Cross-cultural “Stuff”
Two Poets, Eight Centuries, One Poetic Masterpiece
Save Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of those books that some scholars love to be snotty about. Literary critics of a certain stamp dismiss it as bad poetry, apparently on the grounds that people love it who don’t otherwise read poetry.* Persian linguists rightly point out that Fitzgerald’s translation…
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Sticks and Stones and Mammoth Bones
I am once again writing a book on a short deadline. Unlike Heroines of Mercy Street, it is not a book that the Marginalia will have any interest in. My friends and family will feel no need to buy or read it.* I won’t post the cover here.** There will be no interviews, guest posts,…
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The Day(s) The Music Died
If you’ve been hanging out in English-speaking corners of the internet, you are doubtless aware that April 23, 2016 is the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. (In one of those weird little coincidences that historians and poets love, he may well have been born on the same date 52 years earlier since he was…
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