Basil Creighton, translator and art collector, died on 3 May aged 103. He had the satisfaction of having translated some 30-40 of the world's most famous books - from Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel to Hermann Hesse's Der Steppenwolf- as well as the frustration of having to accept that multiple reprints do not necessarily mean multiple fees. But his lively mind and generous nature always welcomed fellow translators caught in a jam. Technical expertise, lovely paintings and the hospitality of Frances made their Queen's Gate flat a place to cherish.
(D.A.)

Christian Bourgois, the publishing house which holds the French copyright of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses has now revoked its earlier suspension of the French translation. Despite previous threats to the company the book is now due in the summer, bearing the names of several other French publishers to affirm their solidarity with Christian Bourgois's decision. (Index)

Frederick Jameson, Edward Said, Juliet Mitchell, Tom Nairn and Stuart Hall are among the distinguished scholars contributing to a forum on the work of Raymond Williams, at the British Film Institute on June 30th. Nicolas Tredell's appraisal of Williams (PNR issues 65 and 67) will be continued in issue 69. Since that appraisal was written, Verso press has published a further collection of Williams's essays and lectures, edited by Robin Gable, under the title Resources of Hope.

Work on the Variorum Edition of Pound's Cantos has entered its ninth year, and is close to completing the collation of all published texts, including ur-Cantos, sound recordings of Pound reading from the poem, posthumous editions, and the English texts of bilingual publications by Mary de Rachewiltz and Eva Hesse. Autograph corrections, emendations and commentary from the margins and endpapers of personal copies, as well as those from publishers' archives and general correspondence (whether published or not) provide further documentation of authorized readings.

The New Directions edition of 1975 is to be reprinted as the base text, with variants listed after the relevant line and keyed to a bibliography of sources, with ancillary documentation for authorial confirmation or rejection of particular readings. To identify setting copy, the final phase of the project is concentrating on the collation of 'diplomatically' transcribed drafts and the culling of unpublished correspondence in public and private collections. The variorum is being edited by the American scholar Richard Taylor at the University of Bayreuth who expects the work to be completed within the next four years.

The thirteenth international conference on Ezra Pound is announced for September 5th to 7th at the University of Essex. The general theme will be 'Ezra Pound and America'. Details are available from the Literature department of the University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester.

A memorial to Stefan Themerson (whose work and friendship C.H. Sisson celebrated in PNR 65) and Francziska Themerson will constitute volume 12 (1990) of 'Comparative Criticism'. The issue will include Stefan Themerson's last auto-biographical writings, together with a translation by Barbara Wright from an unpublished novel he wrote in French, a bibliography of his works in Polish, French and English (compiled by Nicholas Wadley), with a set of drawings by Francziska Themerson. The journal's editor, Elinor Shaffer, writes to announce that Comparative Criticism will now accept poetry and fiction written in English as well as translations from any language.

We noted recently that Orwell is coming up for air, with the approved publication of 1984 in Warsaw and extracts from Animal Farm in Moscow. Hungary too has now published, with official consent, a translation of 1984, as well as Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Tadeusz Konwicki's novel A Minor Apocalypse, recently published in Britain but in Poland available only from an independent press, has now been accorded official publication and is on sale in state bookshops. Some enterprising UK publisher could catch the wind of change: a series of reprints under the brand-name 'Gauges for Glasnost'.

Glasnost and its parallels in earlier Russian and Soviet history are the subject of an essay by René Beerman in the new number (55) of Chapman with a special feature on modern Soviet writing. Poems by Gennadi Krasnikov, Gennadi Aygi, and Oleg Chukhontsev, and a satirical story by Fazil Iskander complement new translations of Akhmatova, Gumilev, Tsvetayeva and Eugène Dubnov, and there is a posthumous publication of an article by J.F. Hendry on Mandelstam.

Acknowledging the illustrations, in PNR 67, from David Arkell's book Ententes Cordiales, we omitted to mention the artist's name. The lapse - o felix culpa-provides the excuse to embellish this issue with further illustrations, from the same book, by Philip Norman. Another non-attribution was John Pilling's review of Swedish poetry: maxima culpa.

