Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) is a towering figure in Central and East European literary history.  You'll find monuments to him in three national capitals—Warsaw, Minsk, and Vilnius—as well as the Ukrainian city of Lviv.  In Krakow, he's buried in the Wawel, alongside Polish kings.  Haven't heard of him?  Me neither, not till long after I finished my Ph.D.

I've recently returned from an American studies conference on "transnational poetics" at Ruhr-University Bochum.  Many of the papers were first-rate, but there was a recurrent problem, namely, a lack of certainty regarding the meaning or value of the word "transnational." What differentiates a "transnational" approach to a literary topic from an "international" or "comparative" one?

Okay, I've turned forty.  On my birthday I celebrated my obsolescence by translating a sonnet titled "To a Corpse."

It's been a while since I posted to Arcade.  So many deadlines!  Several times a day I find myself mumbling, "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near." 

Last year I wrote a "best of 2009" post for Arcade.  This year I want to do something different.  I want to share someone else's list.  Part of it, anyway.

I've long been fascinated by Isadora Duncan's later career. After the 1917 October Revolution, she moved to the Soviet Union, where she opened a dance school for girls. She married the poet Sergei Esenin, drank to excess, and then, when the state failed to fund her school sufficiently, undertook a deliciously scandalous tour of the USA.

Today I heard that my parents might be coming for a visit. That sent me into a cleaning tizzy. While I scrub and scour, I've been thinking about poems that capture the intimate ritual relationship between people and the things that populate their domestic spaces.