As for the article itself, Taormina seems to leapfrog over all the other publishing options, and he makes some faulty assumptions to support his decision to self-publish through Lulu. First, he writes "the maintstream press in America has stopped publishing new literary authors–unless the writer is well-connected . . . or the author is from abroad." Yes, it is true: not as much literary fiction is being published these days. But if you read the industry's trade paper, Publishers Weekly, or peruse the trade catalogues issued by publishing companies, you realize that literary fiction still gets published. What publishers are eliminating are books they do not feel will recoup their initial investment, or pay their exorbitant Manhattan rents. The authors having the hardest time getting published include academic types who are not used to appealing to large general audiences. When you are trained and rewarded for carving out the most esoteric niches, you lose your ability to connect with a more broader audience.

I was also troubled by Mr. Taormina's argument touting print on demand (POD). The article is predicated on the assumption that POD is the way for most authors to go. As an author and publisher of four books, I would never consider POD unless it was a way to keep a book in print after sales had dwindled to a very low point.

To clarify our terms: POD is a method of printing, not a type of publication, and today it is most often used by authors who have been rejected by commercial publishers and who are willing to start their own businesses and be their own publishers.

Those are self-publishers. The problem is POD is also used almost exclusively by subsidy publishers which advertise themselves (or masquerade) as "self-publishing companies," when in fact they are not. Some of the resources Mr. Taormina recommends fall in this category. Subsidy publishers require the author to spend thousands of dollars to print a very limited number of books. Everyone in the book industry frowns on these publishers, including other authors, librarians, and buyers for both book chains and independent stores. Scott Edelstein, in his book 100 Things Every Writer Needs to Know, calls such authors naive rubes. Most bookstores will not even carry POD books.

If your goal is to get your book into bookstores, and you want to compete with books published by Simon & Schuster or Random House, authors should stay away from POD and produce a book that is indistinguishable from anything produced by the majors. That means you have to spend far more than the $500 Mr. Taormina suggests, and you cannot cut corners. You have to hire a professional cover designer, a competent copyeditor, and someone who can professional typeset it.

Pound delighted in irritating Classics profs, language experts, and philologists with his free-wheeling translations. But what the specialists didn't understand is that Pound had absolutely no desire to create faithful translations of anything. His goal was to "make them new," using the creative faculties any way he saw fit. There is no such thing as a pure translation anyway. All translations of creative works are original creations to one extent or another–especially in poetry, which relies, more than any other form of creative writing, on the unique resources of the source language. In fact, I believe that the untranslateablity (sp?) of a poem is one test of a poem's "poem-ness." In other words, if it can be too easily translated, is it really even a poem at all? Or is it "flash fiction" or a "short-short story?" The most transferable prosodic element is typically the "image."

I think of Pound, in his poetry, as a wonderful technician, the "miglior fabbro" that Eliot perceived, rather than much of an originator. Somewhere, for instance, I've read his translation of the funeral-ship lines from "Beowulf" and thought them, though inaccurate in both sense and form, wonderfully imbued with the mystery and majesty of death. More wonderfully so than the "Beowulf" poet himself managed, but no matter.
Don