Archive for November, 2010

Daniel Swift is the author of Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War.

Photograph © by Deborah Copaken Kogan

On October 30th, at a press conference in London, Julian Assange—the founder of Wikileaks—announced the leak of 391,832 secret military documents about the war in Iraq. This represents, he said, “the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.” Here are tortures, newly revealed; here are awful rates of civilian deaths (perhaps 66,000)—and all presented in clipped, oddly formal, occasionally redacted fragments (here, for example, is the record of a friendly-fire incident from January 2008: “CAV REPORTS THAT SMALL ARMS FIRE ENSUED BECAUSE OF A DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN CLC AND IA. NO ENEMY INVOLVEMENT”).

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Here are just a few of the images, objects, and papers that Sam Steward left behind when he died, and which I used in reconstructing his life in Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. The collection remains largely intact, and will hopefully go on display at the Museum of Sex in New York in February 2011, with a planned exhibition time of six months. Steward’s executor has not yet determined where the collection will go, but we hope that it will enter a special collections archive within the next few years. It has been a great honor to work with these materials over the past decade, and a pleasure to share some of them now with FSG readers.

–Justin Spring (more…)

As this glimpse at the proofs of my versions of Leopardi’s Canti suggests, a translation, like an original poem, is never finished, only abandoned. And that remains true even after the book is published—I’ve already started collected “improvements” for a future printing.

There’s usually a way to say what needs to be said more concisely, more pithily, more beautifully. That’s why I’ve found translation over the years to have been an incredible education in writing.

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I took a quick trip to Boston last weekend to produce our teleforum event with Harvard’s Michael Sandel and his book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?

By our accounts, the experiment was successful. If you’ve seen his TV series, you know about Sandel’s interactions with his audiences – he solicits audience members’ opinions and then explores the principles of justice below the surface – and this style translated seamlessly to the teleforum format.

Sandel polled the listening audience with questions about income distribution and, later, about affirmative action, then investigated people’s arguments through several exchanges with individual callers. Curious to see how it went? Listen below:

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Ian Frazier recently read from his new book Travels in Siberia at the Russian Samovar in New York City.

Some of you may remember Frazier from his bestseller Great Plains; others may remember him from those New Yorker pieces that make you laugh so hard your mouth hurts. (“The New Poetry” from Lamentations of the Father is a favorite of mine.)

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