(no subject)

Halfway through Crowley's The Translator, at a section where there's lots of Russian words and phrases dropped, and the language is flooding back into my memory from shelves and forest shadows. What I'm finding is that all the words I can't remember are replaced by French, which I've dabbled with since. Seriously, they're written right over the Russian words, and not just for cognates. What a strange phenomenon, like my mind has a single English to Foreign dictionary. With a lot of blind spots, I'm basically thinking trilingually, in an Ada-esque grotesquerie. Thankfully Latin is long gone.

Great book by the way. Very Crowley, but successfully invades what you'd think of as Roth territory, nostalgia and Eastern Europe. Unwrapping all kinds of packets of both inside me as well.

I need to pick up Resurrection again. And The Idiot. And reread Akhmatova.

The volume of Elizabeth Bishop fragments and discards has been pushed to February, looks like. There's a new Joseph and His Brothers translation out. I like Lowe-Porter but the new guy's a clearer and faster read, probably indispensable for a book so long and dense.

I'm officially engaged.