No one can fault a government for prosecuting a Bradley Manning or an Edward Snowden if they violate laws so as to damage the national interest. But everyone should criticize inhumane treatment, prosecutorial misconduct, misuse of classification laws, the increased privatization of national security, excessive national secrecy, incompetent security programs, wasted tax dollars, sham oversight, lies to oversight committees, lies to the public, closed courtrooms, and abuse of power.

Governments certainly have a legitimate interest in keeping secrets, even though the grim truth is that all governments misuse this right to protect political parties from embarrassment, and to keep citizens uninformed or misinformed about some important matters.

In Edward Snowden’s case, we ordinary citizens have yet to discover whether his revelations damage the national interest in some way, or merely embarrass the government. Nearly every day, though, we learn more about NSA abuses, and we often learn about high ranking officials (like the author of the Patriot Act) who share our shock.

The people who seem to have learned something significant from Snowden’s disclosures are not terrorists, but the American public and our allies.

Personally, I do not trust the assurances of the intelligence bureaucracy or Congress, two institutions that thrive on lies. Whether or not Snowden’s whistle-blowing did any damage, our government has been exposed as violating the Constitution and lying about it to Congress and to the public.

Any terrorist who had not long ago assumed that western governments’ surveillance is deep and thorough is too stupid to survive long. Snowden’s revelations could not have surprised them.

Any ordinary American who does not understand that there are risks to ordinary Americans from secret government surveillance by an unaccountable bureaucracy is probably not much smarter.

Discrediting a whistle-blower like Snowden will be made very easy if the government has access to every email and telephone call. Thanks to President George W. Bush, the FBI can break into Snowden’s home (as they can break into yours), copy all of his computer files, and hide the fact that they did so. The TSA can legally do the same at any airport, seizing laptops and copying their contents without explanation. Thanks to President Obama, these abuses have continued and been expanded.

Some commentary distracts us from the serious issue of state surveillance by focussing on Edward Snowden as an individual. I understand that most people prefer human-interest stories and pop psychology to ideas and analysis, but some people who should be above that, like David Brooks of The New York Times, go out of their way to divert attention from large issues to amateur psychologizing about one person.

The effort to discredit Snowden (as a loner, for example, or high school dropout) demonstrates the vulnerability of ordinary people who oppose terrorists. In theory, a government could eventually have enough intimate knowledge to arrest or intimidate every citizen. We would all be cowed in to submission.

You personally have nothing to hide? Maybe your favorite candidate for the presidency or Congress does, and maybe that candidacy will be destroyed by NSA leaks of personal correspondence. Maybe your company’s trade secrets will be sold by a private contractor to a competitor, and your company will fold, taking your job with it.

Metadata ironically cost the job and much of the good name of a C.I.A. director, David Petraeus, when a search of metadata showed his connection to Paula Broadwell.

Imagine the potential metadata record of the Bush family connection with the bin Laden family. Combine that with the ability of a president (thanks to George W. Bush himself) to simply declare someone an enemy combatant and imprison him at Guantanamo, and you must realize that no one is safe.

As technology, bureaucracy, media noise and citizen complacency expand, we approach a time when the American government will have (and by computer quickly process) all of our emails and internet use. They might be there already.

Short term, I worry a little less about an Orwellian police state than I do about the commercial uses of this information. The internet is relentlessly driven by the commercial collection of data about you, dear reader, and the rest of us, so that we can be targeted with ads today, and perhaps denied health insurance tomorrow.

If you want a sense of how many companies are harvesting data about you, see what cookies are on your computer right now, then download and install Ghostery, a free program that will identify and thwart the covert tracking on those internet pages you visit.

If NSA and Homeland Security employ hundreds of private contractors, themselves employing hundreds of thousands of employees (like Edward Snowden) with access to your data, how many of them will eventually sell data? How much would one smartphone company spend to learn the secrets of its competitor? How many employees would sell data to China? How much more stock market manipulation will be possible?

David Brooks finds Snowden a sad example of disaffected, alienated geeks. Brooks’ general principles, like most of his political ideas, are centrist, bland and unexceptionable. Brooks actually lamented kids today who allow their consciences to trump their loyalty oaths and their career interests.

I hope that by now David Brooks has rethought that sense of priorities. We need more people who place the good of the country above self-interest, and Edward Snowden appears to be one of them.

