When I saw them last year I had the impression that they had been carefully lifted out of the political into the world of the musée imaginaire.

If I have any advice to give to a beginner it is this: do not think too much. That makes for bad novels. By the same token, you must read, read extensively, read other authors, be curious about their work and respect it (behind the finest texts there is real suffering), the classics as much the moderns, from Marcus Aurelius to Michel Houellebecq, from Erasmus to Elfriede Jelinek, and write, write a great deal, scribble and scribble some more, and throw away much of it too, in order to give birth to the marvel of a hitherto unknown thought that surges out of its own self thanks to that unique act, for thought is neither external to nor anterior to the text, but consubstantial with the act of writing. Writers do not think, they allow themselves to be borne along.

The Levys tried to live with Villana, and without their mother. At first, there was some pleasure to be found in watching Villana navigate domestic life. She laughed like she was being murdered. She ran like every bone in her body had been broken. She sang like a collapsing star. She tore the mattress in the guest bedroom open and slept inside it, her wretched body compressed and folded up among the springs.

What I am about to tell you is the truth. I witnessed it with my own eyes; and I am a reliable person. I have often been complimented on my reliability. I have won awards. I would not have obtained my present job – as the senior public relations officer for a respectable company that makes chemicals and plastics – if I did not appear to be trustworthy and believable.

In interviews, when I mention that one of my favourite short-story writers is Hemingway, invariably there is an awkward pause, and often a bemused reaction. Surely I would name someone more fashionable: Alice Munro, maybe, or Lorrie Moore. My reply is always that Hemingway’s best work is important because he crafted a style and tone that approximated his ongoing themes and subject matter. For that alone he is worth reading.

For some, and I’d venture that with poets it is more than ‘one-fourth’, lithium does involve losing these times of heightened artistic facility and productivity. Of course many poets have no affective illness, and many who do find lithium works for them, but if Shelley had lived under a medical absolutism that insisted all manic-depressives should be on lithium, he may never have said that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.

Of the several New Zealand poetry books which I have looked at recently, the most interesting are those which have set about exploring the spaces that constitute and reconfigure ideas of home. Perhaps it’s not without coincidence that these books are written by women, as women might be more readily inclined to define themselves in relation to family and kin, and through the occupation and management of domestic space. Certainly, for all these poets, family is a central focussing force, and integral to the idea of ‘home’.

For a moment, the scholar looked at the blank sheets of paper from where his writings had now disappeared. He had written some serviceable prose to theorise about the rhyming patterns in a volume of classic Confucian poetry, but Wu’s beauty was better formed and more persuasive. The scholar put down his brush and walked over to Wu, who smiled and raised his head to meet the scholar’s kiss.

The problem with a question is that it implies its own answer. The problem with an answer that it responds to a question. But the question that rejects its own answer? The answer that will not fit its question? The memory of the tidal flats about Mont St Michel, and in the fields beyond them the stands of trees, ranked, silver in the winter light, like fragments of roads long washed away, or that never came, answers to a question no-one ever got around to asking.

Simone couldn’t read Englishmen. Men of any nationality for that matter. Andrew was relatively simple. Always happy to be enthusiastic about Simone, provided she was enthusiastic about him. Otherwise, bets were off. Now Simone found herself with mixed feelings. Big Ken would disappoint her if he made a pass, yet she would be equally disappointed if his obvious attraction to her wasn’t charged with the man’s characteristic hunger.

I would like to state, for the record, that Dr Routledge did not ask me to send this email, nor ask that I intervene on his behalf in any way. I write to you of my own accord, for the simple reason that I would not be the student, nor the person, I am today, without Professor Gavin Routledge.

I asked my father about Lil, when I came back to Australia. When I came back from the grey city, from the city of ghostly marriages, after I left George. I asked my father about Lil because I remembered the stories he told us, and her poems that he read to us when we were kids.

I was raised with ghosts. They were always there, lurking about the upright piano and watching me as I slept. They wrote notes to my parents on the big sheets of butchers’ paper which were spread across the living-room floor each night.

The finale was majestical. Dearo, dearie, the explosion was holy in its glory. All of it was gone. The whole mine, pride of the banana state, ended up looking like a big panorama of burnt chop suey. On a grand scale of course because our country is a very big story. Wonderment was the ear on the ground listening to the great murmuring ancestor, and the earth shook the bodies of those ones laying flat on the ground in the hills. Then, it was dark with smoke and dust and everything turned silent for a long time.

How to believe in a God who brings suffering into the world and grants us peace without considering our sorrows, thought Jacinto, tottering like a small child. In one hand he held a half-empty bottle of rum and in the other the revolver he took from his mother. More than thirteen years had passed since his father died; in all that time he had never felt as alone as today, when Francisca confessed to him on her knees that the child wasn’t his and she was carrying a monster in her belly.

As Wittgenstein said, translating is an exact art. That’s why the interesting thing one notices immediately about good writing in translation is the notion of care, of close attention, of stillness and of shape. Translation is above all an ideational endeavour, a reaching towards hidden absolutes, and its texture is as distinct a piece of language experience as philosophy or art.