More Blackbirds

 What I thought was a different species of bird sharing a tree with the red-winged blackbird is the female of the species, which is grayish and drab. There were an abundant number of them all together, making a lot of noise and other isolated ones elsewhere. They like heights. 

BdS

 I found another opera on Bodas de sangre, by Argentine composer. (Sigh). On the one hand, I need one more opera to make a chapter, on the other hand, it sounds kind of pedestrian at first listen. 

Acknowledgments

 I'd like to be in the acknowledgments of many people's books. Not just to see my name there, but to remember having helped someone. Sometimes it will just be thanks to an anonymous reviewer. It would be nice to think of peer review as giving assistance to the author, rather than merely exhausting gatekeeping. 

I don't remember anyone leaving me out of an acknowledgments page. People are good about this, generally. If someone doesn't thank anyone, I get suspicious. Either they never talk about their ideas with anyone, or they are ungrateful. Writing is a solitary activity, but it takes place in the context of intellectual exchange, what Creeley called the "company." 

Dream of Lazarillo

I was teaching Lazarillo de Tormes. My students hadn't read it (nor I, in the past 20 years), so I was improvising a lecture. I explained that it was a book about people too poor to have servants, who still had servants, and that the theme of the book was extreme poverty. Specifically, how not to starve to death (morir de hambre). I'm sure my lecture was wildly inaccurate in its details. After all, it was improvised with no preparation, and I gave it literally while sleeping. 

Red winged blackbird

 Many red-winged blackbirds in the wetlands this evening. Assorted waterfowl, ducks and geese, gulls. At first it seemed like I wouldn't see anything but the odd sparrow. 

Gulls

 At the wetlands on Saturday, seven or eight gulls with dark-tipped wings flying circular and oval patterns over the ponds.  

Come on!

 

Dutch publisher Meulenhoff had announced Rijneveld, winner of the International Booker prize, as the translator of the Joe Biden inaugural poet’s forthcoming collection, The Hill We Climb, last week. But the move quickly drew opprobrium. Journalist and activist Janice Deul led critics with a piece in Volkskrant asking why Meulenhoff had not chosen a translator who was, like Gorman, a “spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black”.

So the translator has to share the same identity as the translatee?  The point of translation is to transcend identity, or, if that sounds bad to you, to negotiate differences in identity.