God of Carnage might have been aptly entitled A Delicate Balance, if Edward Albee had not already used that for another play with a similar thematic interest.

Albee’s play uneasily reveals the fragile, delicate balance of human relationships. In Albee’s world, maintaining a modest level of unhappiness requires vigilance, sacrifice, restraint, humility — and sometimes humiliation. Albee’s characters seem to have a greater capacity for suffering than Reza’s, for suffering deeper than the sting of being contradicted or having one’s hypocrisies noted.

God of Carnage also calls our attention to the delicate balance of human relationships, both the intimacies of marriage and the one-off transactions among strangers. But Yasmina Reza takes audiences to another level, using these domestic and casual relationships to ask her audience to consider the delicate balance within human nature between our savagery and our civility.

The play suggests that the veneer of civility is thin indeed, and is all too easily abandoned when our egos are threatened. Four parents who initially defend their children soon enough throw the little darlings to the wolves, metaphorically speaking. The last ditch to be defended is the self.

Most audience members, being human too, might not want to think very hard about this. Americans prefer sitcom assurances of our own superiority to an evening spent touring the abyss with Samuel Becket.

Most Americans want to enjoy other people’s wretchedness, not nurse our own, especially at today’s ticket prices. Political AM radio programs did not build vast audiences by calling for introspection and self-criticism.

Our national preference for entertainment over understanding probably explains much that is wrong with today’s theatre, television, and movies. If we are open to dark observations at all, it is mostly through comedy.

The director of the Napa Playhouse production, June Alane Reif, decided to shape her production of God of Carnage more as comedy than drama. The script easily allows this, as it also allows the darker interpretation of Roman Polanski’s 2011 film adaptation, Carnage.

Roman Polanski ultimately softened his theme by using visuals under the ending titles to assure audiences that everything turned out just fine after all, with civility restored — the hamster alive and healthy, and the two boys back to playing together nicely.  June Alane Reif’s production ends with the playscript’s unsettling lack of clear closure and comforting resolution.

Having decided to emphasize comedy, June Alane Reif directed beautifully, keeping the pace up and assuring purposeful stage movement. She was the casting director, too, and the actors she selected were wonderful at comedy, too: Christine Julian, Nathan Day, Linda Howard, and Zachary Stockton. I hope to see this combination again.

My review of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry will appear in the Fall/Winter 2012-13 issue of Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com).

Perhaps a few readers today still dismiss the worth of translated poetry because of the long acknowledged inability of a translator to render an exact equivalent of the original. In a literary world with a post-modernist sensibility, this obvious fact is irrelevant.

The inherent imperfections of translation should matter greatly to literary scholars, intent upon understanding the originals, but not as much to poets. Most poets are interested in discovering voices, forms, styles, and techniques, without being overly fussy about what came from the translator and what from the original poet.

Anthologies are still very valuable in this regard, even though anthologies’ influences have been in decline since well before the flood of printed books and then the bigger flood of ebooks. Before book mass marketing, anthologies of English language poetry dominated English language literary culture. Some anthologies, like the Georgian, introduced new literary movements in reaction.

The most impressive anthology of all, China’s Shijing (Book of Songs or Odes), has for centuries served Chinese poets as a pattern book. Poets often composed poems “to the tune of” songs from the Shijing.

The tunes themselves in the Book of Songs have not been preserved, but poets still compose new poems on the structure and syntax of the ancient. Each skilled poet demonstrated that traditional forms can help generate rather than stifle brilliant writing.

I recall once being told a story by a playwright that illustrates the process. Planning to write a musical with a composer on the other coast, Mitch Gianunzio was tasked with writing lyrics for which the composer would write music. When Gianunzio said that he did not know enough about music to do this, he was told to simply write new lyrics for an existing Broadway song or standard, without identifying the source to the composer. If the lyrics fit an original, they would be structurally appropriate for the composer.

One can hardly imagine poets in the next millennium writing poems to the tune of “Autumn in New York” or “A Fine Romance.” That will probably not happen, alas, although worse influences on poets than The American Songbook are at work today.

Despite their diminished influence, anthologies remain formidable primarily as classroom texts, shaping readers’ attitudes and tastes, and as arbiters of worth, shaping poets’ careers. Poetry careers, with the rich bounty of residencies and readings, can be made by anthologies of contemporary poetry.

