Having fortunately lived long enough to finish reading all three volumes of Vincent’s letters, I have moved on to Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, in Boris Brasol’s English translation, published in two volumes by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1949. After years of being away from Dostoevsky’s great novels and stories, coming upon him in the somewhat more casual, conversational mode of his periodical writings is much like having coffee with […]
This poem, too, was written about twenty years ago. If I still have the original typescript, it’s in a crate in one of our closets. Sometime after it appeared on my first website, I’m Telling You All I Know, it was noticed by a writer in France, who took it upon herself to translate the poem into French. “Friends” also appeared in a little magazine called The Synergyst. Friends […]
For a good long stretch, I had been chipping away at Leopardi’s Zibaldone, a few lines here, a paragraph there, careful not to wrinkle the bible-thin pages. Since it is made to lie flat, I had been keeping the book open here on my mother’s desk. But the time came recently that I needed the space to accommodate more books: a complete six-volume set of Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage […]
William Michaelian 