We read Harry Mathews piece on translation and the OuLiPo yesterday in my translation course. I wanted my students to do an Oulipean translation, but I think that is unrealistic at this point. I think I will have them to the N+ dictionary excercise and explore ideas of linguistic redundancy.

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I am reading NEH summer applications this week. So much of my work life involves evaluation: grading, reading manuscripts, evaluating people for tenure, etc... This is psychologically excruciating for me. More equanimity! (Jordan Davis).

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I tend to think that people ought to be like me. In the sense that they should be passionately interested in what they are interested in, whatever that might be. The academic institution promotes a sort of perfunctory approach to everything. I am giving an independent study this semester on "world poetry" for two students who are taking a Ph.D. exam and need to know some basic things outside of Hispanic literature. It is great to be able to talk about Ginsberg, Baudelaire, or even Wordsworth, to try to condense a life-time of reading into an hourly meeting a week. Am I justified in making them read Barbara Guest? You don't have to know her work to be a good Hispanist, I suppose. Yet why shouldn't two young American women not know something about the most accomplished woman writing in the past 50 years in their own country?