The difficulty of studying something so circumambient, the medium in which we are swimming. The fear of saying the obvious. I read some interviews with Simic yesterday: at one point he cites the same poets the same exact poets that I have been associating with him: Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Louise Glück, James Tate, and Russell Edson. Of course, this seems obvious. Birds of a feather.

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We read James Nolan's translation of Gil de Biedma yesterday in my graduate seminar. He feels the need to take a deliberately prosaic language and spice it up. For escribir [to write], he translates "scribble." Now Gil de Biedma is innovative in Spanish poetry for bringing in a flat, understated, Audenesque tone (late 1950s, early 1960s). He uses that Brittanic litotis and the pronoun "uno." This translator probably doesn't want to try for a similar effect, because his audience is principally American. But Gil de Biedma had lived in England and I hear his Spanish as British-inflected.