British poet, translator and essayist Christopher Middleton died November 29. He was 89. The Independent noted that his poetry "was rooted in a scholarship very lightly worn, drew its sources from whatever happened to be preoccupying him at the moment of its creation, be it Roman numismatics, a Cretan deity or the proud grace of a passing feline.... In addition to his own poetry, he translated a good deal from other tongues--French, Swedish, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish--but most often from German, including works by Gottfried Benn, von Hofmannsthal, Goethe, Holderlin and others and works by the supremely odd Swiss prose writer Robert Walser, whose cause he championed for more than half a century."
From "The Paradox of Jerome's Lion":
Local his discourse, not yet exemplary,
Nowadays he is old, the translator,
So old he is practically transparent.
Good things and otherwise, evils done
Come home to him, too close to the bone
And so little transformed,
Him so transparent,
They float in and out of his window.
