I've been going pretty hard all day, teaching and writing.

Rothenberg's Lorca Variations (New Directions '93). I have sympathy for what he's trying to do in creating these poems that "both are & aren't mine," but I'm finding I don't care a lot about these poems one way or another in relation to the Lorca originals. They seem to lack resonance in comparison with the other texts I'm studying in this article. Rothenberg is better as a translator than as a poet, I feel--and even more significant as an anthologist than as a translator. That is, his great talent is in imagining those ambitiously large configurations of texts. To the point that nobody else has even come close to what he did in this area. it is not merel that he created better anthologies than anyone else, but that he invented a new genre of anthology. But his individual books of poetry don't convince me as much.