Palo Alto, Friday 25 September

Where does the time go? A purely rhetorical question? Into various more or less daily routines: writing in the morning while my husband plays his clavichord in the next room (a clavichord is very quiet. In Paris he has his harpsichord, but the rooms we potter in are separated by a nice, thick, bearing wall); lunch with the news; afternoon for translation, biking or going to the gym; supper and a spy novel I usually fall asleep in the middle of, which is very much a bad idea for the insomniac I am, who should not be falling asleep on the sofa. In the sleep-pursuing vein, my rbedtime outine includes 20 minutes of sitting calming (in theory) my monkey mind in the quasi-dark of our balcony/deck.

We live on the third (American) floor of an apartment building that overlooks San Francisquito Creek which is dry at least half of every year but tree-lined. The next town is on the other side of it, mostly invisible, but not sound-proof against dogs. So I sit out there and think about the different sounds: the train 2 streets away that whistles at the level-crossing every half hour on its way to San Francisco to the north or San Jose to the south, carrying university and Silicon Valley commuters; car traffic on a 6-lane highway, maybe someone out for their bedtime stroll talking to their phone. If I open my eyes, I see the lights of airplanes circling San Francisco airport, 40 minutes north, or San Jose airport, 20 minutes south. Mostly they are landing and they don’t make much noise until they are right overhead, and they are quite pretty, like the stars. Oh and the dogs: the one next door has the voice of a dog that was once part of the family, whose barking the neighbours occasionally complained about, so I still cringe when I hear it.

Monday, September 9.

It is Labor Day here in the USA. French Labor Day is the first of May and is just about the only day in the year when nobody works. Here, however, at least the trash collectors came at the usual time and I suspect that I could go shopping just about anywhere from the corner store to the mall supermarket and find the business open.

A few days ago I mentioned how much I like my audio book of To the Lighthouse read by Anne Stevenson. It is not a book I own, but one that comes from the Northern California online public library, Libby. Books of all kinds are checked out for 3 weeks. Popular books — and To the Lighthouse is popular — have waiting lists and recently, finding myself on the waiting list for it, I noticed that an audio for the book with a different reader was available and I took it. What was interesting was that the new ‘narrator’ was very different, but also excellent; in fact listening to a new narrator meant I noticed a lot of new things I hadn’t noticed before;when I searched online for the new narrator’s bio, I discovered she was Phillida Law, A Scottish actress and the mother of Emma and Sophie Thompson, and that she had died just a few weeks ago, at the end of July.

Palo Alto, 3 September 2026

For years, it seems, I have been listening to an audiobook of To the Lighthouse, beautifully read — narrated, I should say — by Juliet Stevenson. (I have read the book in its printed form too, of course, and have at least one copy of it in a bedraggled paperbook on my Paris Virginia Woolf, shelf, as well as hardbound editions of the diaries and letters. I always have one volume of the Diary beside the bed in Paris. When I finish all the Diaries, I go back and start over.

But I’ve discovered that an audiobook is a wonderful way to get to sleep at bedtime, or get back to sleep in the middle of the night: I plug an earbud into one ear, the one that won’t be on the pillow, set the volume low, and the timer for 60 minutes and cross my fingers that I will find the earbud in the sheets if it falls out after I doze off. It no longer matters to me where I begin and where I stop listening, always I hear new things in Juliet Stevenson’s narration

Last night, however, listening to the the dinner scene at the end of section 1, I began to count up how many people were staying in the Ramsay house: parents and children alone make 10, plus their guests, and then there’s the staff. That must make, let’s guess, 20 people to plan, shop and cook for every day. Presumably Mrs Ramsay is the overseer of this domesticity (hard to imagine Mr Ramsay had the patience). So 20-ish people around the table or in the kitchen or upstairs putting small children to bed. Twenty people to plan, shop and cook for every day! How did she do it? It boggles my mind.

30 July 2026, Palo Alto

We have been anxiously following the news from France, first the heat waves and now the wildfires. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the weather is same-same: solid blue skies, warm days, overnight fog off the Pacific which works much better than air conditioning to cool our nights. I realise that the weather in our micro-climate (south of San Francisco) is so boringly good it is not worth mentioning. Alas.

I had a funny experience with AI this week. I am working on a new translation whose author quotes a book by Jacques Derrida. I made a draft translation of the paragraph concerned, then looked online for the Derrida book’s translator. My first thought was to search with IA; I asked Gemini to find the translation for me, giving Gemini my draft translation as guidance. IA returned the Derrida book’s translation to me was promptly returned to me, flatteringly much like my draft.

Pleased at having saved myself a lot of searching and maybe even a trip to the university’s Green Library West Stacks (a place one might only be found months later under a musty stack like a dried-out beetle), I asked Gemini to give me a page reference, at which point Gemini started sending me increasingly obviously wrong answers. I got irritated, Gemini apologized increasingly abjectly for wasting my time with made-up answers (as they/it /he disarmingly admitted) to my questions. A bit of this and I started wondering about the translation they had given me — wasn’t it suspiciously close to my draft translation?

Indeed. When I asked Gemini to find the translation she/it/they — what are Gemini’s pronouns?—had simply sent me back my own translation, framed as an answer.

Remind me to tell you some other time about the West Stacks labyrinth.

July 8, 2026, Palo Alto

A whole six months without posting! Six months in Paris, where we suffered under the first, May, heatwave, or ‘Canicule:’ with temperatures in the mid 30s: shutters (where we have them) closed all day, open when the sun sets, hoping cooler air will breeze in. But nighttime cool in the city is not cool enough to help, unlike here near the coast of northern California the temperature drops 20 degrees as soon as the sun goes down and fog rolls in off the Pacific. The fog may hang around until late morning, but seldom for the whole day. I watched it roll in last evening, down the coastal hills and along the bay. It looks like a long train entering slowly and deliberately entering a station.

