press conference at the White House, showed prominent bruises on his face that he incurred after a fistfight with other members of the Trump administration. It’s difficult to know what Gaddis would have made of so many contemporary developments, but disgust and indignation are, I think, safe bets to make. I wonder if Polymarket has the odds on that.

Much of JR and Gaddis’ subsequent novels were inspired by his day job doing public relations and film production work. He was under no illusions about the nature of that work. While at Pfizer, he wrote to his friend, the novelist David Markson, “I am hung up with an operation of international piracy that deals in drugs, writing speeches on the balance of payments deficit but mostly staring out the window.” It’s a position that a lot of us find ourselves in. The institutions are decayed, criminal in nature. But instead of staring out the window, we stare at our phones, confronted by a legion of hectoring voices, wanting to buy—or buy into—some kind of awful bullshit.

Despite its reputation as a hipster mecca, Portland in the 2000s was a provincial place, especially where literature was concerned, and Bookworm was a lifeline and an entrepôt for what an actual metropole had to offer, what college recruiters like call the life of the mind. In between taking calls from stranded motorists, I would improvise some sort of cultural scene with my peers, trading book and music recommendations. Despite the contemporary equation of coworker with dullard, they were never as philistine as management. The former would be game for the most outlandish recommendations. The latter would laugh at me to my face because I had never watched Little People, Big World.

I am not sure exactly when, but it must have been on one of those commutes that I first listened to Silverblatt’s interview with W. G. Sebald, an interview that planted the seed, or at least manured the soil, for my interest in German literature and translation. At the very beginning, Silverblatt asks Sebald about the influence of German poetry on his writing, citing Heinrich Heine and other well-known figures, a question which Sebald then redirects into an answer about the influence of German prose, citing writers that, despite my having taken the language in high school and community college, I had never heard of before, unlike, say, Heine. But Silverblatt evidently had heard of these writers. It’s when Sebald cites Adelbert Stifter as a key influence that he lets out that soft gasp of surprised recognition. I just had to know who this guy was. That second or so of airtime was material enough for a longstanding preoccupation.

Armed with the minimum-wage-plus-commission I earned at AAA, I would hunt for paperbacks at library sales and college-adjacent secondhand shops, hoping for a critical edition of Lenz or Bunte Steine, unbothered or at least undeterred by the cracked spine and smudged notes in the margins; the near unavailability of such books in the U.S. market salvaged them from what would otherwise have been an unsalable condition. Sources for an abandoned graduate thesis, castoffs from a retiring professor, these books became, through that Sebald interview, material for expanded consciousness. Through Sebald’s influences—through writers such as Gottfried Keller, Stifter, and Robert Walser—I could see how writers could refine workaday, provincial experience into something that, while not poetry itself, approached it in its beautiful rhythms and clarity of its images.

Later, when Anecdotes, my first book of translations, was published, I heard from my publisher that Silverblatt had read and enjoyed it. Of course, I nursed grandiose ambitions of going onto his program, of trading brilliant aperçus with contemporary literature’s most attentive reader. In hindsight, that was silly. Silverblatt had read and enjoyed thousands of books in his lifetime. He paid attention to my work because he was special, not the other way around. What I regret is not getting into contact with him just to express my gratitude. The world of serious literature is a small place and, provided you are not asking for a favor, quite accessible. If there is a living writer, a living critic, or just a living reader whom you admire, it is imperative that you get in contact with them, if only to let them know that their work is appreciated. This is how literary culture is maintained on a fundamental level. This fellowship is the work of a lifetime, but, as Silverblatt demonstrated every time he went on air, what a life and what a time.

“If you had been at the tavern, I would have gotten you a drink—I would have liked to, anyway. You could use some cheering up.” Their shadows, advancing before them, lay crisp against the soiled ground. “Not at all. In fact, my prospects have never been better. I couldn’t hope for better prospects, not even in Heaven.” They passed by an open field where a camp for the indigent had lately been erected. Sparks and the glow from a fire, an indulgence in better weather, rose in the middle distance. “And how is that? How do you live such an exalted state?” The rag-choked mouth of a hovel opened up beside them. A child or a small monkey cried out from within; the cry was smothered. A few blocks later, the pair concluded their exchange. “Well, speaking for myself only, the conditions on Earth seem much the same as they will be in the sweet hereafter. As scripture tells us, the saved neither eat nor drink, such is their rejoicing.” With that, they departed.

“There’s a new flush of ducks in Piss Creek. In another month, something will have lasted a year.” From Backwardness by Garielle Lutz

Perfect Days (2023) would have not worked as well as it did if not for the elegant lavatory architecture of Tokyo. (In fact, a design magazine has published an article advising travelers to the city about where to find the toilets featured in the film.) The main character, Hirakawa, a janitor, (played by Kōji Yakusho) can be convincingly avuncular, can be a credibly stern yet kindhearted coworker, so long as feces and urine, the raw materials of his profession, remain reported, implied, not in frame. Hirakawa blends rather well with the elegance of the Shibuya district. The snobs that turn up their noses at him seem like they could do that to anyone; they do so to their own children. The janitor is no different. He belongs there.

It’s much more difficult to imagine such a film in America. We don’t really believe in a humble yet dignified life, one filled with a quiet inner beauty, at least not for janitors. Our filthy public toilets reflect the general sentiment of the public. Wim Wenders would be hard put romanticizing the lavatory culture of New York, let alone Scranton or Wilmington. Imagine snapping a photo of dappled sunlight as it glances off bathroom tile, only to have Joe Biden step into frame, the taut scalp between his hair plugs glistening. (The 46th President is said to visit Philadelphia often.)

Cleaning toilets is also the fate of the family patriarch in Tokyo Sonata (2008). Though it factors less in the overall plot, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa doesn’t spare us the usual filth of such places. Laid off from his job, salaryman Ryūhei Sasaki (played by Teruyuki Kagawa), has to make ends meet as a janitor at a mall, where he—along with the viewer—has to stare down human waste in way that Wim Wenders gently avoids. Though it doesn’t seem so at first, Tokyo Sonata ends up being a kind of spiritual prologue to Perfect Days, as Sasaki finally learns to apply himself to a more humble métier The penultimate scene, where Saski scrubs an escalator, hints that he has also found virtuosity along with his piano playing son.

Suburban Bus Ride

The weather had turned warm, outright damp, during the film screening of Perfect Days at the Woodmere Art Museum. The sun had gone down well before the film had started, and so, when we emerged onto the wide drive that fronted the museum, it felt as if it were deep night, if not early morning, though the buses were still running. We had tried to economize getting there, to this suburban art museum, located in the wooded, gently rolling hills just within the Philadelphia city limits, but missed our transfer, a mere signpost, unsheltered, along a turnpike, and had to hail a car from a mall parking lot further down the road. Our driver, a black woman, listened to an audio book about the history of slave rebellions in the Antebellum South.

As we listened to an account of the enslaved being whipped to death by vindictive planters, it occurred to me that a few of the buildings in the vicinity, a roadside inn turned local eatery for instance, had been built before the abolition of slavery in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which, being enacted in 1780, was the first legislation of its kind in the United States, yet another credit to the Quaker influence on state politics, but I wondered what the Quakers thought of slave rebellions in their own country. As it turned out, they were conflicted, prefiguring the habitual position of American liberalism for the next few centuries. Most objected to the practice of slavery but objection was overridden by a commitment to nonviolence.

The film screening was free, open to museum members and nonmembers alike, but, having hailed a car going there (the particular service we used not being important) we decided to chance it on the bus again. It came and, what’s more, came at the specified time, a minor miracle for SEPTA, our regional transit authority, though they have gotten much better at promptness and consistency during the past year, budget woes notwithstanding. There were only a few others aboard, two or three maximum, coming from the service jobs in the wealthy suburbs, going back to their homes in less wealthier suburbs. We made our transfer this time. The wheel of American commerce was still spinning, if at a more relaxed pace.

On this date, January 9th, 1793, the first manned balloon flight in America was launched from the grounds of the Walnut Street Prison in Philadelphia. Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a Frenchman, flew a hydrogen gas balloon to an altitude of approximately 5800 feet, travelling over the Delaware River, before he touched down in Deptford Township, New Jersey, a distance of approximately 22 miles. President Washington was in attendance for the launch, as were future presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. The hydrogen used to inflate the balloon was generated by mixing sulfuric acid with iron filings: Fe(s) + H₂SO₄(aq) → FeSO₄(aq) + H₂(g). The site, a prison yard, was chosen for its relative lack of obstructing trees. The capital was otherwise unsuitable for aviation, having been laid out as “a greene country towne” according to the wishes of its founder, William Penn, in 1682.

