In spring 2016 I took a wonderful translation workshop taught by my old friend Jonathan Mayhew . It was a lot of fun. My French came back very quickly - a really sweet surprise. Below are some of my translations. "Je rêvais de toucher" [Georges Bataille] Je rêvais de toucher la tristesse du monde au bord désenchanté d’un étrange marais je rêvais d’une eau lourde où je retrouverais les chemins égarés de ta bouche profonde j’ai senti dans mes mains un animal immonde échappé à la nuit d’une affreuse forêt et je vis que c’était le mal dont tu mourais que j’appelle en riant la tristesse du monde une lumière folle un éclat de tonnerre un rire libérant ta longue nudité une immense splendeur enfin m’illuminèrent et je vis ta douleur comme une charité rayonnant dans la nuit la longue forme claire et le cri de tombeau de ton infinité. I Dreamed of Touching I dreamed I was touching sadness of skies no magic was where I was on the moor I dreamed I had found murk-deep in water the
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Some Old Poems, by Robert Basil Briggs Room Reading Stanford University Spring 1984 Hi there, everybody. This August I was sitting outside the Student Union reading To the Lighthouse . It was a spacey day, and out of the store comes this little kid with a woman I presumed to be his Mom. The woman had three chocolate bars, and she gave the child one half of one. The Union bees were waiting for him to open it. They had already crawled into my coke can, too intent on sucking sugar up to sting me when I waved at them. The woman gives the child her chocolate bar and she walks away, and I might have seen her start eating, but reading all day made me too tired to turn my neck, so I just heard her unwrapping. Then the child said the first two lines of my poem. I was blown away by the beauty of his words and how they represented in haiku implicitness the perfect tasty union of mother and child. Then the child said the third line of my poem and that changed everything. Because the words t