Consider Charles Boatwright. His name is one of the charming pseudonyms from the vignettes in George Vaillant’s new book, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. Boatwright grew up with a manic-depressive father and was married to a miserable woman for 30-odd years, but he almost always called himself happy. READ MORE >>
Sound Check: W.S. Merwin’s Love of Foreign Language
In the world of letters, there’s prolific and there’s W.S. Merwin. The former Poet Laureate has written twenty-six books of poetry in the last six decades and has still found the time to translate twenty-two books of other people’s poems. The translations are so voluminous, and the source languages so varied—from Japanese to Swedish, from Sanskrit to Crow—that you would expect a selection of his translations to be an opus of world literature, a small window into a pre-Babel world. READ MORE >>
