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In 1989 James Fenton startled his friends by moving to a derelict farm to set about making a spectacular garden. Now he has surprised them again by selling up. Julie Kavanagh talks to Fenton and friends-and his gardener, Mike Collins ...  read more »

Daniel Arizona considers the life and music of a southern bard who never quite achieved the fame he deserved ...  read more »

When Wallace Stevens died, few of his Connecticut insurance colleagues even knew he was a poet. With the recent release of his "Selected Poems", Ryan Ruby revisits a man who proved that to be a great poet, no great experience is necessary ...  read more »

NOTES ON AN EXUBERANT POET | August 31st 2008
National Archives
There was a time when Ryan Ruby would've taken a punch for broody, gloomy T.S. Eliot. But years in the thrum of New York City have encouraged a taste for something more jazzy and irreverent ...

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POETRY ABOUT AGING | January 29th 2008

Random Rog/Flickr

Ariel Ramchandani finds a melancholic honesty in Grace Paley's last book of poems. Paley wrote with the detachment of a woman near death, punctuating her work with the occasional bitter laugh ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

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AND OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT POETRY IN TRANSLATION

The effect of a succesful translation is like walking through the streets of a foreign city and finding that you can understand what is being said around you, though you also know the language is not your own. By Ariel Ramchandani ...

From our arts blog, MOREOVER

DAVID ORR'S article on Zbigniew Herbert in The New York Times Book Review got me thinking about translation. I believe--along, I imagine, with many other people-- that Poland's poets are among the best in the world. And yet, like many others, I do not experience these poets in Polish. As Mr Orr says: "Of course, for most of us, discovering ‘the Poland that is real’means reading works translated from Polish."

If you ask me, Polish sure sounds good in English. It is perhaps a conceit of an English speaker, as well as a testament to the skill of the poets and translators, that I feel this way. I have not read a single poem by a Polish poet in Polish--or in any language other than English, for that matter. But I do know that a good translation makes the reader aware of what a poem means, and at the same time makes the reader aware that it is not English she is reading. In this way a successful translation is like walking through the streets of a foreign city and realising that you can understand what everyone is saying around you, if only just barely.  read more »