This summer I decided to stop trimming my beard short and see what it would look like longer and fuller. Like many resolutions made during vacation, this one had questionable merit. I look like me, plus an angry squirrel hanging off my jaw.

In her recent post about a conference on Futurism at SFMOMA, Marjorie Perloff raises several important literary-historical questions.  One of them:  To what extent do a writer's noxious political opinions require us to construe as suspicious his or her activities and affiliations earlier in life?

I might be a specialist in twentieth-century American poetry, but in my spare time late at night I have been translating Russian verse.  Since neither the TV nor the cat care, this blog has provided a welcome outlet for sharing my discoveries.  My current fixation is the poet Afanasii Fet (1820-1892).

This week's reading has been Boris Bukhshtab's A.A. Fet: ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva (Leningrad 1974), a short survey of the life and works of Afanasii Fet, a mid-to-late nineteenth-century Russian poet whose name might be unfamiliar to American audiences but some of whose verse is nonetheless absolutely first-rate.

I was writing a different post, but yesterday someone broke into our house and stole assorted things, including my laptop.  Farewell, my Sony Vaio, we had some good times.  After adversity, one seeks distraction.  I went straight to one of the most beautiful poems in the Russian language, Afanasii Fet's "Shëpot, robkoe dykhanie" (1850).