Last & Lost Poems by Delmore Schwartz. I have to disagree with Robert Phillips who lauds this work in his introduction. Almost none of this writing shows the compression, the intelligence, the drama of his earlier work. What “broke” Schwartz? His illness? The various medications he was on when he wrote?

How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. I’m genuinely enjoying this book. It’s sent me back to Augustine’s Confessions and has put Thomas Kinsella’s The Tain on my Amazon wish list for next ordering.

The Catalpa Bow; A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan, by Carmen Blacker. This is a classic in the field and is just as important as Ghosts and the Japanese.

New British Poetry, edited by Patterson and Simic. Thin pickings.

Haiku; Anthologie de poem court japonaise, Atlan and Bianau.

From the Country of Eight Islands; Sato and Watson.

The Poem Behind The Poem; Translating Asian Poetry edited by Frank Stewart. Most of this is impressionistic stuff: we’re told about the translator’s spiritual condition while translating, how they must “prepare” for translation in some mysterious fashion, etc. etc. So far the best essay is J.P. Seaton’s “Once More, on the Empty Mountain,” because he really addresses the difference between Romance languages and Chinese and Japanese writing systems: parataxis, and he discusses how this comes into play in attempting to transfer the meaning (not to mention the form) of a poem from one completely different mode of thinking into another. William I. Elliott also gets high marks. The absolute worst essay is W.S. Merwin’s; the most puzzling is Arthur Sze’s in which he reveals his process of translation using Robert H. Mathew’s Chinese-English Dictionary, as if this is the key to a deep understanding of a language he doesn’t know. Anyway, as I said, I’m still reading and will no doubt re-read Sze and Merwin to try to understand if I’m missing something, or if the something I feel I’m missing is not there in the first place.