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I don’t begrudge anyone for engaging in the year-end content mill. In fact, I’m neglecting my duty as a publisher—(at least my duties as a publisher who doesn’t have a publicity department)—by not using the occasion to promote the works that I published. In 2025, Paradise Editions published a grand total of two pamphlets, which together consist of less than a hundred pages of relatively large type. Still, I’m proud at having designed and assembled Israel Bonilla’s Phoretics. It doesn’t serve Israel’s work at all for me to adopt some anti-promotional stance, now of all times. I’m on social media constantly. Why should I have scruples about it all of a sudden?

It’s just not my job. As a translator and publisher, I’m a custodian of texts; I do them far more justice when I write procedurally, impersonally, commercially, rather than reflectively: Book A, about Subject B, is now, as of Date C, available through Website D, for Price E. International shipping charges reflect the expense of the service; Publisher not liable for lost packages or duty charges; Thank you for your order.

Speaking of translations, I had a novel by Jean Paul and a short collection of essays by Heinrich von Kleist come out this year. The former was published by another publishing house; the latter was, by most definitions, self-published—both to little fanfare. That was at least half my fault. I was responsible for sending out review copies, for following up with those reviewers, for doing all the other promotional chores. Part of my reluctance to promote stems from the fact that the substantive work on both books is more than a year behind me. They’re the products of 2023, of 2024. Print—especially the printing of translations—works slow.

Why should I begrudge anyone for posting their yearly highlights? I’m glad that did. I did happen to read his profile of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a favorite director of mine; I was aware of the article because I talked to him directly about it, before we saw a rare screening of Kurosawa’s 1998 comedy drama License to Live at the Japan Center in New York. Rob’s thoughts on the film helped me clarify my own. But I also found out, through his retrospective newsletter about 2025, that Rob also wrote about the Met’s Caspar David Friedrich exhibition, about Kelly Reichardt’s recent art-heist movie, and about a dozen other things. I had no idea, and I follow the guy, as they say, on all the socials.

The deluge of content never stops; it’s impossible to pick out everything worthwhile that’s trapped in the current. Those yearly retrospectives are like a sluice gate, channeling the suspended ore to where it can be panned out and sifted, while the rest floats on by, out of sight and out of memory. If there was anything in 2025 you might have wanted to read but did not, could not, well, I’m sorry. It really is too bad that we can’t read everything we want, write about everything we want to write about. I plan to do better at this, but that’s a promise about production; when it comes to quality, there can be no guarantees.

These interests were unpopular with the other writers who attended the meetup. Not only were they uncomfortable with the genre’s historical association with eugenics, male chauvinism, and colonial expansionism, but they also held a concomitant (and oftentimes stronger) aversion toward so-called literary fiction or even literary ambition in general. To them, both tendencies—the chauvinistic and the literary—were artifacts of a past best overcome if not forgotten entirely. I never, not as far as I can recall, pressed my own marginal pursuits and preferences on the rest of the group, at least not during their formal meetings, except for one particular night.

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I had been seated at a small table in a back room of the café. There were about five or six others seated randomly with me, gathered to critique each other’s work. A woman (I feel safe in this recollection, as pronouns had been introduced) began to talk off-topic, (I’m not sure why) about James Joyce and how he was a writer who “sucked so much” and who “just wrote ungrammatical nonsense” that “nobody really read anyway”. It was the usual anti-modernist boilerplate, but I happened to have —as if I had been furnished with some preprepared argument for a debate tournament—a copy of Ulysses in my tote bag, specifically the excellent Oxford Classics annotated edition, which I pulled out and set on the table.

Despite having read and loved Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (typically enough) in high school, I had only gotten through Ulysses relatively recently, during a post-college stint teaching English in rural Austria. For reasons I can no longer clearly remember, I took that Oxford Classics edition with me, schlepping it on the transcontinental flight to Europe and the subsequent train journey from Salzburg to Bad Ischl, the historic spa town where I was posted; maybe I’d brought in anticipation of boredom and loneliness. That seems likely.

The winter I spent in Bad Ischl was particularly snowy, even by the standards of the Salzkammergut, an astoundingly beautiful district of clear Alpine lakes that had been settled since the late Neolithic and for that reason designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, though the scenic component was not always apparent, especially in winter, when the landscape was obscured by capricious mountain weather. But the place always had atmosphere in abundance. The front window of my garret apartment—yes, it was a garret apartment—looked out on the Totes Gebirge, the “Dead Mountains”, and icy gusts would blow down from the high limestone plateau, shaking the Christmas lights strung along the narrow village roads and piling the snow into heavy drifts along the sidewalks.

That Christmas season, my teaching schedule, already lean in anticipation of the winter break, was canceled entirely, and so I decided to commit to Ulysses. It seemed an appropriately perverse occasion to read a novel famously set on a single day in June. There wasn’t much else to do besides watching German-dubbed episodes of Two and a Half Men and getting drunk on mulled wine at the Christmas market. Seemingly no degree of harsh winter weather could cancel the Christmas market. But as it turned out, I didn’t need so much time, and I tore through the book in about a week, only consulting the voluminous endnotes and scholarly essays when it was absolutely necessary. Needless to say, I didn’t understand everything, or even half of the things, that I read, but I did enjoy it. The local dialect could be just as impenetrable.

If my stay in Austria convinced me of anything it was that I was not meant to be a teacher. If it convinced me of anything else it was that I could be marginally happy anywhere I could take long walks in the forest and also—almost a century’s worth of received opinions notwithstanding—that I enjoyed Ulysses. Back in Seattle, I began to revisit my favorite parts, especially the hallucinatory “Circe” chapter, in which Bloom and Daedalus meet at a brothel in Dublin’s red-light district. The jumble of characters (some of them from other books) was no less disorienting, but I was also still viscerally shocked and amused by the chapter’s psychosexual fantasmagoria, especially the hero Leopold Bloom living out repressed impregnation fantasies. The guy would have loved browsing tumblr.

I wasn’t going to tell this woman at Café Racer the particulars of “Circe” or any other chapter. Joyce’s own frequenting of prostitutes certainly would not have endeared him to her either. Instead, I simply said that I liked Joyce’s writing and that I happened to be rereading him, producing my own copy, complete with its cracked spine and greasy, dog-eared pages, as proof. Her response was that I was just “a graduate student” and so I had to “pretend to like Joyce” in order to fit in with my colleagues. I explained that I hadn’t studied English literature or Irish literature but German literature, and only at the undergraduate level, and that it was common, very common in my experience, for academics to be just as suspicious of canonical literature as she was, if in a more systematic way, or else become jaded about the subject from years of studying it professionally with diminishing career prospects. I wasn’t “defending him, defending that overrated writer” as she said, but defending myself and my own tastes: “No, I don’t go to college anymore…no, I really do like him…I really do…honest.”

That must have been eloquent enough because, after spluttering for a moment, the woman left our table. I was worried that she might complain, having, by her simple absence, lost the argument, but none of the organizers approached me. I stopped going to the meetups soon after that. I didn’t feel burned by the experience—far from it—and I hope the woman didn’t either. The science-fiction events were well organized, and I admired a lot of the writing that was presented at them. There was a much higher standard, I felt, than at the other writer’s groups in the city, even those sponsored by The Richard Hugo House, a large and well-respected literary nonprofit. I just realized that I had my own fundamentally different goals as a reader and a writer. I cared not only about the craft but the history of that craft. And with even less speed and shrewdness, I also realized that the culture that supported that sort of argument, what made it possible to be in the same room together arguing about James Joyce, was about to be erased, was actually in the process of being erased, and what was replacing it was unimaginably more crude and stupid than anything offered during the open mic. In a very palpable sense that erasure had already been achieved.

So far I have avoided mentioning an event that in retrospect must have been a factor in me wanting to leave Seattle. This is not because of any deliberate rhetorical strategy but simply because the event, however horrible, has slowly been fading from memory. On the morning of May 30^th 2012, a frequent but disgruntled customer of Café Racer returned and, after he was told to leave a final time, fatally shot four people there, two customers and two employees, a fourth person, another employee, surviving with serious injuries. Those killed included Drew and Joe, members of a local folk-punk band, God’s Favorite Beefcake, whom I vaguely knew from going to shows at Café Racer and elsewhere. The gunman then fled the scene, later killing a random woman elsewhere in the city and stealing her car, before he ultimately turned the gun, or rather one of his guns, on himself.

Even when I lived close to Café Racer, during my time at the University of Washington, I never went there except in the evenings, but for a year or more, basically until I left for Austria, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I could have been there. A dear friend of mine, Abi, certainly could have. She lived a few houses over and regularly visited the café at the time when the shooting happened. I would read a description of the killer, I would see his face on reproduced security footage, and I couldn’t help but remember me and my friends there with him, even though such a memory would almost certainly be false. I couldn’t help but think that way, picturing us together, me and my friends just sitting there, eating bad food, drinking bad coffee, talking about music or books or whatever while the shooter, off to himself, planned on killing us and every other person in the room. It may very well have happened like that, but having a definite memory of it seems impossible. The time of day is wrong, for one thing.