‘Canicule’ is the French word for very hot weather. It’s been around for several centuries, my dictionary tells me, and refers to the ‘dog days’ or the period of great heat when the dog star rises and sets with the sun. ‘Par la fenêtre ouverte de ma chambre de torture, pénètre la chaleur lourde, pâteuse, écrasante, d'une matinée de canicule’ is one of the examples drawn from French literature and dated 1898. But I don’t believe it was ever as hot before this year.

A new episode of the ‘canicule’ has just begun in France.

Palo Alto, 20 November, 2025

Just to announce that Victoria Moul has written a wonderfully witty review of my new collection Apple Thieves (Carcanet 2024) for The New Review. It has just appeared in their 11 November Newsletter:

Review of the week:

Ants and honey bees and bears

Beverley Brie Brahic is well known as a translator from French, both poetry and prose. I am always irritated by those who talk about ‘translations’ vs ‘original poems’, feeling grumpily that anybody who insists on such a distinction knows nothing much about either. All the same, I bought Bie Brahic’s 2018 collection The Hotel Eden on the strength of its delicious translations of Baudelaire, so accurately at once lush and evasive in their extravagance. Here is the start of ‘Autumn Song’:

Now we will plunge into the cold shadows;
So long, dancing light of our short summers!
Already I hear the funereal blows
Of firewood ricocheting off the cobbles.

I came for the translations, but I stayed for the ‘originals’ (shudder). There’s much less translation and imitation in Apple Thieves, her latest collection, than there was in The Hotel Eden, but more variety of another kind. Apple Thieves suggests a whole life, in all its moods and phases, matched by an understated level of technical accomplishment. If you want to write well about many different occasions, you need many different forms and styles in which to do it.

One of the things I like most about Bie Brahic’s poetry is its humour: she is an adult speaking to other adults about the silliness of the world. No hint of the long-drawn-out solemnity of post-adolescence which seems to be the default register of much (too much) poetry in English. I was particularly amused by one poem beginning ‘Oh it’s draining poorly this shower!’ She’s also very good at poems full of erotic suggestion: an unusual trait in an Anglophone poet, perhaps learnt in part from all that French translation.

If there is a characteristic feature it is the dying fall. Many of her poems end with a metrical irregularity, a break in the rhyme scheme, or a rhetorical side-step, as here in ‘Little Song for Michel’, in which the final stanza is the least regular:

A puff of wind
Will tickle the skin of a summer day
And one white cloud
May turn things hazy

Or here at the end of ‘Paradise’:

We humans in our shelters are
Susceptible to flood and fire,
As apt to perish in our lairs
As ants and honey bees and bears –

Echo (faint)

As ants and honey bees and bears.
As ants and honey bees and bears.

She doesn’t draw the moral. I admit I have a fondness for poets who are brave enough to risk the resounding conclusion and sometimes I feel a bit frustrated by the end of these poems. I want more of the clickety-clunk of a form coming home. But this is part of the point (and sometimes the sexiness) of her poems – to leave that to you. I think she is just more grown-up than me. VM

Palo Alto, Friday 12 September 2025

Here in Palo Alto we live on the edge of a creek (dry since the spring) that is the boundary between two towns south of San Francisco, and tree-lined so that we look at what seems to be a forest, but is really a thin screen of green with houses, apartment buildings and businesses cheek-to-cheek on each side. Why do I mention that? Because straight across from us, a leaf blower has started chasing leaves around the parking lot of the building.

Really what I set out to say is how excited I was to receive a copy of Andrew Sclater’s collection Quite Joyful from Mariscat in Scotland. It is a pamphlet (chapbook) and every poem in it is strange and wonderful and playful and deeply serious. I can’t praise it highly enough. I was so thrilled that I sat down and read it straight through, all 30 or so pages in one — well, maybe 2 — gulps. I’m Canadian, we’re pretty low key, but this book makes me jump up and down inside me. I want to shout to everyone I know or don’t know. I think there is going to be at least one launch reading in Paris, where Andrew lives part of the time, before December, perhaps at the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore in the 6th arrondissement.

Palo Alto, Tuesday 12 August 2025

Another coolish, sunny afternoon in Northern California. Yesterday biking, today gym, everyday, in the morning, writing, translating. I’ve been slogging away at some prose texts (poems) by a contemporary Italian poet Valerio Magrelli. I discovered Magrelli by reading a selection of his poems by a British poet Jamie McKendrick (Faber), really fine translations that made me want to read more of Magrelli (and McKendrick). I began with a recent collection of poems called Exfanzia, then switched to the prose called In the Flesh Condominium, as backup. I’m gradually getting it, but it’s not easy. I’ve fallen back on Baudelaire as relief, a poem called ‘The Giantess’ (La Géante’) ‘recited’ by Matisse in a book I was reading, a favourite of Matisse, apparently. It’s lovely, I hope I can get it word and tone-perfect.

I’m also trying to do that with a couple of my own poem drafts, over and over, in each case a stanza that won’t come right (of course I come back to them after not having worked on them for a while, and nothing will seem right).

So I’m going to the gym and maybe a yoga class to think of something else. A book back to the library, perhaps another one I want to borrow, though I have it online for 3 weeks (after being on the waiting list for it for months) from the northern California public library. I think it’s a book I want my own copy of.

Oh, and an update on the hungry bluejay. We keep putting out bread and he comes back and stands on the balcony railing and squawks, and I hop up from whatever I’m doing and talk to him and if all the bread cubes are gone, I tell him/her to wait while I get some more. He is becoming less wary. Then he squawks (thank you?) and flies off.