we were all somewhat confused today because, according to the syllabus, larry rosenwald was visiting our class, but when two o'clock arrived the man who turned up in our classroom was really norman r. shapiro. this made me feel foolish and embarrassed because i had gone over the rosenwald material for class but only skimmed the shapiro translations precisely to avoid the situation i found myself in - being unfamiliar with the visitor's work. but more than that - simply knowing that one had norman r. shapiro himself in the room and not to have anything to say to him made one quite mortified- when will i get another opportunity to be in the same room with an acclaimed translator again? and when i came home and sat down to read his translation of chreole echoes it really came to me that i had let my one brush with a top-notch translator go by without so much as retaining one fleck of lint from his sleeve. his translations had the same insouciance and slight wiliness and quirky radiance that he himself seems to have - not that i read french so well - but if only in the same way most people are so impressed by what ina rilke did with nooteboom, even if they don't read dutch - now i have to go read more shapiro translations - well i know he did baudelaire and all that, but i'm more interested in his translations of francophone american lit - like the two plays of victor sejour (blood and thunder verse tragedies! what good fun!) and he compared his philosophy of translation to playing on a pinball machine. the possible trajectories of the ball are infinite and unpredictable, but there is also a frame and a closed system in which to work (which is why, he said, he prefers translating verse to prose, although i wish he had said what the "system" was - the text? the translator? language? the interface between languages? or did he mean something as simple as, say, metrics, which in light of his preference for verse and "grille and grid" structure is not unlikely) also, something interesting he said: that of those enslaved out of africa, over 60% were sent to french colonies like martinique and guadelope and haiti. less than 5% were sent to american plantations. but france today does not apparently have any guilt issues, whereas that guilt associated with slavery continues to dominate america.