In the days and weeks after the shooting, I would see random Facebook commenters insisting that the victims were at fault for not being armed at the time, as if anyone reasonable would have felt the need to carry a handgun, or multiple handguns, into Café Racer on a Wednesday morning. In Austria, my students and co-teachers were shocked, though in their stereotypical understanding of America not surprised, to hear that I knew or rather was vaguely acquainted with the victims of a mass shooting and that I had had a chance, an outside but not insignificant chance, of becoming the victim of a particular mass shooting myself. It confirmed every other prior assumption they had about my country. It was like telling them I ate hamburgers every day, another stereotypical belief that these kids harbored, maybe the teachers too, and which was impossible to disabuse them of following that other, more weighty admission.

Café Racer had, understandably, an irregular history following the shooting. I can’t recall exactly how many times it reopened and then closed again—“at least twice”, so the Wikipedia entry states. I would like to say that it was “never the same” but that vague cliché has too strong of an emotional valence for what I felt on coming back to the US.. The initial fear and outrage at the shooting was replaced by the dull grind of living in a city that was fast becoming overwhelmingly unaffordable for writers, musicians, and service workers, the kinds of people who were murdered that day. Seattle had become world-famous not from its tech industry but for its cultural scene, and the city had repaid that debt by shuttering its cultural venues, one way or another.

I was happy to go back to Café Racer whenever I could, but other places, and the other interests that those places fostered, gradually took over. Nowadays, its memory is most often reduced to that one argument I had there, an argument that I had won, arguably, by stuttering and gesturing toward a book I had randomly brought along with me. Much less often, if I’m being honest, I do also remember Joe and Drew and I try to think about the other people that died that day, not even vague acquaintances but people who had, nevertheless, lived lives very similar to mine, playing in local bands, writing a first novel or first poetry collection, exhibiting a painting or collage on café walls. We all lived such similar lives until they, the unlucky ones, went to Café Racer on a Wednesday morning and were killed for it, some of them executed with shots to the back of the head. It disgusts me to see how typical this story has become.

During the past decade or so, places like Café Racer have become increasingly rare. Coffee costs more. Food costs more. Booze costs more. Rent costs more. Books are one of the few things that don’t cost more, but fewer people are reading them. Amateur art has migrated online, only to be replaced by AI-generated content, devoid of individual personality and social context. The world has been remade in the image of the mass shooter: full of lonely, resentful creeps with murderous intent. It has been remade according to their wishes: those who would participate in any kind of modest cultural life have been driven away, sometimes killed, and the places they once frequented are now closed forever. Whatever faults those science fiction writers had, their vulgarity pales in comparison to our current leaders—university administrators, nonprofit directors, editors-in-chief, producers, publishers, landlords, and so on—who do not even need the pretext of a spree killing to demolish one institution after another.

These are dreary, dispiriting times, but I still hold onto that vision of that shared cultural life. I still cherish being able to read an excellent book, still cherish being able to discuss those books with different people with different views, different values, different backgrounds, in a physical space together. Even when the talk is sharp there is a gentleness to it, a sort of reciprocal grace, that transcends difference. This can’t be reproduced online, not anymore. The slop has crowded it out. But there are still rooms in this world, in Seattle and elsewhere, with good or at least tolerable company, full of people who deserve to be heard, or at least heard out. There is fellowship to be had. Merry Christmas.

Here is how Empyrean describes the novel:

Declaring himself the inventor of a new literary genre—one which “explains little and banters much”—Jean Paul in The Parson in Jubilee: An Appendix (1797) portrays the joys and sorrows of the Schwers family on the eve of a momentous occasion: the double fifty-year anniversaries of the parson’s marriage and of his service to his village congregation. When a messenger arrives with a letter appointing the pastor’s son, Ingenuin, to the pastorship from which the father will soon retire, the romance between Alithea, the family’s adoptive daughter, and Ingenuin is starting to blossom. Through a series of “pastoral and encyclical letters”, Jean Paul presents the reader with an uproarious satirical complement to the book’s idyllic aspects. The book concludes with “The Appendix of the Appendix, or, My Christmas Eve,” one of Jean Paul’s most stunning and wondrous dream visions. Never before available in English, studiously annotated by translator Matthew Spencer, here is an irreverent, unclassifiable work from one of Germany’s most beloved and eccentric novelists.

As you can probably tell, The Parson in Jubilee is what a hack reviewer—(that critically endangered species, in need of our protection)—might call a “difficult” book, meaning that it’s formally inventive, with multiple changes in form, register, and perspective across its modest page count of 170 pages. But if the novel is “difficult” then Jean Paul wears that difficulty lightly. “Audacious” or “playful” might serve better, especially since play often requires serious effort on the part of the player. So let that word imply another word: fun

The stakes are low: just a simple country wedding and the anniversary of an old married couple. There is nothing “timely” or “necessary” about The Parson in Jubilee. It came out in 1797. Whether it is “luminous”, to use another book marketing phrase, depends on your appetite for JP’s antics. But low stakes are a prerequisite for free play. The score of a Harlem Globetrotters game is beside the point. It’s an exhibition game: no need to follow every move, let alone perform them at home. And, as I hope might be implied by the epithet of “studious”, I do try my best, like a tutor for a star college athlete, to do all the academic grunt work myself.

From the Shoproom Floor: Snail Staircase

For my social media posts about The Parson in Jubilee, I chose a passage for the first chapter, one that really exemplifies, at least in my mind, that classic bantering style of JP. It concerns worldly ambition, specifically the worldly ambition of pastors, priests, and spiritual leaders of all kinds, and how such ambitions might be realized:

Of all the stairs that ascend to the pulpit, there is perhaps none more moldering and worm-eaten than the gradus ad Parnassum, scholarly discipline, this Jacob’s Ladder of dreams; to ascend, one may set the siege-ladder of coarseness, the gallows-ladder of simony, against the pulpit and run up—or clamber up on apron strings, or rise in the aerostatic machine of a relative—:in short, one climbs all stairs—even clandestine ones—faster than the snail staircase of merit.

I’m especially fond of that last phrase, “snail staircase…”, because it allowed me to make what might otherwise be a bad move for a translator: deliberately ignoring the direct equivalent and opting for a word that makes less sense. Strange mollusk-related connotations aside, “Schneckentreppe” just means spiral staircase in German. It’s not used as frequently as “Wendeltreppe”, but it’s far less rare than the hapax legomena—words that appear only once in a given language—that JP deploys liberally throughout his voluminous writings, The Parson in Jubilee being far from an exception.

But it is quite normal, or at least not outlandishly strange, to call a spiral staircase a “snail staircase”, at least in other European languages: “Escalier en colimaçon” in French; “Schodiště šnekové” in Czech; “Slakkenhuis­trap” in Dutch. Even the Uralic outlier of Hungarian has such a word: “csigalépcső”. Had I been working in those languages, rather than English, I could have better preserved both the literal and metaphorical senses of the passage; I was disappointed to find out that Albert Béguin’s 1981 French translation doesn’t do that, but simplifies the last sentence to, “bref, par tous les escaliers, – les secrets, du moins, – on monte plus vite que par l’escalier du mérite.” This is quite ironic since many people assume, naturally enough, that Jean Paul wrote in French.

Anyway, rendering “Schneckentreppe” as “snail staircase” might be considered a clumsy move. Eliding the difficulty, as Béguin does, makes for a smoother reading experience, but I don’t think I would be translating JP well if every passage was easily and immediately intelligible. That’s a fool’s errand for such an author anyway. In any case, I believe it’s much closer to the original spirit of the writing to have this absurd image of a staircase purpose built for snails.

Meaning gets lost in translation. That can’t be prevented. What remains under our control as translators is how that meaning gets lost. I’m perfectly fine if “snail staircase” doesn’t evoke a spiral staircase in the mind of the reader. That emphasis is better placed on the slowness inherent in climbing the ladder of success through honest means. I’m sure every reasonable person can agree on that.

“What are you reading?” I had to be delicate in answering his question. It was Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars, translated by Alan Brown and reissued by NYRB Classics. “It’s kind of a horror novel, I suppose, a modernist one, written by a Frenchman.” I could have gone on to say that it was about a serial murder of women, the titular Moravagine, and his sympathetic psychiatrist, who narrates the novel, but I was unsure of how to broach the topic of transgressive literature in a professional setting.

