Well, the full craziness of taking a two-week trip to Vietnam over Christmas break has now sunk in, at least partly. It will fully sink in, I suppose, next week when I am in the think of grading final exams and essays. I wouldn’t have chosen to make a...

Sometimes the world hands you a gift. I just found out that I will be spending Christmas and the first ten days of the new year in Hanoi. I’ve been invited to participate in a conference on the translation of Vietnamese literature and its reception...

Note: I’m going to be talking tomorrow morning (with my friend Amy Hauber from SLU’s Art Department) about our use of blogs and other electronic media in the classroom and with our students. I’m going to use this post to sketch out the main ideas I...

I was reshelving a book in my office and noticed a volume on the shelf that I hadn’t picked up in a couple of years– a collection of selections from the work of Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (edited by Collette Gaudin). I...

Haiku in translation often require a fairly extensive set of notes or even scholarly apparatus in order for the reader to “get” the insight payoff that is the point of the form. For instance,  in this poem by Kikaku (1661 – 1707) At a grass hut I...