In their own way, Norton and other anthologies have probably done more to canonize or inter various poets than all of our prize committees, reviewers and literary critics.

This important power of anthologies sparked one of the most acrimonious literary disputes in recent memory when the estimable Helen Vendler attacked Rita Dove’s selections for The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry in The New York Review of Books. Vendler’s attack drew an equally caustic reply from Dove. Their exchange was alarmingly personal, or perhaps refreshingly personal, but the field they fought over involved such vast and serious matters as artistic standards, race, and the grave responsibility of anthologists.

The poet and critic William Logan, whose reviews are not to be missed, wrote insightfully about this dispute in his New Criterion review of Rita Dove’s anthology.

In our own times the idea of proper poetry models seems hopelessly antiquated, despite the alarming sameness of much contemporary poetry. Our times are dominated by a post-Romantic cult of originality and individual authenticity, edging towards a cult of personality, and by a reluctance to acknowledge influences.

Nevertheless every poet who is still developing, and knows it, is excited to find a new poet from the past whose work inspires. These two anthologies of Latin American poetry would not disappoint them.

Still, several poems here invite rereading and meditation. I count among them “personal effects,” “pentagon,” “bagley removes a thought,” “victor,” and “be afraid, brother.” Despite their casual surfaces, these poems seem to me among the best to come out of the war, more worthy of being anthologized than some poems that seem almost canonized.

Michael Casey is a skilled storyteller, writing crisp, brief anecdotes or vignettes free of extraneous lines or phrases. “Imaginative literature is about listening to a voice,” A. Alvarez says, more than about information or even stories. Listening to the voice is probably the chief pleasure in Check Points.

The 52 poems in Check Points involve the same few characters who have appeared in earlier Casey poems, notably an MP named Casey, a friend named John Bagley, and a young Vietnamese woman nicknamed Stanley, hired to help with female prisoners.

Serious and still innocent, Stanley is a foil to the Americans, who have a whiff of detached cynicism about them, in the best tradition of American military humor. Many of the poems are modestly humorous anecdotes in the tradition of military humor, not far from Reader’s Digest “Humor in Uniform” items. As I wrote elsewhere about his Millrat, these poems are free of sentimentality, bombast, and pretension.

Without much of a war going on around them, the young men in this military police unit tease each other, play verbal grab-ass, and sometimes treat regulations and security rather casually. They might all be heroes in a some politician’s speech, but in these poems they are just young guys. Like many who served in Viet Nam, these men seem to be civilians at heart, and kids at heart.

As usual, Casey’s poems have no punctuation, as if they were transcriptions of casual stories told in bars or factory lunch rooms. Words are dropped, syntax is clipped. The poems sound casual, spontaneous, and unedited, but my guess is that Casey rigorously worked these poems to eliminate anything extraneous.

Underneath some of these working class soldiers’ simple accounts of simple events, Casey provides irony and indirection. Soldiers learn to suppress inconvenient emotions, and Casey recreates this survival technique wonderfully.

Some of these poems approach but pull back from directly facing the deeper unpleasantries of war: abuses of the living and dead, the death of fellow Americans, and our abandonment of the Vietnamese people at the end of the war.

“Cenerizio’s service,” for example, ends with a digressive attention to one minor detail, a shift in attention that allows the speaker to ignore the deaths themselves. The poem tells us that two men were

killed in the same bunker
the same night
the same hour same minute
maybe not the same second
but you know it was close very close

Whenever a poem’s speaker edges towards understanding, he stops short, offers a deflating joke, or finds a convenient digression, and the poem ends. But the attentive reader cannot stop as suddenly as the speaker, and slides past the poems’ last lines, moving lightly forward into understanding.

The plays themselves are very weak and very dated. They lack effective central themes, relying instead on the novelty (a century ago) of a slice-of-life look at unlikely stage characters, rough and tumble sailors who quarrel and drink too much. A press release suggests that The Early Plays “explores themes of longing and eternity,” but press releases are known to be generous.

“Mr. Maxwell himself was unsure if they deserved staging,” according to one report, “since he felt the plays sounded as if they were by a writer finding his voice.”

