Some People Are Just That Good, They Have This Soldier-saint Part Of Them Intact And It Takes Your Breath

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it is definitely a Thing with Claws.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

to want and to wonder are parallel actions

- Jessica Fisher, Anne Carson’s Stereoscopic Poetics

Dum pudeo pereo (as I blush, I die) says an old love song. Blood rushes to the face, at the same time the heart seems to wither on itself and snap,

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

‘Agamemnon,’ Aeschylus (translated by Anne Carson)

what are the best academic essays you’ve ever read?

audaces: a study in political phraseology

“domestici hostes”: the nausicaa in medea, the catiline in hannibal

catiline’s ravaged mind: “vastus animus”

the two voices of virgil’s aeneid 

in defence of catiline

antony, fulvia, and the ghost of clodius in 47 bc

the duplicate revelation of portia’s death

virgil’s carthage: a heterotopic space of empire

the taciturnity of aeneas

gender and the metaphorics of translation

Truth. What ferocity in your quest for it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

He cried as if crying was a language he alone knew and in it there was something urgent he needed to say.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

And your lips rise from the dead in each of my smiles.

Wisława Szymborska, A Sentence tr. Regina Grol

I am a song about the great pain of joy.

Dagna Ślepowrońska, tr. Regina Grol

how deeply faithless we are, which is

to say: how true we are to ourselves

- Marina Tsvetaeva