I was ready to let the matter drop when he picked up the book. He examined the cover, front and back, very carefully, adjusting his glasses. In working out the pronunciation of the title, he seemed to grasp what the novel was about. “Well,” he said after a pause, “you certainly read some interesting books.”

I had nothing to say to this, not directly; instead, I vaguely described my research and publishing interests, about how, during the early 20^th century, popular genres such as horror and mystery were more closely linked with so-called high literature. The two weren’t thought of as diametric opposites, as is commonly supposed today. The rheumatologist repeated his remark, that I certainly read interesting books.

I could have also gone on to say that, despite or perhaps because of the tasteless nature of the novel, it had some profound things to say about what we would now call mental health and the concept of health in general. “Diseases are,” states the psychiatrist narrator, early on.

We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may have even created us. They belong to this state of activity that we call life. They may be its main activity.

Reflecting on the degree to which chronic illness has molded my own life, I was inclined to agree with the narrator, even if he’s no less a madman than Moravagine himself. But instead of venturing into even more speculative, philosophical territory, my rheumatologist and I returned to the practical matter at hand. The medication I was taking, given its low dosage, could be increased.

“There are so many books to read,” he said as we were leaving the consultation room. I had to agree: “Hundreds of thousands are published every year.” “So many to read—old and new—interesting books.” He took one last look at Moravagine. “Some books are interesting, some of them are even good,” I added, unsure of how I felt about the novel. (I’m still unsure now.) “Some of them—right,” said my rheumatologist, “Some of them.”

For N.

I never heard him play a solitary note of music. I don’t think ever he did. I don’t remember. (That’s what I’m saying: I don’t remember.) Regardless, he had taste, a musician’s ear for good music, but he never pursued it, not even in the half unserious way the rest of us did, playing in basements and community halls, going up to Seattle or down to San Francisco, sleeping on floors, sleeping in tents, sleeping in the tour van. N. preferred to stay in town, was a homebody, was a hometown dude. Before he passed, he improvised his own sleeping arrangements too, but without that crucial matter of choice. It could all fall apart in such a short span for him, for N., and the only means he had to dignify that was a love of music.

Everyone who met him met him at a show, or at a party after a show. That was precisely how you met him. It could be any genre, any kind of band at any level of notoriety; he’d still be there regardless. He never played music, not that I remember, but he always was conspicuous at shows, easy to spot—a big dude with a big head, close cropped hair. He always stood up front, by the singer or the guitarist, nodding along, enraptured.

He had taste, hat an encyclopedic knowledge of various musical genres and subgenres, but rarely expressed that taste in a negative way. He rarely had a bad thing to say at all, except about himself, the way his health and his finances were going. The job I remember him being at the longest was at some kind of consumer research firm. He called people in to do in-person focus groups. He seemed to like the job until he hated it and it was taken away from him.

The last time I saw N. was at the memorial service for K., their death following quite soon after the death of another friend, C. Our crew was starting to dwindle prematurely. N. was having the same problems as C., addiction and homelessness, but we avoided those topics at the memorial service for K., who had not been homeless at the time of their death, but rather had been housed and employed, ostensibly healthy. It was all very sudden, all very surprising with K.. It was not surprising with C.; it wouldn’t be surprising for N. either.

The memorial for K. was held in a public school turned brewpub and event space. It was part of a regional chain that did that sort of thing, converting older, historic buildings into brewpubs and event spaces. Group photographs of the student body, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, hung on the walls, along with the pennants and shelves loaded with trophies that the school teams had won. Our room was big, must have been some kind of gymnasium. Afternoon light poured in from high windows.

After the memorial for K., I went and talked with N. His booming voice, which you could easy set to laughing, had become quiet and hoarse. He’d grown thin, his hair wild, his nails long. I never noticed how delicate his hands were. He should have played the piano, should have played the guitar; they were articulate fingers, built for playing notes in rapid succession.

We talked about the usual bullshit—mostly about San Jose hardcore, I think, bands like Gulch and Sunami. Once you started talking with him, with N., it was easy to keep talking, so long as the topic was music. When the conversation turned to his own life, as it did after the memorial for K., then the talking became a lot more difficult. As usual, things weren’t going well. He left it mostly at that. He gestured to his dirty clothes, his wild hair. He might have mentioned his mother, who had recently died or was in the process of dying. He excused himself. There were other friends to catch up with.

I didn’t see him leave. I was stacking chairs, as if the memorial for K. was some kind of assembly or annual awards ceremony. The old trophies and photographs looked down on us, keepsakes of people whom we would never know and who had certainly passed away themselves. The generations are erased, one after another, like chalk from a blackboard.

A few others stopped by, mentioned that they were glad to see N., glad that he had managed to make it out to the memorial, though a few of them, from what I could tell, had taken the opportunity to catch up; that was a hard thing to do. N. had said as much himself. Mellow light filtered down from high windows, onto the student keepsakes, which had now become decorations, while outside, in the hallways, pubgoers were milling about, waiting to find their seats.

Our word for it, connoisseurship, is an 18^th century hybrid—French and Old English. The German word was coined around the same time, but with elements that had existed in the language since the High Middle Ages. When I think of connoisseurship, or Kennerschaft, I think of the café society that was forming at about the same time, when Western society’s dalliances with the “Turkish mistress”, as an English wag once called coffee, eventually turned her into a kept woman.

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• I’d like to thank for becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Subscriptions help immensely with the costs of running a small press, which, even on a very DIY basis, are not nothing, not inconsiderable. In case you missed it, I released a pamphlet of Kleist translations through Paradise Editions. Newsletter subscriptions also enable me to write on volunteer basis for excellent publications. In that capacity, I’d also like direct people once again to The Graveyard Review, edited by leonor and , where I have a piece about the Woodlands Cemetery in West Philadelphia.

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Calendars

It’s November, firmly so, and time for replacing the old wall calendar. I have a great respect for calendars as a physical medium. Johann Peter Hebel wrote some of my favorite narrative prose in German for them, appending tales like an “An Unexpected Reunion” and “A Peculiar Ghost Story” to the usual index of days and months, tales about everyday people for everyday people—farmers, miners, butchers, bakers, and the like; Hebel’s subjects were his audience. I really like that.

While calendars aren’t a venue for literary excellence nowadays, they still have nice pictures in them, those that aren’t filled with images generated from “AI” diffusion models, but, then again, that’s a problem in every visual medium, no need to lament the state of calendars in particular. Their makers are just as guilty (or innocent) as anyone else in the media game. The company I usually buy my calendars from is called Red Ember. They’re based out of Reno, Nevada, which for some reason strikes me as apt. Reno strikes me as a calendar making city, don’t ask me why; maybe it’s the proximity to California, which, at least to me, represents the acts of measurement and demarcation more generally.

For 2025, I had a Maine Coon themed calendar, with pictures of that exceptionally fluffy breed posed majestically in front of various plain domestic scenes or even plainer generic backdrops. Though I’ve never kept a fluffy cat, I do have a fondness for them, which I express—insufferably, I know—by the Japanese loanword for fluffy, ふわふわ or “fwa-fwa”. I’m also insufferably amused by footage of Maine Coons in French cat shows, with the announcers doing their best to put an especially French intonation to that very American word: “le Maine Coon”. It’s nice to see images of them, on the TV or tacked to the wall of the home office, without having to vacuum up the bales of stray hair they always leave behind, especially when the weather changes. That extra fluffy breed standard developed naturally, without intensive human intervention, in the cold climate of New England, but it proved just as useful for a semi-feral Maine Coon I knew back in Seattle. He lived in my neighbor Cody’s backyard, never had a proper name as far as I could tell, and burrowed underneath his garden shed during the few odd days of the year when the mild maritime climate would turn snowy. During the summer, great tangles of woolen hair would develop on his flanks, like a stray sheep which, lost in the mountains, can’t be taken in and sheared.

Cody and his wife Donna were elderly, a remnant of when the neighborhood, Fremont, was middle-class and not within walking distance to the offices of several oligarchical tech companies. The couple distrusted me as a renter, that is until I started doing yard work for them, a replacement for the Mormon missionaries who would do the same, on a more irregular basis, though their services seemed worth a conversion to Donna. I also fed the cat when Cody couldn’t, a task which the missionary boys never did, pouring generic kibble into a plastic margarine tub set beside the back porch. I used to worry that the cat was undernourished, since any free-roaming animal could eat its food, or eat it, as could have easily been the case. Foxes and coyotes are not too uncommon in Seattle, even deep into the urban core, such as it is; Fremont is suburban by the standards of the East Coast, dominated by low-slung, detached houses, though their owners (accidental or intentional real-estate millionaires) would vociferously claim otherwise. Me and my wife— then girlfriend—lived in a triplex, the only renters left on our block.