In trying to replicate the cadences and dialects of sailors from around the world, O’Neill created a casting nightmare. This language problem apparently stymied even the estimable Elizabeth LeCompte of The Wooster Group, who had wanted (for some reason) to do the plays for years but finally decided that only Richard Maxwell could solve the problems.

The New York Times reported that Elizabeth LeCompte said “I didn’t know how to deal with the dialect of the play without it becoming cliché, so I figured Richard, a writer of real rigor, could figure it out.”

And he did. Or at least he decided to eliminate the problem of accents. “When we read through with everyone trying the accents, it just wasn’t working,” Maxwell told Gothamist. “Happily, we found a way to satisfy the requirements of the text without doing accents, and it’s dialect. There’s a distinction between dialect and accent. If you say the lines as they’re written, that’s satisfying the dialect without worrying about, well what’s the accent going to be.”

Sounds reasonable. It also helps to get around  Eugene O’Neill’s efforts, an embarrassment even at the time, to recreate black dialect in some of his plays.

“I feel like once we did that,” Maxwell said about eliminating accent,  “it became easier for us to attack the text. It made it easier for us to get it across in its pure form.”

Unfortunately, the pure form loses its musicality when delivered by an actor following the director’s flat, minimalist delivery style. In fact, parts of this production sounded less like a live production than like actors “running their lines” when they are learning their parts.

That New York Times article characterizes Maxwell’s directorial style as “a process of purification, focusing on stripping away artifice, cutting away excess interpretation and aiming for lines delivered neutrally.”

I have no quarrel with that minimalist style, when it is appropriate to the text, but early O’Neill isn’t early Pinter. Nevertheless it is churlish to criticize a contemporary director who so respects scripts.

Because O’Neill’s early scripts are truly weak, I was eager to see what New York City Players and The Wooster Group would do to bring them alive to a 2012 audience. Perhaps I missed a great triumph of production over material, but I suspect instead that the inherent problems Richard Maxwell acknowledged while developing the production are beyond anyone’s abilities, even The Wooster Group and New York City Players.

The young Eugene O’Neill was not only looking for his voice (never to find it in the cacophony of sailors’ voices), he was looking too for the playwriting principles that bring theater alive. He was looking too for tragic characters and compelling stories, not the vignettes and sketches that comprise these early plays.

[Edit Feb. 24, 2012] Ben Brantley of The New York Times just reviewed The Early Plays and came to a similar conclusion: “The style is stripped-down, straightforward and somnolent in the classic Maxwell manner, but without — I’m sorry to report — the usual Maxwell impact.” My thinking is that the fault lies primarily with the young Eugene O’Neill, who wrote these one-cats while still learning playwriting. He was so enamored with language that he had not yet learned the power of silences. Of course, few playwrights before the 1950s understood that.

John Hurt in the Gate production of Krapp’s Last Tape Photo Anthony Woods

Michael Colgan directed and James McConnell designed the light. While my guess is that an actor probably needs greater skill to play Lear or Hamlet than Krapp, John Hurt’s performance seems so great as to be inimitable. After this experience, my next trip to Dublin will certainly include the Gate Theatre, just as my trips to London usually include Donmar Warehouse productions.

Krapp’s Last Tape presents a dismal, fatalistic world view, but Beckett’s comedy, moving between clownishness and irony, provides a workable happy ending of sorts. If we cannot finally deny the grim realities about life and ourselves that we try hard to ignore most of our lives, at least we can join Beckett in getting past a narcissistic reaction. Using Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, Krapp ends in the depression stage, tipping perhaps into acceptance, but Beckett reached acceptance long ago. Beckett is Ecclesiastes with a sense of humor.

Disillusionment, where is thy sting! It’s hard to be upset about mortality, loss, waste, and personal failure when theatre is this good!

Beckett’s script is so tight and perfect as to seem impervious to tinkering. Every director doing Shakespeare seems to cut out or rearrange scenes, but who could do that with Krapp’s Last Tape? Good sense would forbid it, even if Beckett and now his estate did not strictly forbid deviation from his scripts.

The brevity of Krapp’s Last Tape is utterly appropriate to its theme, both vast and simple, about the brevity of life and our isolation in the present moment. This performance opens with a remarkably long part in which Krapp sits motionless, a minimalist, painterly coup de theatre that simultaneously creates suspenseful anticipation and embodies the suspended animation of life in which Beckett’s characters so often wait.

