I see my last post was about dishwashers--well, I'm done with Season 5 of Downton Abbey, but the dishwasher repair folk are still coming and going, and I afraid we may have to replace the dw because they can't keep making weekly visits forever, can they?

Aside from that, it's a pleasure to announce the publication of my translation of Yves Bonnefoy's collection of prose pieces (I say "pieces" because I'm not sure what other all-encompassing term--texts?--to use. A lot of these would fall into the category of prose poems, but others are more like personal essays, on dreams, on art, on travelling, on memory, on childhood, on some combination of all these things), Rue Traversière (Seagull Books). My copies arrived a week or so ago, and I have really enjoyed rereading them. Each of them, I think, has eternal value. This small book was originally published in the 70s, then YB added--as he often does--some more essays and collected it again as Rue Traversière and Other Dream Tales. I only translated the shorter, cohesive, poetic group of essays--for now--in part because I love the way it stands alone--the collection greater than the sum of its parts--as, in my view (it is unstable) a poetry collection should, a reason to admire the British way of publishing books of poetry that are sometimes only 48 pages long.

Beverley Bie Brahic