ICYMI: Part One of my thoughts on how the “free speech culture” movement contributed to the moment of historical censorship www.popehat.com/p/how-free-s...

I finally surrendered to the Ghost of Things Contemporary and published a poem about a current event

A poem of mine about Nabokov has been published in the Threepenny review

C’est de loin la meilleure traduction française de Dante que j'ai jamais lue. Elle saisit quelque chose de lui qu'aucune autre version française n'arrive à rendre. Fortement recommandée.

A poem I wrote about vanquished soldiers through history is now published in the New Verse Review

Where would I go to understand the versification principles of rap music? I know traditional English literary versification but the system rappers use is hard to figure out beyond "there's a basic four-beat thing going on". Weirdly this will be relevant to my dissertation about pre-Islamic poetry

Two poems by Saadi translated by yours truly in the Los Angeles Review

I have seen takes you people wouldn't believe. Bill Kristol on fire with AOC's talking point. I watched David Brooks' eye glitter remembering Bloody Sunday. All those moments will be lost in time, like Hannania's Mea Culpa. Time to cry.

Toxic nazgulinity

For another specimen of reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation, here's me reading psalm 120 from the Aleppo Codex.

Not only did I decide that Jabberwocky needs to exist in Middle English, but I also decided that it needed to be recorded. Lots of Old English words, particularly poetic ones, don't have reflexes that survive into Middle English. This was one very weird way to fix some instances of that.

A reading of the famous "Once More Unto The Breach" speech from Shakespeare's Henry V in a reconstruction of very early 17th century pronunciation. The king gets surprised mid-speech. (This is a relatively conservative accent for the period, w/ even the long mid-vowels still relatively low.)

The beginning of the Shma read by me in Khan's reconstruction of Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation. This pronunciation is the one the vowel diacritics we now know originally represented. This is the closest I think we can come to an idea of how Hebrew was read in liturgy in 10th century Abbasid Tiberias

Modern writers' workshops: "Don't make your villain too over the top or on the nose! People don't do evil for evil's sake" Shakespeare's plays: "Hi audience! I'm the villain! My favorite pastimes are puns and murder! Evil is so fun. Watch me do some now”

My god this man is such a whiny little baby

Every time I do self-translation it feels almost like performing surgery on myself. No matter how good a surgeon you are, you're doing some pretty janky shit.

“The Goths were Arians” Dude racial terminology like that isn’t cool anymore “ARIANS! I mean A-R-I-A-N-S” Jeez stop insisting on it it’s creeping me out.

This is either delusional or a lie. “Young men don’t have bank accounts” is flat-out not a thing and Mark “Ethereum” Cuban of all people is an unreliable narrator on this point

What do you call it when you get frustrated trying to hypothetically vocalize an Ugaritic text written in consonantal script? Irritable Vowel Syndrome

How big does a qamatz have to be before it constitutes a qamatz Gadol? Does it have to be a qamatz descended from Aaron?

Think that the beginning of Ecclesiastes should be translated “Total bullshit, said Gatherman. Total bullshit. It’s all bullshit”

"She's a tongue that lived two thousand years And ran a blockade to kiss mine. They have turned into twins, like lips On which two hopes combine." — Salman Masalha on the Hebrew language (tr. Mine)

MAGA people seem capable only ever of acting like they are running a political campaign. Like, all they can do is play to the crowd regardless of how stupid it is from the perspective of actually achieving objectives.

Two of my translations (a Yiddish poem by Avrom Sutzkever and a French one by Victor Hugo) came out in Lunch Ticket today. Also yikes I really need to remind myself to give half a damn when I take headshots.

If you were born in the 80s, science fiction authors mostly did not actually offer you a future of jetpacks, flying cars and 4-hour work weeks. They offered you a messed-up cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go, enjoy

Does…does she know what that emoji means?

If someone showed me this interaction and told me it was parody I would believe them. An increasing amount of online neurodivergence advice & discourse is basically bullshit. (A particularly stupid example is the periodically circulated thoughtmeme about autistic people being immune to propaganda.)

Whenever someone says "this isn't what I thought I was voting for" and regrets how they voted it is REALLY hard for me to resist jumping down their throat. But it's important to react positively to stuff like that and commend it. At this point, it feels almost immoral not to.

"This world will never hold for you or me. So just hold God to heart, and let it be. Trust not this earthly kindom to be true. You will not be the first it nursed then slew. What does it matter, as your soul moves on, Whether you die in dirt or on a throne?" — Saadi of Shiraz

My translation of a short cheeky poem by Robert Desnos in the latest edition of Lighten Up

I wrote a poem about two Old English poets, followed by translations of their work. The first eight lines to the Beowulf Poet use no Romance loanwords, which I only pulled off by inventing a non-loaned modern word for "Mercian".

Key point: nobody is going to be up in 2026 (except Durbin, and I very much doubt he runs.)

I had a dream where I wound up giving another Shakespeare talk @rachelschine.bsky.social asked me with a scowl “What’s a Shakespeare?” Then Antara ibn Shaddad and Imru’ul Qays appeared and asked me to join their juggling team.

In short: yes they did in fact rhyme in the 1600s. The modern pronunciation seems to have been rarer during the 17th century. The diphthongal pronunciation continued to be a thing in the delivery of verse for a while.

In which I read Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 in a reconsteruction of early 17th century pronunciation

A lot of you aren't ready to hear this but 1980 was almost half a century ago

Happy International Women's day. In honor of which (& because I love how modern Tajik poets play w/ the Persianate tradition) here's me reading "Daughter's Song" by Zulfiya Atoi in Tajik. My translation is on screen in the video with a Perso-Arabic transcription for the Cyrillically impaired.

AOC is the hero we need and don’t deserve

The whole Trump and Tarriffs thing is starting to feel like when the writers kept trying to make you think Gilligan might actually get off the island this week.

The whole Trump and Tarriffs thing is starting to feel like when the writers kept trying to make you think Gilligan might actually get off the island this week.

In which I read Shakespeare's Sonnet 81 in a reconstruction of early 17th century pronunciation

The waitress asked me how I wanted to top my sub and I just blurted out "consensually"

This very mistaken passage from Robin Robbins' edition of the Complete Poems of John Donne sort of illustrates why I really think it's a bad idea for lit people to let old-school philology slide. I'm going to go through them one by one.

When I say that no gov/policy/media/organizing work can be effective without acknowledging that a solid 30-40% of the US is living full-time in an ARG that positions verifiable reality as an evil illusion, this is what I am talking about.

The job of Vietnamese cuisine is to take French food and make it way better

Ok but that line needs to be farther south. The top half of France (if not the top two thirds) should be green as well

When your hate speech bot flags me for antisemitism for asking if Jews have a particular beracha for using the space laser, but not the people spouting sincere unvarnished Nazi shit, you done fucked up

Crazy Diamond Design makes amazing paleographic fonts. For that doubtless enormous constituency of people who feel like translating a text into late 14th century English and making the reader deal with late 14th century English handwriting, there's nothing better.

I should pause here and say that pretty much every time I speak about my own harm (that is being paid for by NY taxpayers) the court receives a letter from Cuomo’s attorney’s trying to silence me.

This was a bad idea