Pandemic update, à la française

Part 2 of our conversation with Jack Jung, translator of Yi Sang; Michelle on the Supreme Court; Albert on the second lockdown in France and the infuriating failures that led to it.

Hello from lockdown, friends. We’ve been feeling anxious, as have many of you, about this coming week’s election. Here in France, people are also on edge with the skyrocketing COVID numbers and a spate of violent attacks, most recently the incident at a church in Nice that killed three.

In this edition, Michelle talks a bit about the Supreme Court, and Albert lets loose about the French state’s failure to control the pandemic. But first, here is Part 2 of our interview with our friend Jack Jung, poet and translator of the great modernist poet Yi Sang. (You can find Part 1 here.) In this second half, we ask him nosy questions about, among other things, his journey to America at age thirteen.

A young Jack Jung before emigrating to the United States.

Michelle: You came to the U.S. when you were thirteen. What was your relationship to English and to poetry at the time? Sketch out a young Jack Jung!

Jack: Oh gosh. I came to the States with my mother in July 2001. She had been thinking for a …