Warning! Promotional!

Just received my ten translator's copies of Yves Bonnefoy: The Anchor's Long Chain, first published in France in 2008. The translation is published by Seagull Books, with a blood-red burning sky cover (Frederic Church) that seems to fit this summer of forest fires and smoke-filled air in the West, and charred black endpapers. It is handsome.

I gave a copy to a friend the other evening and then reread it myself, through his eyes. What I felt--in addition to my relief that the translation held up--was the moving limpidity of Bonnefoy's lines and their vision of the human condition--if you'll allow me the expression--which is probingly dark. 

I want to mention the British journal PN Review, which has been an enthusiastic supporter of many individual poems in translation, including, most recently, the title poem, which retells a tale Seamus Heaney also recounts in his Squarings sequence ("Lightenings viii").