Literary Studies

Translated by Clare Cavanagh In this witty "how-to" guide, Wislawa Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: "I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories," she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave--anonymously--for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life. She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. "I sigh to be a p...

In the course of compiling his highly acclaimed, three-volume life of Kafka, Reiner Stach made one astounding discovery after another: original writings, unexpected photographs, inconsistencies in handwritten texts, surprising excerpts from letters, and testimonies from Kafka's contemporaries that shed surprising light on his personality and his writing. Is that Kafka? presents tasty morsels all about the real Kafka: he couldn't lie, but he cheated on his high-school exams; bitten by the fitn...

The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty--from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth's loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, "Eliot Weinberger's commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei's little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but a...

Who doesn't love haiku? It is not only America's most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere--Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, Hallmark's made millions off them, first-grade students across the count...