Eliot Weinberger

Eliot Weinberger’s first book of essays, Works on Paper, was published in 1986. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated came out the following year. He has translated the work of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges and others from Spanish. ‘What I Heard about Iraq’ was published in the LRB of 3 February 2005 and soon afterwards as a short book by Verso. Angels and Saints came out in 2020. His most recent book is The Life of Tu Fu, a fictional autobiography of the Tang Dynasty poet.

From The Blog

Romney, the Curse of the Trochee

10 January 2012

There are many reasons Mitt Romney will never be elected president. These include, in descending order of importance: 1) He is a Mormon who wears funny underwear. 2) On a family vacation, he drove for many hours with his dog, Seamus, strapped to the roof of his SUV. 3) He is a stuffed shirt, full of 'pious baloney', as the incomparable Newt recently put it. 4) He has been on both sides of every issue, while denying that he ever held the opposing view. But what will sink Romney is his last name. Americans do not find two-syllable names ending with a long e presidential. They are associated with diminutives and baby-talk and lack the requisite gravitas. American history is littered with these losers:

Poem: ‘The Cloud Bookcase’

Eliot Weinberger, 28 July 2011

Absorption of Solar and Lunar Essences by Anonymous (4th century)

Alchemy of the Purple Coil by Anonymous (12th century)

A treatise on sexuality. The female sexual organ is referred to as the ‘furnace of the reclining moon’. A later commentator notes that ‘it has never been known that one can obtain immortality by mounting women.’

Arcane Essay on the Supreme...

From The Blog

Band of Insiders

19 May 2011

In 2009, Bernard-Henri Lévy circulated a petition complaining that his good friend, confessed and convicted child-rapist Roman Polanski, though known as an 'ingenious filmmaker', had been apprehended 'like a common terrorist'. Scores of writers and movie people in his circle signed. Now, predictably, Lévy is back, defending his good friend, accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in The Daily Beast – a web magazine that finally lives up to its name.

Letter

Mistakes

6 January 2011

There are two young American avant-gardist writers, Tao Lin and Tan Lin (LRB, 6 January). In my review of the Bush memoir, I wrote ‘Tan Lin’ when I meant ‘Tao Lin’. I may become a character in Tao Lin’s next novel.

‘Damn right,’ I said: Bush Meets Foucault

Eliot Weinberger, 6 January 2011

In the late 1960s, George Bush Jr was at Yale, branding the asses of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the Societé française de philosophie, considering the question, ‘What is an author?’ The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists will have to invent a chance encounter in a basement club in Austin. Moreover, Junior’s general ignorance of all things, except for professional sports, naturally extended to the nation known as France. On his first trip to Paris in 2002, Junior, now president of the United States, stood beside Jacques Chirac at a press conference and said: ‘He’s always saying that the food here is fantastic and I’m going to give him a chance to show me tonight.’

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Name the days: Holy Spirits

Marina Warner, 4 February 2021

The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at their adventures as a remedy for the drudgery,...

Real isn’t real: Octavio Paz

Michael Wood, 4 July 2013

In 1950 André Breton published a prose poem by Octavio Paz in a surrealist anthology. He thought one line in the work was rather weak and asked Paz to remove it. Paz agreed about the line...

Spanish Practices

Edwin Williamson, 18 May 1989

Octavio Paz occupies a unique position in the Spanish-speaking world. He is the foremost living poet of the language as well as being one of the most authoritative interpreters of the Hispanic...

Goodbye to Borges

John Sturrock, 7 August 1986

Borges died on 14 June, in Geneva – which bare fact virtually calls for an ‘English papers please copy,’ as they used to say, so complacently scant and grudging were the notices...

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