mistranslations result in beauty

19

Blind children studying the hippopatamus

23 SEP 2026

Marcel Proust
as quoted by Gilles Deleuze
in Dialogues II

“Great literature is written in a sort of foreign language. To each sentence we attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is often a mistranslation. But in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty.”

18

Dorothea Lange
"A Sign of the Times—Depression
Mended Stockings, Stenographer
San Francisco, 1934"

“whatever you have to say, leave the roots on,
let them
dangle

And the dirt

       Just to make clear
       where they come from—”

20 SEP 2026

—Charles Olson
from "These Days"

inner madman

17

From How to Become a Star, Licedei Theatre (1986)

“He who hides his madman, dies voiceless.”

19 SEP 2026

—André Gide
from Le traite du Narcisse

thinking poem

16

Luke Stephenson, "An Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds"

19 SEP 2026

Lisa Robertson
from an interview in the
Northern Poetry Review

“I just try to make a poem that can think its own thoughts.”

already been said

15

“Everything has already been said, but since nobody listens, we must continually start again."

Early emoticons in the American humor magazine Puck in 1881.
Interesting related article here

18 SEP 2026

—André Gide
from Le traite du Narcisse

totality of existence

14

Simone Leuck - Cuba TV Series

“Poetry’s impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not to make comparisons . . . it is to discover those correspondences of which the sum total would be proof of the indivisible totality of existence.”

17 SEP 2026

—John Berger
from “Dream,” in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1982

monks head

13

Wooden sculpture of a monk's head bearing an inscription on the interior, Japan, 1328 from Sign, Image, Symbol (ed. George Kepes)

“One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another.”

17 SEP 2026

—John Keats
from his marginalia in Paradise Lost

a dry psyche

12

attribution unknown

17 SEP 2026

Heraclitus
(translated by Guy Davenport)

“The stuff of the psyche is a smoke-like substance of fine particles that give rise to all other things, particles of less mass than any other substance and constantly in motion . . . The psyche rises as a mist from things that are wet. . . . A dry psyche is most skilled in intelligence and is brightest in virtue. . . . A drunk man, staggering and mindless, must be led home by his son, so wet is his psyche.”

love

11

Flannery O'Connor as a girl, reading
via the Ina Dillard Russell Library
Georgia College & State University

"To begin with, let us take the following motto. . . Literature is love. Now we can continue."

17 SEP 2026

—Vladimir Nabokov
from Despair

glass of water

10

Hannah Hoch – Der Kleine P (Little P)

“There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.”

17 SEP 2026

 —Mignon McLaughlin
author of 3 volumes of neurotic aphorisms

original context unclear 

reality intolerance

09

“No artist tolerates reality.”

photographer unknown

17 SEP 2026

—Friedrich Nietzsche
(paraphrased)

a wise reader

08

Lucien Freud
The Artist's Mother Reading, 1975

“A wise reader reads . . . not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.”

21 JUL 2026

—Vladimir Nabokov
from “Good Readers and Good Writers”