...Who was the real Jack Kerouac? David Amram likes to recall the day in 1959 that he and Jack, dressed in ordinary working men's clothes, went to a coffee house, the Cafe Figaro, years after the author had become famous. "Everyone was sitting there with their bongos, with the price tags still on them, and wearing berets," he remembers. "Jack said to me - Dave, this is like being in Catholic school - everybody's in uniform!" According to Amram, the patrons of the coffee house gave he and Kerouac funny looks "because we looked like outsiders intruding on a beat scene. There were pictures of us on the wall, but no one knew who we were...."

...for me, translation is an aesthetic and a philosophy, just like phenomenology or dada -- creation-as-transformation, America-as-a-translation), as well as a vital poetic craft. It's also more fun than, say, stamp collecting, as Rexroth explained to me. That joy of finding a word that unlocks a gridlock of text, like getting a letter in the mail with a stamp which completes a page in an album. Just yesterday, I pulled out a draft of one of Ko Un's poems, I'd already gone over a dozen times when it hit me, like a bolt out of the blue, right between the brows: my co-translator's choice of unrotting would more likely and easily be imperishable and the rest of the questions all resolved around that...

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