Issue 719 of the Paris magazine Europe is principally concerned with Rainer Maria Rilke and includes, besides an essay by John Pilling, translations into French of Rilke's 'Sonnets to Orpheus' by several hands: Philippe Jaccottet, Maurice, Regnaut, and Charles Dobzynski. Stephen Cohn's translations of Rilke's Duino Elegies, with an introduction by Peter Porter and drawings by Elisabeth Frink, is to be published by Carcanet.

The South Bank Centre, London, is host to a group of Latin American writers at a series of readings and discussions from July 9th to 14th. Octavio Paz's work will be discussed by Jason Wilson. Ernesto Cardinal (the Nicaraguan Minister of Culture and poet) will be reading, as will Maria Eugenie Braco and Roberto Rivera (the exiled Chilean poets) and Julio Valle Castillo. The Argentinian novelist Daniel Moyano (also in exile) will be discussing Argentinian literature since the military coup in 1976.

The Arvon Foundation's centre at Lumb Bank in West Yorkshire, where many of this magazine's contributors and readers have been tutors and students, needs to find supporters who will undertake a covenant or make a donation to save the centre from closing down within the year. For fourteen years the centre has been on a lease, from the Arvon Foundation trustees, which has now expired. Already £70,000 has been raised for the purchase of the centre, but more is needed. Donations, and queries about the covenant scheme, may be sent to Arvon at Lumb Bank, Heptonstall, Hebden Bridge, HX7 6DF.

Rodrigo Rey Rosa's second collection of short stories (the first was The Beggar's Knife) has now been published by Peter Owen, under the title Dust on Her Tongue. The stories don't deal with the political tensions in Guatemala, but their spare, terse qualities, 'compact and severe as theorems', as Paul Bowles describes them, seem all the more disturbing against that context-an instance here for the old reflection/refraction debates. Stylistically, the choice of Paul Bowles for these translations seems exact and his versions from the Spanish read decisively.

Fleur Adcock and Gavin Ewart, with the magazine's editor Ben Webb, are the judges for a poetry competition organized by Sanity, the magazine of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The peace movement has been as much engaged with the 'culture of politics' as with campaigning tactics, recognizing that its aims take it to the moral and imaginative frameworks where literature comes onto the agenda, as well as with political polemic. Not surprisingly, Christa Wolf's Cassandra and her 1987 novella Accident, recently translated into English and published by Virago, have been quickly appropriated to that effect. The Poet Laureate's work is less easily appropriated, but now there's the competition, open till September 30th, and details of which are available from 22-24 Underwood Street, London N1 7JG.

In August this year Thom Gunn will be sixty. As an Englishman who has spent most of his writing life in the United States, Gunn has received rather less attention in Britain than other poets of similar distinction. PN Review will be publishing a birthday supplement to celebrate nearly forty years of his individual contribution to poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. The supplement will include new poems by Gunn himself and an interview with him, as well as essays, memoirs and poems by friends and admirers. The supplement will be edited by Clive Wilmer, a frequent contributor to this magazine and the editor of Gunn's prose collection The Occasions of Poetry (Faber 1982).

In 1913 appeared Blaise Cendrar's poem Prose du Transsiberien... in an edition of 150 copies, each printed in various typefaces on a two-metre sheet of paper, with the poems on the right side and an abstract painting by Sonia Delaunay on the left. Without these visual enhancements but with intriguing introduction and notes, there is now a new translation by John Adlard (author of work on Apollinaire, Blake, Rochester and Max Jacob) in the current issue of Poet's Voice (volume 4, number 1), something of a fugitive magazine but but available from 12 Dartmouth Avenue, Bath BA1 2AT.

Also from Bath, a new journal eschewing "deconstruction's dogmatic relativism" and "neo-Marxist mysticism" for "sensitivity and common sense". The title, bracingly, is Right Reading.