Cody died not too long after I started doing chores for him and Donna, no more than a year or two, and when he died (I can’t remember the cause) then the cat disappeared as well. Donna didn’t like the animal, didn’t want it taken care of on the property, which was hers alone now, and no intervention of mine—setting out food by the back stoop of our triplex or in the alleyway—was enough to summon the cat, that is until around Christmas, during a rare Seattle snowstorm, when the cat crawled underneath a yew tree beside our bedroom window and died there, unnoticed by my wife and I; it was only until about two or three weeks had passed, when the snow partially melted, that we were able to see the cat’s partially decomposed remains among the yew needles and stray trash that our co-tenants threw into the plantings. Donna certainly didn’t want to claim the cat. Having nowhere to bury the cat, I stuffed the body into an extra-strength vinyl contracting bag and sent it out unceremoniously, out of necessity, to the landfill; there was nothing else to do.

For my 2026 calendar, I picked another animal of personal significance: the donkey. Growing up in Glenwood Springs, I would often hear one braying in the morning, usually as I walked to elementary school, that sort of independence still being common, or at least not actively discouraged, not actively prosecuted, in Colorado mountain towns during the 1990s. The donkey lived in a small pasture along the Roaring Fork River. Its hoarse voice (the voice of an angel) would carry over the swift water, and I associate the braying with frost on the grass, the first sprinkling of mountain snow, and the steam that would rise from natural hot springs along the river.

To me, calendars are powerful, almost occult objects—as long as they’re printed. A digital calendar is both wholly mundane and wholly ephemeral. As days go by, the events within them disappear from memory at a rate best described as pre-literate. But with printed calendars, you can organize time rationally but also revisit the past or anticipate the future in a much more concrete way. What was once an anonymous procession of days becomes subject to a more richly lived experience. I will never disrespect a calendar, nor will I disrespect the cute animals, beautiful women, and generic vacation scenes that typically appear on them. I will never reveal how I dispose of used calendars, which is my business alone.

• The critic, translator, and biographer David Bellos has died, as was announced this week by his colleagues at Princeton University. Bellos had a long and productive career but is perhaps best known for his work on 20th-century French literature. He translated George Perec’s monumental novel Life: A User’s Manual in 1987 and then went on to write a biography of the author, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which was published in 1993. Notable for this newsletter, Bellos also hosted a weekly series of public translation-related speaking events at Princeton. There, I met and talked with him as a casual visitor, not as an academic or an invited guest, but he extended the greatest amount of warmth and courtesy during our brief acquaintance.

• The Graveyard Review, an annual zine about cemeteries and horror movies, has just published it second issue, with a contribution by yours truly; I review The Woodlands, a historic cemetery in West Philadelphia, which may or may not have been immortalized in the classic 1976 crime drama Mikey and Nicky. For additional information and details about purchasing print and digital copies, please go to the Substack of , who, along with , edits The Graveyard Review. No events have been planned for this release, but if you, kind reader, are able to find me walking the banks of the Schuylkill, I will relate certain mysteries not disclosed on this or any other mortal page.

Self-Officiation

Last weekend, some New York friends happened to be visiting, not visiting our part of the state, not Philadelphia, but rather its mountainous (or nicely hilly) northeastern quadrant, specifically in the Poconos, so me and my fiancée, now my wife, decided to visit them there and have them sign, as witnesses, our marriage license, in a ceremony peculiar to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, officially called a “self-officiating marriage” but unofficially referred to, even in official circumstances, as a “Quaker marriage” because of the denomination’s influence on state law from the colonial period onwards. It made for a beautiful weekend.

Usually by then, in the middle of the end of October, the trees would have already dropped most of their leaves. But fall had been warmer than usual in the Poconos and the steeply banked valleys along the Lehigh River kept their color wonderfully. There was a corresponding increase in traffic in Jim Thorpe, a scenic tourist town nestled along the river, named or rather renamed in honor of the American Indian athlete, despite him not ever setting foot in the place, at least while he was alive. As it happens, the original name of the town, Mauch Chunk, does have indigenous roots, meaning “Bear Place” in the Unami branch of the Lenape Language. While we were walking to brunch, a man shouted out from his lifted pickup truck that Jim Thorpe was “not that special” and that we should all “just go home”. — Too late for that, way too late.

The wedding ceremony, so-called, was self-officiated by me and my fiancée over brunch and witnessed by friends, not solemnly, as in the Quaker tradition, with a moment of silence, but rather between a course of deviled eggs, the paperwork spread over the tablecloth. The topic of general conversation was roguelike videogames and the annoying persistence of QR-code menus. Having more important matters on her mind, the proprietor of the cafe explained, with some solemnity, that she did not serve fries and chicken tenders. Apparently, visitors to Jim Thorpe expected them as a matter of course, from any establishment. Truth be told, chicken tenders did seem like a nice option, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment, informal though it was, by being flip and ordering them anyway.

• The critics Dan Sinykin and Johana Winant have a new book out through Princeton University Press, Close Reading for the 21^st Century. Like Dan’s previous book, Big Fiction, this one takes on an ostensibly obscure subject in academic literary studies and demonstrates how it affects our culture as a whole, not just professors and students. From Princeton’s website: “Close reading—making an argument based in close attention to a text—is the foundation of literary studies. This book offers a guide to close reading, treating it as a skill that can be taught and practiced. It first explains what close reading is, what it does, and how it has been used across theoretical schools ranging from affect studies to Black studies to queer theory to Marxism. It then presents a series of master classes in the practice, with original contributions by scholars from a range of different institutions. Finally, it provides practical materials, worksheets, and suggested activities for instructors to use in the classroom. The tone throughout is encouraging and accessible, inviting readers of all backgrounds to hone their craft.”

• A week or so ago there was an online dustup about the magazine n+1 and the salary they were offering to a prospective editor. Instead of revisiting the whole silly affair, it’s far better to read n+1 contributor Sam Dembling’s appreciation of the folk singer Michael Hurley, who died earlier this year at the age of 83. As someone who met Hurley a few times, while playing DIY shows in Portland, Oregon, Sam’s profile jives well with what I remember of him—an accomplished slacker, a beautiful bum. “I didn’t enjoy the process of applying for gigs, that determination to penetrate things, all this trouble you had to go through,” Hurley told The Guardian in 2021, “I preferred playing parties. Little gatherings. Drinking with friends, hopping across the river.”

Product Photography

I don’t have the equipment to do proper product photos—a lighting rig, a backdrop cloth, et cetera.—so whenever I have some kind of new book or other piece of printed matter to sell, I’ll go out into the neighborhood and try to use whatever happens to be of visual interest as a backdrop instead. Earlier this week, it happened to be the autumn flowers that were still blooming effusively in the graveyard of the neighborhood Episcopal church. I chose not to shoot inside the graveyard—my preference is to ask neither for permission nor for forgiveness—but rather to shoot along the wrought-iron fencing that separates the graves, some of them more than two centuries old, from the usual narrow residential Philadelphia street that fronts the church. I think the photos look nice, if in an unprofessional sort of way.

The same could be said of the binding setup on my desk—just a wooden cradle, for punching holes in paper, along with the various printed pages that make up this new pamphlet. When I posted a photo online, a small German publishing house, which focuses on textual criticism, replied that my setup seemed “very practical”. And a cradle is a very practical piece of equipment—well, it’s practical if you happen to be hand-sewing the spines of books and other printed matter. It seems quite exotic, antiquarian, but cradles are easy enough to acquire, sold through specialty craft suppliers as well as through major online retailers. I paid $30 for mine. It’s sturdy, simple. It will outlast my body or at least outlast my ability to sew.

So what kind of pamphlet am I talking about? Have I set up enough context for you to even know what I’m talking about? I don’t know. Anyway, I’m talking about a pamphlet of Kleist translations, some of which were recently featured in this newsletter. You can read them here and here. There are other Kleist essays, “print exclusives” as we call them in the publishing trade, along with an introductory essay by me providing some additional context for the pieces. Below is the “jacket copy”, another professional term, meaning the descriptive text that appears on book that tells you what kind of book the book is.

Can a work of art reject its viewer? What if human beings have no control over their actions? What if recognizing this was the key to absolute freedom? These are the some of the questions posed by Heinrich von Kleist in this collection. Published in rapid succession during the last year of his life, these brief but challenging essays present the finest distillation of Kleist’s philosophical thought.

Heinrich von Kleist was a German-language novelist, dramatist, journalist, purported spy, newspaperman, and poet. Best known in his own time for his theatrical works, he is perhaps most famous today for the short novels, Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquise of O.

