End of October reads

I don't participate in or plan on themed readings but enjoy hitting a sequence that coalesces around some center (or one might say vortex), which this time around started with Weinberger's An Elemental Thing (prior post) and continued, Eastward Ho!, with:
Julián Ríos, Poundemonium (Richard Alan Francis w/ author) [Dalkey]: also pundemonium, ideosyncretically (cf interview)
Thomas McEvilley, The Arimaspia [McPherson]: a journey to India via Greek philosophy (see Chas Bernstein's intro)
The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987 (Eliot Weinberger et al) [NDP]: among other things bringing together ancient Indian (east and west) mythos; also, Surrealism

and then on to other themes ...
António Lobo Antunes, Knowledge of Hell (Clifford E. Landers) [Dalkey]: I apparently got hold of Lobo Antunes by the wrong end (as I had with Walser, see prior post, and Miguel's reassessment of Caravels, my prior Lobo Antunes), but the upside is that it only improves as I go on. And I will be going on.
Poems of Nazim Hikmet (Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk) [Persea]: matter-of-fact lyricism, undercut by Commutopianism (however human-faced), understandable given his personal history.
Julio Cortázar, Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia (David Kurnick) [semiotext(e)]: Miguel covers it better than I can, I'll just add its format ahead of its time (eg Eco's excursion with Queen Loana), and its bill of particulars somewhat out-of-date though perennial (eg do a global replace of IBM or Google in this piece with NSA) ...

Meanwhile, Archipelago Books celebrated 10 years, 100 books from 25 languages a couple weeks ago at the Wythe Hotel; at my table were Mr. Waggish (whose site I've long sullied with comments) and translator Ross Benjamin, whose englishing of Clemens J. Setz's Indigo is forthcoming shortly from Liveright/Norton (cf boardchat) and who's currently working on Kafka's diaries for them (I've read both of the ones he did for Archipelago, and of course Maar on Nabokov). A good do for the press that's inverted the "3%" translation problem (that's right, 3% of Archipelago's publications were originally in English and so untranslated) (and yes it's getting to be time to consider an end-of-year donation to keep the string alive).