The great works are ageless, but their translations date; indeed, as Walter Benjamin remarks, the subsequent translations of great works mark their stages of continued life.

After forty-five years, as W.S. Merwin says, "the sentence continues." Here are a sheaf of poems from some of the original contributors to The Paris Review, which may serve--though many more of the original contributors are still writing poems--to inscribe upon the tablets of memory a certain continuity, a certain faith. 

So disparate, so distinct, even, are the new poems, the new poets who appear in all their multitudes in the office mail, so docile in their return-addressed envelopes yet so indubitable in their variety and delicacy that it would be defamatory for the poetry editor to claim more, in a generalizing way, about this particular clutch of poems than his own taste, his own delight in their particular virtues, their singular vitalities.

When I was nine, I shared my bedroom with a coffin. My father had it made for my grandmother for her seventy-third birthday and referred to it as shou mu, which means something like “longevity wood,” and seemed like a strange name for the box Grandma would be buried in.

Your nearsighted eyes cannot do the shooting. In response to the chinese government’s killing of pro-democracy protestors at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Liao Yiwu wrote several poems in which his anger at the state is matched by his own sense of frustration at being unable to fight back:

The woman in Édouard Vuillard’s Woman Sweeping, painted between 1899 and 1900, is Marie Michaud Vuillard, the painter’s mother. She is tall and stocky, her posture—that slight give of the back to the broom, without bending—marking a nonchalant style of carrying out a chore that routine hasn’t made any less complex. As Madame Vuillard sweeps, her gaze seems to fall on the broom or the floor. We might detect deference or humility in such a pose, but the turn of her head, her face ringed with a whitish glow as if lit by an inner ardor, conveys ease. We cannot see her gaze; we are given only the black slash of her eyelashes, which suggests an almost closed-eye intensity. Madame Vuillard is invested in her work and in herself, though perhaps in this moment she does allow herself to be mildly flattered by her painter son’s attention. The slash also conveys a quiet authority; you know that she need not look up to be heeded.

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.