Beckett remains a master of theatrical effect whose gestic and temporal devices make text secondary. The timing in this production seems perfect, perhaps paradoxically since most of Krapp’s actions seem casual. One impulsive sweep of Krapp’s right hand conveys a staggering moment of recognition for Krapp, and perhaps for the audience.

The very best theatre is not comforting entertainment. It fulfills the classic role of Greek tragedy by bringing a community together to confront home truths about themselves and their society, not just about characters on stage. American theatre today too often does the opposite, pandering to our need for reassurance, our desire to feel superior to others, and our wish to splash happily in the shallow end of the emotional and political pool. In evidence, I offer Love, Loss and What I Wore.

John Gardner once asserted that although Beckett’s audiences should “cry out with tragic recognition,” they instead merely laugh, while sensing no further connection than that they, too, once felt as miserable as Beckett’s characters, but snapped out of it.

Perhaps. One cannot actually know how individuals in an audience absorb and are changed by what they see on stage, but everyone who goes to serious theatre has been profoundly moved there once in a while. We can hope that most in an audience are moved towards deeper understanding. At theatre prices today, why waste the opportunity?

To the extent that we do glimpse reality and then fall back into denial, we emulate many of Beckett’s characters. To the extent that we muster the courage to experience our own recognition scenes, we acknowledge Beckett’s greatness.

I enjoyed this production immensely, because its successful moments were solid and its weaker aspects, as I see them, are both consonant with the director’s apparent intentions and interesting to those of us who want to learn something about theatre from every production.

Charles Isherwood rightly calls the production “operatic” and “relentlessly turbulent” in his New York Times Review. Director Lucy Bailey and William Dudley, the set and video designer, do not leave the gathering and clashing armies to our imaginations.

William Dudley’s videos, especially looped crowd scenes and Roman cityscapes engulfed in flames, are constant, effective reminders that the characters are small and the world outside is large. This seems very effective at supporting the director’s political emphasis, suggesting that the most fearsome potency lies in barely controllable Roman mobs, not in the characters.

This production rivals Broadway for sheer scale, elaborate setting, large cast, and emphasis on spectacle. In short, for cost. Whatever quibbles an audience member might have about aspects of this production, we are comforted by the idea that all of the cost went to support a worthy script, not Spiderman.

Expensive productions even by The Royal Shakespeare Company might end soon, as the UK dramatically cuts arts and other spending. The UK is moving away from the European model of serious state arts support to the American model, far more dependent on box-office sales and the frugality of  two-character scripts and monodramas.

Most great and affecting theatre is about the uneasy interplay of character, ideology, and events. Ideology might be too strong a word, but central characters have belief systems that are essential to their functioning and are often agents of their destruction, like Willy Loman’s notions of fairness and dignity.

For the Greeks, those external events are more often matters of fate and the gods’ poking sticks about, and for Shakespeare those external events are usually about political power. Either way, theater at its best considers who we are and what we believe, and why much of that is illusory.

This threesome of character, belief, and events lacks the stability of a three-legged stool, and is instead as inherently unstable as a three toddler play date.

That instability, the vulnerability of character and belief when stuff happens, underlies the greatest plays ever written. Its faint, etiolated shadow can usually be sensed even in the most trivial television sitcoms.

The costumes of the early scenes in this production puzzled me, and seemed too effeminate for the play, but by the end of the play that made sense. By the end of the play all of the characters were in brutish combat gear, looking nearly black with filth and sporting mismatched leather belts and pads. The descent from political debate to large scale physical savagery was emphasized.

Similarly I was at first a little discomforted by the fact that the actors were not physically imposing and seemed to lack gravitas, even Brutus. Caesar made his fatal decision to go to the senate with more camp affect than seemed appropriate. No one but Mark Anthony looked ready for a bar fight, let alone a military campaign.

But those effects properly underscore the play’s suggestion that events are big, men are small.  The most thoughtlessly dangerous conspirator, Casca, was wonderfully cast: Oliver Ryan demonstrated the frenetic danger of a physically slight and intellectually uninterested man who is eager for violence, underscoring the production’s apparent point.