This is a lot of trouble to go through for 36 pages of text. Granted, I think I did a good job translating these pieces, and length is not an absolute measurement of difficulty. “On the Marionette Theater” was particularly taxing. There are puns and rare words, the usual lexical knots I preoccupy myself with. It’s not the most difficult translation I’ve ever had to do—that’ll probably always be Jean Paul—but nothing easy or relaxing either. I still don’t quite get why I do this, but, as always, I really hope some readerly pleasure comes your way by indulging these marginal pursuits of mine.

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• László Krasznahorkai has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art,” as the Swedish Academy states. This is richly deserved. Those unfamiliar with Krasznahorkai’s work should check out his Hungarian novels, particularly Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, but really any of them will do. Paradise Almanac also recommends his fiction set in Japan, specifically the novel Seiobo, There Below and the novella A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East.

• With all the worry about declining literacy, it’s good to get some good news every once in a while. And much of that good news, at least in America, has been coming from its poorest region. States in the Deep South have seen a dramatic jump in reading scores, with Mississippi rising from 49th place in fourth-grade reading ability to 9th place. The key, writes Kelsey Piper in The Argument, is the adoption, or rather re-adoption, of proven methods such as phonics, along with subject-specific training for teachers. Why aren’t these developments better known, even though they overwhelmingly benefit the most disadvantaged students? Education is a highly partisan field, and many of these reforms, specifically testing and holding back underperforming students, run counter to popular positions within academic pedagogy.

• The publisher First to Knock has announced Know Me to Be Your Superior in Everything—Erik Satie & the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor, an absolutely wild archival project focusing on the eccentric composer’s art-based religion. Compiled by Sam Kunkel, a scholar of 19^th-century symbolist literature, Know Me to Be Your Superior in Everything is “the first book dedicated exclusively to the story of Erik Satie’s Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. Drawing upon a multitude of firsthand sources—including documents held in the Erik Satie archives in Caen—the book includes new English translations of all known Church publications and correspondence by Satie as the Parcener. Facsimilic translations of Satie’s Church publications are reproduced herein as well, capturing, for the first time in English, the design and typography of the original productions.” The book even comes with flexi-disc record of Satie’s music. Neat.

• The writer and critic has been busy recently. An excerpt of his as-yet unpublished novel, The Searchers, is available through minor literature[s], highly recommended for its mordant take on the European backpacker scene: “I don’t know why I climbed into the night. Yes, I was young and drunk and hopelessly lost. Yet fool that I was I should still have stumbled back to my room, climbed into my bunk, and awoken that afternoon in agony. But then I would never have met Anna, and I would not be speaking to you now.” Rob also has a long piece about the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata at Liberties Journal. The essay focuses on elusive, fractured nature of Kawabata’s work, which, despite its lack of formal complexity (at least in translation), makes for difficult but ultimately rewarding reading.

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What that particular book was, whether it was from Immanuel Kant himself or from a commentator, has never been established, but it did precipitate a mental crisis, one that would have decisive effect on Kleist’s short life, which, at the age of 24, was already two-thirds over. “An unspeakable emptiness filled my innermost being”, he wrote. Later that year, Kleist travelled to to Paris and then to Thun in Switzerland. He broke off his engagement with Wilhelmine and began his literary career in earnest, writing The Family Schroffenstein, a tragedy about feuding families in medieval Swabia. The play was ignored in Kleist’s lifetime and remains little staged to this day.

If you would like to read more Kleist translations, excerpts from the Berliner Abendblätter can be found at Harper’s Magazine as well as through my newsletter: here, here, and here. A short essay about translating Kleist’s work can be found at the wonderful journal Hopscotch Translation. Anecdotes, a collection of the Kleist translations published in 2021 through Sublunary Editions, has recently fallen out of print (though not through lack of demand) and I’m seeking a new publisher for a revised and expanded edition. I could do it myself, but if any other publishers are interested in picking up the book, let’s get in contact.

Thanks to Michael P. Daley at the great eclectic and esoteric press First to Knock, who first commissioned this translation in 2023. A previous version appeared in FTK’s The Publication, an irregular, print-based zine of “new writings, exhumed un-classics, translations, art, and anything else deemed relevant by the editorial brain trust.” Subscribe to them!

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During the winter of 1801, which I spent in the city of M—, I chanced to meet one evening, at a public garden, Herr C—, who had recently been employed as first dancer for the opera, and who had found extraordinary success with the public there.

I said that I had been astonished to see him, on several occasions, at a marionette theater, which had been cobbled together on the market square and had provided, with its little dramatic burlesques, interwoven with song and dance, amusement for the rabble.

He derived, he assured me, much pleasure from the pantomime of these puppets, and made it clear that a dancer, if he wished to cultivate himself, had something to learn from them.

Since this remark, along with his tone of voice, implied more than a passing fancy, I sat down beside him, the better to hear the reasons for such a strange assertion.

He asked me whether I had not found certain movements of the puppets, especially of the smaller ones, very graceful in the dance.

I could not deny this fact. Had Teniers painted a quartet of peasants dancing a ronde at rapid pace, he could not have achieved such grace.

I enquired about the mechanism of these figures, how it was possible, without a myriad of threads on the finger, to govern their individual limbs and respective centers of gravity, as the rhythm of their movements, that is to say, the dance, required.

He answered that I must not imagine that each limb, during the various stages of the dance, had to be pulled and positioned by the puppeteer.

Each movement, he said, has its own center of gravity; this suffices, within a figure, to govern it; the limbs, which are nothing but pendulums, follow of their own accord, in mechanical fashion, without further assistance.

He added that these movements are very simple; that even when the center of gravity was directed in a straight line, the limbs would describe a curve; and that often, when shaken in quite a random way, the whole puppet would assume a kind of rhythmic movement, resembling a dance.

This observation seemed to throw some light on the pleasure he derived from the marionette theater. But I was still very far from guessing at what conclusions he would subsequently draw from it.

I asked whether he believed that the operator, as the ruler of these puppets, must needs be a dancer in his own right, or at least have some idea of beauty in dance.

He replied that we should not suppose, even if an activity appeared simple in its mechanical aspects, that it could be performed without sentiment.

The line described by the center of gravity is indeed very simple and in most cases, so he believed, straight; in cases where the line is curved, the law of its curvature appeared to be at least of the first order, at most of the second; even in the latter case, the line is merely elliptical, a form of movement (because of the joints) natural to the human body, and therefor requiring very little from the operator to portray.

This line, however, considered from another point of view, would be something very mysterious. For it would be none other than the path of the dancer’s soul; and he doubted whether it could be found, except by the operator placing himself in the puppet’s center of gravity, in other words, by dancing.

I replied that this activity, as he described it, appeared quite mindless and trivial: rather like how, by the turning of a crank, a barrel-organ might be played.

By no means trivial, he replied. On the contrary, the movements of the fingers relate quite intricately to the movements of the puppets attached to them, rather like the relation of numbers to their logarithms, or asymptotes to their hyperbola.

Meanwhile, he believed, the last fraction of human volition could be removed from the marionettes, and their dance wholly transposed into the realm of mechanical forces, brought about, just as I had imagined it, by the turning of a crank.

I said I was astonished see him dignify this parody of theater, contrived for the masses, with his attention. Not only did he believe it capable of higher artistic development: he seemed directed toward that very end himself.

He smiled and ventured to say that, if a craftsman were to construct for him a marionette according to the designs that he supplied, he would, by means of the same, perform such a dance than neither he nor any skilled dancer, Vestris himself not excepted, could ever replicate.

Have you seen? he said, as I silently cast my eyes to the ground: have you seen the mechanical protheses which English artisans make for unfortunates who’ve lost their limbs.

I said no; I had never seen the like.

A pity, he replied, for if I tell you that those unfortunates can dance with them, I’m almost afraid you won’t believe me. — Dance? What am I saying? The range of movement is indeed limited; but those who have such legs to stand on dance with an ease, grace, and fluency that astonishes any thinking mind.

I remarked, in jest, that he had found his man. For the same artisan, able to build such remarkable shanks, could doubtless assemble a whole marionette according to his specifications.

How? I asked, while he, for his part, stared at the ground, a little abashed: how are these specifications, which you demand of the artisan, to be fulfilled?

With nothing, he replied, that wasn’t already found there; balance, mobility, and ease—but each to a higher degree; and especially in a more natural arrangement of the centers of gravity.

And the advantage of such a puppet over living dancers?

The advantage? First, my excellent friend, a negative advantage: namely, that they affect nothing. — For affectation, as you know, appears when the soul (vis motrix) divests itself of gravity of the moment. Now, because the puppeteer, by thread or by wire, has nothing in his power other than what gravitation provides, all remaining limbs are, as they should be, pure dead pendulums, which follow the basic law of gravitas; a marvelous quality, which we look for in vain in the greater part of our dancers.

