Panel: Los Angeles, California
I’ll be on a panel on literature and immigration tonight at Loyola Marymount University here in Los Angeles. Do come and say hello.
I’ll be on a panel on literature and immigration tonight at Loyola Marymount University here in Los Angeles. Do come and say hello.
A kind reader emailed to inform me of the passing of Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus. Here is a lovely piece about Boulus and his work by fellow Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, who recounts the last time he saw Boulus, already very sick, at a literary festival in a small town in France. Youssef eulogizes Boulus, saying:
وأقول إنه الشاعرُ الوحيدُ…
هو لم يكن سياسياً بأيّ حالٍ.
لكنه أشجعُ كثيراً من الشعراء الكثارِ الذين استعانوا برافعة السياسة حين تَرْفعُ…
لكنهم هجروها حين اقتضت الخطر!
وقف ضدّ الاحتلال، ليس باعتباره سياسياً، إذ لم يكن سركون بولص، البتةَ، سياسياً.
وقفَ ضد الاحتلال، لأن الشاعر، بالضرورة، يقف ضد الاحتلال.
سُــمُوُّ موقفِه
هو من سُــمُوّ قصيدته.
And here’s my (humble) translation:
And I say he is the only poet…
He was not political in any case.
But he was more courageous than many other poets who used the banner of politics when it suited
and then abandoned it when it presented danger.
He stood against occupation, not because he was political, since Sargon Boulus was not political at all.
He stood against occupation because the poet, by necessity, stands against occupation
The eminence of his position
is the eminence of his poem.
You can read the rest of Youssef’s piece here.
Even though we moved back to Los Angeles about two months ago, I have yet to catch up with all my forwarded mail. And I still have not renewed any of my usual subscriptions (except for the New York Review of Books). So it’s with more than a little wistfulness that I look at interesting issues of some magazines. This week’s New Yorker, for instance, has a wonderful poem by Robert Bly, an essay by Elizabeth Kolbert about the disturbing tendency by U.S. automakers to take billions in government help without producing fuel-efficient cars, and a piece on the Frida Kahlo “cult” (of which I will freely admit to being a member.)
Orhan Pamuk has a brief essay at the Guardian about reading the Paris Review interviews as a young author in Istanbul. “In the beginning,” he writes, “I read these interviews because I loved these writers’ books, because I wished to to learn their secrets, to understand how they created their fictive worlds. But I also enjoyed reading interviews with novelists and poets whose names I hardly knew, and whose books I had not read.”