Seeing and hearing this production while America’s debt ceiling theatre farce was playing its closing scenes in Washington, I looked hard for parallels. I found parallels not in the bad acting and bad lines of dueling politicians, but elsewhere in America, in gun rights advocates’ posturing call for resistance and the Tea Party’s vainglorious recital of Thomas Jefferson’s “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots.”

Small minds with no sense of unintended consequences and with noble intentions, like the conspirators in Julius Caesar, can bring ruin. The Royal Shakespeare Company has done well to bring us theatre with ideas in the production as well as in the text, and New York was lucky to have them with us.

The film follows the opening adventures of a middle aged woman responding to a mid-life crisis. Naomi, who gave up hopes of a theatre career to marry a stuffy British civil servant, is known wrongly to her husband as an incompetent because of her domestic inadequacies, whole days being spent ruining dinner and breaking antiques.

In fact, however, Naomi is an accomplished fixer, as writer-director Michael Bergmann has said. If Naomi cannot fix a problem herself, she finds someone who can. Before she leaves her husband she thoughtfully arranges for a friend to see to him, knowing that friend is up to the task. The audience catches on to Naomi’s strengths as slowly as her husband does. Late revelations of her electrical wiring talents and her fluency in Arabic help our understanding of her character, as those talents help the plot.

As the film opens, Naomi has become so lost in domestic ineptitude and marital scolding that she has forgotten her love of theatre.  After a final marital scolding, Naomi sets out to fix her own life by renewing her acting career.

Her determination crosses the border into obsession and stalking, and prompts her to several impulsive acts that she, unlike the audience, hardly notices are crimes: auto theft, grand theft, gun violence, kidnapping, and hijacking. Desperate actors have been known to do desperate deeds in pursuit of a part in a film.

While telling this comic story, Tied to a Chair also manages to parody caper movies and international thrillers, play off of iconic scenes like the airfield ending of Casablanca, and allude surely to other cinematic tropes that I missed. Like many Hitchcock protagonists, Naomi is an ordinary person accidentally caught up in a high-stakes criminal plot.

That plot leads to the film’s finest scene, Naomi’s confrontation with a group of suicide-bombers in a Manhattan parking garage. Her ability to befuddle those radicals on matters of theology ends any thought of her being incompetent, as does her gun trick and her hasty scheme to save Manhattan.

Screenwriters are often advised to have their protagonist succeed against all odds by using one fundamental personal strength established early in the film. Naomi succeeds against all odds because she is an actor. She might never get the movie role she desperately wants, but she gets plenty of acting opportunities along the way.

Good indie films usually have a charming eccentricity that compensates for, and often arises out of, the rough corners and loose seams that Hollywood would edit to death. Tied to a Chair has this charming eccentricity. Breathless and other French films of the 1960’s demonstrated the potential power of films that eschew technical perfection in favor of a more overt audience awareness of the director’s style.

Critical reviews of Tied to a Chair are mixed, as always, but this film seems to thrive in independent film festivals. Slant Magazine reviewer Diego Costa misreads a trope when he writes about Naomi’s “erotic bondage fantasy.” Richard Brody, movies editor of The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town, admires the film, especially as an expression of the personality of Michael Bergmann. Like Brody, I look forward to Bergmann’s next film.

There is something to this view, of course. Surely many people have found themselves one day at the dining room table wondering how they ended up in a family accreted by the addition of a spouse here and a child there, with strange old people at the table, too, as if they belonged there.

But Octubre aims at a broader, more fundamental truth about the human condition than mid-life crises, which are probably better explored when they happen to otherwise prosperous and successful people. The marginal existences in Octubre do not allow characters the luxury of sudden disillusionment.

In Octubre, human relationships arise out of emotional and economic necessity, not out of desire. Every human interaction has a price, obvious enough to the central character (a casual pawnbroker), and the price is often relatively arbitrary and unclear. How much do I owe you, Sofia asks Don Fico, after he prepares a lottery-like newspaper contest entry for her. How much should a repairman get? How much does a prostitute charge for both sex and information about another prostitute’s whereabouts? Similar questions recur often.

Even in poverty, even when the cash nexus marks human relationships, there are no villains in this film.  Despite petty attempts to wheedle money or otherwise manipulate other people, functioning human relationships are reluctantly and sometimes accidentally formed out of economic imperatives. The human condition. Clemente, for all his sullen passivity and his seeming power over desperate borrowers, is defenseless when life wedges into his squalid apartment and life. His life, not just his apartment, is taken over by squatters.