Watch Madame P—, he continued, when she, playing as Daphne, is pursued by Apollo and glances back to him: her soul sits somewhere at the base of her spine, she bends as if it would snap in half, like a naiad from the school of Bernini. Watch young Monsieur F—, when, as Paris, he stands with the three goddesses and hands the apple to Venus: his soul (it is fearful to behold) actually settles in his elbow.

Such blunders, he added finally, are inevitable, since we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. But Paradise is locked and barred, and the Cherub is behind us; we must take a journey around the world, to see if a back door has perhaps been left open.

I laughed. — True enough, I thought, the mind cannot err where none is present. But sensing that he had more to say, I asked him to continue.

Furthermore, he said, these dolls have the advantage of antigravity. They know nothing of the inertia of matter, which of all properties is most obstructive to the dance: the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the one that shackles them to the earth. What would our dear Madame G— give to be sixty pounds lighter, or to have a counterweight of that size to aid her in her pirouettes and entrechats? The puppets, like elves, need only touch the ground to revive, by that momentary inhibition, the spring in their step; we need it to rest and recover from the exertion of the dance: a moment which is clearly not of the dance itself and about which nothing can be done, other than to make it pass as swiftly as possible.

I said that no matter how skillfully he might pose his paradoxes, he could never make me believe me that a mechanical man could embody grace better than any human body.

He replied that it was absolutely impossible for anyone to be as limber in the limbs as a mechanical man. Only a deity, in this domain, could compete with mere matter; and it is here where the two ends of the round earth meet.

I grew more and more astonished and did not know how to answer such bizarre assertions.

It would seem, he said, taking a pinch of snuff, that you have not read the third chapter of Genesis with attention; and whosoever remains ignorant of the first stage of human development cannot speak of following stages, much less of the final one.

I said I knew all too well of the disorders that consciousness can produce in the natural grace of mankind. Through a simple remark, a young acquaintance of mine, before my very eyes, so to speak, lost his innocence, and despite every conceivable effort, his paradise was never regained. — But what conclusions, I added, could be drawn from this?

He asked to hear more about the incident.

About three years ago, so I told him, I was bathing with a young man whose form and deportment radiated a most wonderful charm. He must have been sixteen or so, and only the first traces of vanity, induced by the favor of women, could be seen in offing. As it happened, we had just viewed, in Paris, the statue of a youth pulling a thorn from his foot; casts of it are well known and can be found in most German collections. A glance into a large mirror, just as the youth was placing his foot on a stool to dry, reminded him of this; he smiled and told me about the discovery he had made. At that very moment, in fact, I had noticed that same resemblance; but to test the grace within him, and to provide some salutary response to his vanity: I laughed and replied—you must be seeing ghosts! He blushed and raised his foot a second time to show me; but the attempt, as could have easily been foreseen, failed. Confused, he raised his foot a third and then a fourth time, probably he raised it ten more times: in vain! He was unable to produce the same movement again — indeed, the movements he did make had such a comical effect that I had trouble holding back my laughter: —

From that day on, as if from that very moment, the young man underwent an incomprehensible change. He would stand for whole days in front of the mirror; one charm after another left him forever. An invisible and incomprehensible force, like a net of iron, seemed to enclose the free play of his gestures, and when a year had elapsed there was no longer any trace of the sweetness which those surrounding him had once feasted; there yet lives a man, a witness to that strange and unfortunate event, who can confirm word for word as I have related it. —

I must take this opportunity, said Herr C—, to tell you another story, the relevance of which you will easily discern.

On a trip to Russia, I found myself on an estate belonging to a Herr von G—, a Livonian nobleman, whose sons practiced fencing rigorously at the time. The older one, who had just returned from university, acted the virtuoso, and, when I was in his room one morning, offered me a rapier. We fought; but it so happened that I was the superior; passion confused him; almost every thrust I wielded made a hit, and, at last, his rapier flew into the corner. Half in jest, half in pique, he said, retrieving his rapier, that he had found his master: but everyone in the world will eventually find his, and henceforth he would lead me to mine. The brothers laughed out loud and cried: Away! Away! Down to the woodshed! And with that, they took me by the hand and led me to a bear, which Herr von G—, their father, had raised on the estate.

I was astonished to find the bear standing on his hind legs, his back leaning against a post to which he was tied, his right paw raised and ready to strike, looking me direct in the eye: that was his fencing posture. Facing such an opponent, I thought I was dreaming; but Herr von. G— called out, Strike! Strike!... and see if you can teach him anything! Having recovered a little from my astonishment, I lunged with my rapier; the bear made a brief swipe with his paw and parried the thrust. I tried to ensnare him by feints; the bear did not move. I lunged at him again, with instant dexterity, and, had he been a man, I would have stuck his chest without fail: the bear made another brief swipe with his paw and parried the blow. Now I was in almost the same predicament as the elder brother had been. — The solemnity of the bear further robbed me of my composure, thrusts and feints alternated, and I was dripping with sweat: in vain! For not only did the bear, like the firstborn fencer of the world, parry all my thrusts; he didn’t even bother (no fencer of this world could match him) making feints of his own; he stood eye to eye with me, as if he could read my very soul in these maneuvers, his paw raised for the strike, and did not stir from his place, as though my thrusts were not meant in earnest.

Do you believe my story? he asked me.

Utterly, I cried, with delighted applause. It is so plausible, I would believe it coming from any stranger, all the more so coming from you.

Now then, my excellent friend, you are in possession of all you require to understand my point. We see how, in the organic world, as reflective thought grows dimmer and dimmer, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. — But just as two intersecting lines, converging on either side of a point, intersect once more, after having passed through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes into infinity, only to reappear before our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us, and so appear in a bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite amount of it, which is to say, either a puppet or a god.

That means, I said, somewhat distracted, we would have to eat of the Tree of Knowledge a second time, in order fall back into a state of innocence.

Indeed, he replied, and this would be the final chapter in the history of the world.

• has a sobering essay about the precipitous decline in reading. His conclusion is that we are living in a “post-literate” society. While I have a few quibbling objections, specifically about Marriott’s use of scholarship on pre-literate societies, I do agree with him on the broad outline. Reading is in free fall, and this has knock-on effects on political organization and creativity. I don’t think the damage is irreversible—the banning of phones in schools, for instance, can yield positive results almost instantaneously—but it is good to get the measure of the problem.

• Reading and writing are unpopular because reading and writing are difficult, and yet without them a high level of competence in anything is impossible, so argues in this newsletter post about the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. Bessis takes Grothendieck at his word, arguing that his agonized, exhaustive writing methods were key to his astonishing abilities. It might also be worth noting that in OECD countries PISA scores in mathematics are declining alongside those in reading, though not as precipitously.

• The first complete Chinese translation of James Joyce’s monumental final novel, Finnegans Wake, has been published by Shanghai People’s Publishing House. Congrong Dai, a professor of Comparative Literature at Fudan University, accomplished the task after 18 years of effort, one year longer than it took for Joyce to write the book. Besides a paywalled article in The Irish Independent, there hasn’t been much discussion in English of this achievement, a stark contrast with attention the project garnered a decade ago, when the first volume of the novel became a surprise hit in China. Perhaps the decline in literacy helps explain the discrepancy.

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Why Publish a Bad Translation?

Last week, I received an email from a reader, who, having read my last newsletter about typesetting haiku, declared that “my translations” were hard to read because they were “too wordy”. At first I was just plain baffled. I thought I had made it clear that Shadowings was published in the early 20th century, in 1900 to be exact. If I had actually translated the haiku, the lack of quality would have been minor news compared to my extreme longevity. As it happens, the book was written by Lafcadio Hearn, who lived from 1850 to 1904.

When asked about this extreme case of mistaken authorship, the reader answered that he had been misled by the phrase “when I set my own version of the text”. I admit this might have been somewhat confusing. To clarify matters, I amended the phrase to read “when I set my own layout of the text,” which, while somewhat redundant, is less ambiguous. As I’ll show shortly, Hearn was far from the only person who deserves credit for these translations—but I don’t. I’m just the typesetter on this one.

Are the translations too wordy? In some cases, I agree—hence my dig at the “logorrheic” conventions of poetry in Hearn’s time. This was a bit unfair, and, to be honest, I expected more criticism for that editorial comment than for anything else in the newsletter. Fault-finding can never be a solo pursuit. Anyway, I do get hung up occasionally, for instance on this haiku:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Waré to waga
Kara ya tomurō—
Sémi no koë.
—Yayū.

Methinks that sémi [cicada] sits and sings by his former body,—
Chanting the funeral service over his own dead self.

