a poetic utterance found on the internet

And he was very moved and wanted to translate Raymond Carver into Japanese, and soon he was convinced he wanted to translate everything Raymond Carver ever wrote.

blindness

Did I mention that the Canadian journal PRISM International will be publishing my translation of Niels Hav's poem Blindebuk [Blind Man's Bluff]? Well, now they've decided to print two more. Which is all the more pleasing given that the three are thematically related. The titles are Blindeinstituttet [Institute for the Blind] and Om hans blindhed [On his Blindness]. I think they'll be out in the spring.

a sort of present

I may have mentioned this before. That I'm translating a couple of stories by David Foster Wallace. That they ought to be coming out somewhere. That it's a puzzle he hasn't been rendered in Danish yet, apart from one story in a journal some years back. Anyway, one of the stories I'm translating, one that I've actually finished, as far as I can tell, is called 'Suicide as a Sort of Present', which is a poignant title given that Wallace only recently chose to leave this life and find another. The story is a raw, fleshy slab of psychology. That's how I want to describe it. It starts like this in the English original:

There was once a mother who had a very hard time indeed, emotionally, inside.

You can read the rest in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, first published in the USA in 1999.

have a cigar

Thomas E. Kennedy (here>>) is a busy chap. If he's not lecturing in America, writing novels about his adopted city of Copenhagen, or translating Danish literature, he may well be updating his blog 'A Shout from Copenhagen' for the literary journal Absinthe: New European Writing. Have a look at this piece, for example, a great little story about translating celebrated Copenhagen beatnik Dan Turèll (above).

welsh for bladder

More: Welshmen pissing themselves here>>.

welsh

It's not Welsh's fault (see here>>).

filled newspaper space

Here's a recent piece from The Times. An author slags off translators and then gets slagged back at by respondents in the comments box. I've already forgotten about it.