In some ways it’s less intimidating to translate the great and famous than the under-translated and little-known, because you know that your versions aren’t going to be the only ones out there by a long shot, so monolingual readers will be better equipped to take them with the requisite grain of salt. Anyway, here are my best efforts at five favorite Vallejo poems: “Pain without explanation: five poems by César Vallejo.” It’s the latest post in an ongoing series at Via Negativa called Poetry from the Other Americas, in which I’ve been joined by Natalie d’Arbeloff, Jean Morris, and Dale Favier so far, with other translators signalling an interest in contributing as well. It’s one of the most exciting collaborations I’ve been involved in for some time, and it’s also breathing new life into Via Negativa as a group blog, with poets responding to the translations and to each other in such a manner that I’ve upgraded the description of the site: “Via Negativa is a unique experiment in daily, poetic conversation with the living and the dead.” I hope that isn’t too grandiloquent! (After consultation with Luisa, we agreed it would be best to keep “purveyors of fine poetry since 2003” as the main description.)

In other Via Negativa news, we’ve updated and expanded the Recommend Sites page, which the stats suggest does attract a steady trickle of visitors. As I wrote at the bottom of the page, despite the near-disappearance of blogrolls, for a site like Via Negativa where most posts are original creative work rather than commentary and therefore contain few outgoing links, it’s as important as ever to maintain a list of some of our favorite places on the web—especially those that aren’t as well-known as they should be. But for the first time we’ve expanded it beyond just a blogroll to include other daily poetry sites and a small but diverse list of favorite online magazines. (There would be a lot more literary magazines in this latter category if I didn’t get so irritated by the way most of them continue to ape the look and reading experience of print journals.)