I don’t read Japanese well enough to compare Yokoi Yayū’s original with Hearn’s version, but I have translated enough books myself, both prose and poetry from the German, to trust my initial impressions. As I’ve written about before, readers of translated literature are often too deferential to assumed expertise and too hesitant in forming their own opinions; I’d be a hypocrite if I held back my opinion because I wasn’t a Japanologist. So in that spirit, I’ll offer a brief, somewhat amatuer commentary on Hearn’s translation, or rather, on his version of the poem.

The negative impression stems almost entirely from the first word: methinks. Yayū wrote in the 18th century, during the Tokugawa Shogunate. Despite Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world, it was a period of high modernity compared to the Anglo-Saxon era, from which we get methinks (mē þynceþ). Even if there were a neat semantic equivalence between the Japanese and English words, I would still hesitate to give the literal translation. The word has too many associations with the fanciful European medievalism of Walter Scott or Charles Maturin. It rips you from the Japanese context, if only briefly.

Though Hearn was thoroughly adopted into Japanese culture, even starting a family and taking on the Japanese name of Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲), he still possessed many of the limitations of his 19th-century orientalist peers, especially in language competency. Hearn had limited facility with Japanese, spoken and written, and did not master the kanji system of Chinese characters. Despite the scholarly persona he embodied in his writings, Hearn could not directly read Japanese literature, but rather relied on intermediaries to interpret the texts for him.

So then why publish Hearn’s translations, or rather interpretations, if they’re so outdated? Well, the question can be answered with another question: where else am I going to find a collection of Japanese poems about cicadas in English? So far as I know, there haven’t been any others. Even if we broaden our search to include Japanese literature about insects more generally, what we get is more…Lafcadio Hearn. Eleven out of the twelve books he wrote in Japan feature bugs of one kind or another. The subject captivated him, to such an extent that Hearn is still regarded in Japan as an authority, though much of that reputation can be ascribed to Japanese translations of his work, which began to appear in his lifetime. Still, you would think that a culture as fascinated with insects as Japan would produce a native expert on Hearn’s level, but he remains irreplaceable. For that, we can excuse the occasional anachronism or infelicity.

This is perhaps what Jorge Luis Borges meant when he said: “I have read many works only in translation, sometimes in very bad translations, and I don’t think it matters very much. What matters is the encounter with the book.” This was not tossed off aside, not some one-time provocation, but a principle he espoused throughout his long career. This is not to damn Hearn or any other past translators with faint praise, but rather to make two important points: (1.) that literature is resilient across languages (2.) that the worth of a given writer inheres in their contributions as a whole, rather than in isolated words, lines, or phrases. To pretend otherwise is quibbling. The bias, as I’ve written before, should be for the work to exist. One is better than none.

• This Saturday, 9/13, at 6:30 PM, there will be an event called “Poetry in Place” happening at Lot 49 books in Fishtown, Philadelphia, “a reading, conversation, and launch…for those interested in the geography of poetry.” It will feature local—and excellent—writers Audrey Lee and Graham Irvin, as well as Noam Hessler, who is reading from their poetry collection Officeparks, out now through Farthest Heaven.

• Next week, there will be two talks on esoteric Pennsylvania history given by Timothy Grieve-Carlson, Assistant Professor of Religion at Westminster College. The first will be on the 17th, about 17th-century mystic Johannes Kelpius, held at the Valley Green Inn in beautiful Wissahickon Park in Philadelphia. The second talk will be about an early account of poltergeists in America, held at the historic Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County.

• New Directions has just announced their Winter 2026 catalog. Among their new releases is The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis, volume three in their Fernando Pessoa heteronyms series. Instead of one authorial voice, Pessoa had many, with Reis being the conservative classicist. From the catalog: “Ricardo Reis was imagined as a melancholic doctor ‘with a darkish complexion,’ a self-taught Hellenist who exiled himself in Brazil because he was a monarchist. In a 1914 letter to Pessoa, the writer Mário Sá-Carneiro described Reis’s odes as ‘admirable,’ ‘a marvel of impersonality,’ praising the way he ‘achieved a Horatian, classical novelty.’” Come to think of it, a volume of Sá-Carneiro translations would be welcome too.

Poetry and Legibility

Responsibilities multiply themselves. I’m still working on that longer piece about LLM-based translation services, but my role as publisher, or rather, my role as very small publisher, who’s in charge of everything from editing to cover design, also comes with pressing duties. I’m still typesetting Shadowings by Lafcadio Hearn, and have led myself into a tight spot—poetry.

English-language readers have been steadily familiarized with Japanese traditional forms—haiku, tanka, and so on—for almost a hundred and fifty years. They just don’t seem all that new or radical to us. But at the turn of the 20th-century, when Hearn was first publishing his accounts of Japanese culture, they certainly were. They must have sounded so terse, so abrupt, compared to the logorrheic conventions of Euro-American poetry at the time. But part of that unfamiliarity must have been also the odd context in which Hearn presented this radically new poetry, in a chapter about Japanese folk beliefs about cicadas.

While for some this anthropological data might suggest a dusty textbook survey, Hearn’s essay, at least for me, is anything but that. This is apparent from the first few paragraphs, in which Hearn reveals that the Chinese and Japanese believed that cicadas didn’t eat food, but rather sustained themselves on dew, a characteristic which made the insects moral exemplars.

A celebrated Chinese scholar, known in Japanese literature as Riku-Un, wrote the following quaint account of the Five Virtues of the Cicada:—

“I.—The Cicada has upon its head certain figures or signs. These represent its [written] characters, style, literature.

“II.—It eats nothing belonging to earth, and drinks only dew. This proves its cleanliness, purity, propriety.

“III.—It always appears at a certain fixed time. This proves its fidelity, sincerity, truthfulness.

“IV.—It will not accept wheat or rice. This proves its probity, uprightness, honesty.

“V.—It does not make for itself any nest to live in. This proves its frugality, thrift, economy.”

Hearn goes on, enumerating more of these quaint properties. The Japanese had—perhaps they still have, I’m no expert—a rather elaborate folk taxonomy for the different cicada species. These include the aburazémi, so named, Hearn tells us, because “its shrilling resembles the sound of oil or grease frying in a pan.” That sounds quite fanciful, a product of a culture obsessed with food, or perhaps not; Smithsonian Magazine states that there are over 3400 species of the insect. Odds are that there are some really weird-sounding ones—well, weirder than usual.

If the chapter consisted of just charming trivia about cicadas, I wouldn’t be having such a difficult time. Instead, near the end, the reader, and by extension the typesetter, is confronted with poem after poem about cicadas, without much in the way of headings to differentiate them. The original typesetter put the English translations in a different font size, which helps a little with legibility, but it never quite creates a sense of separation necessary to read each poem as a separate piece, discrete from the others:

But this legibility problem, which was mild in original, compounded itself when I set my own layout of the text. I wanted to keep the fonts the same (relatively large) size, but that ended up making the poems more difficult to read.

Adding italics, used elsewhere for passages in Japanese, helped somewhat, but I needed something extra. With luck, I had my copy of Japanese Death Poems in reach, an anthology of jisei, a type of traditional poem composed just before death. Edited by Yoel Hoffmann, this anthology was one of the first books that got me into Japanese literature. Consulting it again, I was struck about how clear the layout was, how easily it broke down what could have otherwise been a jumble of material.

At that point, I really wished I knew Japanese better; I could have supplied the names of the poets in kanji characters, as Hoffmann does, but such a task wasn’t in the remit for this book. None were supplied in the original publication, nor could they have been in all probability. I doubt any English-language press could have printed them, at least none outside of Japan or in select cities along the West Coast of the United States.

Since I was dealing with a much narrower page—I won’t bore you with the dimensions—I decided not to split the Japanese and the English versions of the poems into their own separate columns. I did, however, separate each entry with a diamond pattern (❖), its function similar to an asterism or a dinkus, typographical oddities that I’ve talked about before. I felt these insertions made a big positive difference in organizing the text.

This is all provisional work. Until the book goes to print, I reserve the right—the obligation, really—to continue improving the layout of the book. But I’m hesitant to erase the work I did for this chapter. It was quite the pain in the ass to find a font in Adobe Creative Suite that had the ❖ symbol. I had cycle through dozens of examples before one could display—it was a Japanese font, as it turned out: Hiragino Kaku Gothic.

Having four different writing systems and thousands of characters spread between them, the Japanese have a large inventory of symbols that the typographer can play around with. In certain Japanese fonts, Hiragino Kaku Gothic, for instance, the Unicode symbol for snowman wears an amusingly bland expression on his face and, randomly enough, a fez on his head. I really wish I could just type that snowman whenever I want; it’s so much more distinctive than the emoji that’s rendered when the symbol is displayed on a Mac: ☃. What will I used the fez-snowman for? I haven’t got a clue. But someday, it’ll be quite handy—someday, eventually. I know it. I’m sure.