Friday Links
August 8, 2025
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Bernardo Cavallino
La Visione di San Domenico
Gary Saul Morton: A Question of Purpose: On Translating Russian Literature
The Heroism of Homeric Women
Paul Willis: Greetings on a Morning Walk
Alfred Nicol’s Frost Farm Conference Keynote
A Life in Fiction: John Wilson on the books that stick with us
“The Tear” by Richard Crashaw
Gary Saul Morton: A Question of Purpose: On Translating Russian Literature
Russian literature has been blessed with some splendid translators. In the early twentieth century, when Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev came to be widely read in English, they astonished readers, critics, and the most important novelists. In her essay “The Russian Point of View,” Virginia Woolf explained that while English novels leave readers comfortably “on shore,” great Russian fiction plunges them into the water. We read “feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in a moment of vision understanding more than we have ever understood before, and receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from the press of life at its fullest.” We see the naked human soul, experience “its passion, its tumult, its astonishing medley of beauty and vileness.… Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvelous, terrible, oppressive—the human soul.” This is a description of an experience. It describes what translators should convey.
The Heroism of Homeric Women
The latest installment of an ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein. Eirene S. Allen joins in to discuss her recent book, The Epic Women of Homer: Exploring Women’s Roles in the Iliad and Odyssey.
Paul Willis: Greetings on a Morning Walk
Blackberry vines,
you hold this ground
in the shade of a willow:
all thorns, no fruit.
Go on and read the rest, here.
Alfred Nicol’s Frost Farm Conference Keynote
Not surprisingly, this keynote from Frost Farm’s 2023 Conference is delightful and insightful:
I’ve come to believe that, while poetry is indeed a competitive field, nobody who enters the field in good faith loses. Don’t get me wrong: as a poet, you have to play to win. Frost himself said that of all the departments in a college, the closest to poetry was not the English Dept., not socio-economics, not science—closer than most—and not philosophy, as much as he loved philosophy. It was the athletic department. The poet’s next of kin in college was the athlete.
A Life in Fiction: John Wilson on the books that stick with us
If you’re not subscribing to Prufrock, Micah Mattix’s substack, then you really need to rectify that mistake—stat. John Wilson has regular gig with Prufrock so you essentially get two great critics for the price of one.
My chief objective in this column, though, is to propose a nonfiction book series, by a wide variety of writers, on novels (or short stories) that in one way or another made a particularly strong impression, beginning with those in childhood and proceeding (more or less) to the present. The individual volumes in the series would not be long, but they would not be short either; writers would enjoy a degree of leeway on that front. Similarly, there would be no presumption that each volume would offer a personal selection of “Great Books,” but neither would such titles be proscribed.
“The Tear” by Richard Crashaw
This was a great episode of the always wonderful Versecraft from Elijah Blumov. This particular episode will be featured in September in Dappled Things, but you can take a listen now.