In Octubre, all human relationships have a cash basis. This sets up the central symbol of Clemente’s stalled life: a flimsy, tattered, counterfeit 200 nuevo sol bill. Accepting the phony bill in a moment of distraction, Clemente cannot pass it off on anyone else. People cannot live on inauthenticity forever.

His unlikely counterpart in what might almost be called a romance, in its own pathetic way, Sophia, is given to superstition and religion, while Clemente is driven by economics.

We are surprised that a thief stealing a wheelchair turns out to be sympathetic, as Don Fico steals it in order to spirit his comatose wife out of Lima toward what he imagines might be a better life. He has to bribe an accomplice to manage the theft, and then bribe a hospital nurse to manage as escape. Ironically, this old man’s laboriously accumulated savings are the funds that Clemente lends out as a pawnbroker, the money simultaneously exploiting and rescuing the desperate wretches who pawn items.

On Clemente’s birthday, a bizarre parody of a family photograph shows the central unfortunates who have been brought together by necessity, and held together by a little reluctant decency. Clemente and Sophia are like husband and wife, there’s the baby, and two grandparent-like figures, Fico and his comatose girlfriend. This grotesque variant of smiling family photos is one of several beautifully framed scenes.

If you have been waiting for cinematic sex scenes with a purpose other than satisfying our voyeurism, Octobre is for you. Clemente’s grim interactions with several prostitutes, like Sophia’s trickery with Clemente, will cure prurience.

Critics have called Octubre a comedy, and it is, although the comedy is mildly grotesque, understated, dark, and ironic. Critics have called Octubre slow, and it is, although it is pleasantly slow, like the largo movement in a string quartet. Critics have noted that Octubre is often beautifully shot, and it is, successfully presenting muted colors and shabby interiors in a painterly way. Hollywood does not know how to achieve this, and has forgotten how to make a film in which necessity so dominates free will.

One critic has called Octubre “a blasé work of social observation, a trifle of a story with fuzzy characters and weak political, social, and moral dimensions, notable only for its ostentatious framing of its proletarian characters’ lives using the style of more accomplished filmmakers.” Don’t believe a word of it. Octubre is a carefully constructed and beautifully filmed work of social and moral observation. The final scene is richly ambiguous, a fine ending to a fine film. Don’t look for this film at your local Cineplex.

If translators operate in one of three basic modes, Grossman prefers the middle ground of the paraphrasts, translating so the reader “will perceive the text, emotionally and artistically, in a manner that parallels and corresponds to, the aesthetic experience of its first readers.” She has no use for either of the two extremes, literalists or imitators.

Implicitly endorsing this attention to the original is Burton Raffel, who in his notes on translating the prose portions of The Canterbury Tales, writes that “translation is not supposed either to worsen or improve what it tries to recreate. . .  in the case of Chaucer’s prose the difficulty lies in avoiding improvement.”

Literalists include Vladimir Nabokov, whose Eugene Onegin Grossman and I both find unreadable. Another is Ted Hughes, whose Selected Translations includes among the prose pieces several interesting defenses of literal translation.

The most recent advocate of imitation I have encountered is Paul Schmidt, translating the wonderful, tragic early 20th-century Russian poets in Stray Dog Cabaret. “For me,” he writes, “translation is a performance. I mean that almost in the same way you’d say it about an actor’s performance.”

In fact he sounds like Stella Adler counseling actors when he writes that translating is “a matter of trying to think what’s in that person’s head, what was their life like, what elements in their life can you identify with in your own.”

Whichever of the three approaches we might prefer in general, Edith Grossman has done readers a tremendous service with her translations of Don Quixote and several Latin American writers. In an ideal world, foreign language writers would be available to us in more than one translation. Comparing translations of Dante’s Inferno or the Iliad proves that here is no single right way to translate. Variety allows us the richest pleasure and understanding.

I wish that poets would carefully read Edith Grossman’s detailed explanation of how she translates poetry, as she takes far more care in translating than many poets seem to take in composing. I am convinced that far too many contemporary poets are sloppy, self-indulgent (“privileging” the authenticity of the spontaneous first draft), averse to revision, and dismissive of musicality. Edith Grossman can teach all of us who write poetry a thing or two.