Senior Readings + Epstein on Publishing's Future + Problems of Digital Media Preservation

Customarily in the university's undergraduate writing program, graduating senior majors and minors read at the end of the academic year, in late May and early June. This year, however, the readings moved to this just-concluded winter quarter, which meant that the spring quarter wouldn't be so overloaded, but it also translated into 2 readings per week for several weeks at first, and then 1 reading, usually on Tuesday evenings, up through this--exam--week. For the last three months, 2 to 3 seniors, paired with a faculty member who teaches in the program, have read.  I participated this evening in what was the final reading, with three seniors, Allie Keller (whom I taught in her introductory fiction class), poet Meriwether Clarke, and Aaron Kuper (a poet who was in my Situation of Writing Class). I hadn't heard Allie present her fiction in several years, and had never heard Meriwether or Aaron read, so it was a pleasure to hear all three of them. Aaron, who has a connoisseur's eye for books (once he brought for show-and-tell a well-maintained, hardbound, mid-20th century copy of Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol at a midwestern bookshop), seemed to have taken to heart one key suggestion of one our class readings, of reading other poets' work in addition to your own, in Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" I didn't know that he was going to do so (he read poems by Millay, Verlaine, and Sandburg), but I'd decided, after the panel discussion on Saturday and a review of all the translations I have done, a great many of them for and on this blog, that I'd pick a selection of them, and read four to end the program.

I've never read any of my translations at the university, so this was a first for me, but I'd also never read any non-English texts aloud either, so I chose one poem each from French (Alain Mabanckou's "Séjour Terrestre"), Portuguese (Manuel Bandeira's "Desencanto"), Spanish (Severo Sarduy's final poem from his series, "Cuadros de Franz Kline"), and Italian (Eugenio Montale's motetto "Il fiore che ripeti"), and read both the original and my English translation. It was, to put it simply, really fun. I ended by reading one of my favorite poems from Seismosis, "Color," which with several others was recently translated into French. I didn't want to overdo it, though, so I read only the French translation of "Process," the one-line poem that opens and closes the volume. The English and French ("Processus") rhythms differ, but the words themselves are quite similar. And with that, I helped to bid our wonderful seniors goodbye. Congrats to all of them, and as I said at the reading, it's been a honor to work with and teach them.

∫∫∫

I mentioned before that in the Situation of Writing class we read Jason Epstein's charming, memoiristic survey of his profession, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future (W. W. Norton, 2001), which explores both the transformations in the last half-century of mainstream literary publishing in the US and Epstein's particular role in them.  In "Publishing: The Revolutionary Future," a short piece that appeared in the March 11, 2010, New York Review of Book, Epstein revisits many of the themes in his book. He once again discusses many of the major challenges facing his industry, as well as the current possibilities inherent in the electronic and digital platforms that had only just begun to appear a decade ago. In particular, he touches upon several issues that he didn't explore as much in the earlier work in part because of the state of e-publishing then: the question of social networking sites' role in the creation of new works; the potential proprietary problems with digitization; and the "cloud" approach not only increasingly central to computing but to thinking itself.