quotes from classic

My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.

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There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

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I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

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The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

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Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.

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Various on-line discussion groups are ways to find out about books and writers that one might have remained ignorant of otherwise.

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Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

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I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.

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When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

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Praise Voltaire, there are no flags except on municipal buildings!

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As an editor, I continually felt honored by the work I was doing. Putting together a journal is essentially compiling an anthology, and inviting the reader to contrast and compare, to consider the way the juxtapositions play off each other.

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I've always had a penchant for the crown of sonnets, where one sonnet leads to another sonnet and then another, as in John Donne's The Corona.

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I consciously wanted to be the editor of a literary magazine, which I was on several occasions, most notably at the Kenyon Review from 1990-1994, and which is perhaps related to teaching.

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Roubaud writes sonnets that sound like John Donne in French - something that you read with the same kind of shock and rightness and wit that you feel when you read John Donne, of a little knife going in.

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I first encountered Venus Khoury-Ghata's work in an anthology on which I was asked to write a reader's report in 1998. Her poems fascinated me, and I sought out more, translated one.

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I do have a degree in French literature, though living a language and writing term papers in it are different experiences!

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I've been in Paris as much as I could be, which includes living here for longer stretches of time, then eventually just living here tout court.

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The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

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I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

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For me, editing can be frustrating, but invigorating - something I love to do. Until I was editor of The Kenyon Review, it was mostly something I did without pay, a habit I had to feed by doing other work.

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