Marguerite Feitlowitz.

Marguerite Feitlowitz is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford). A translator of French, Spanish, and Catalan, she writes often about literature and art.

Let us now praise promiscuity, by which I mean a spirited romp through the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Smaller than my own hand, lighter than a wineglass, and slim enough to read within the frame of a single hour, Alan Bennett's The Clothes They Stood Up In (Random House, $13.95, 161 pp.) is every inch a novel. Written by one of England's most prominent playwrights, it is layered and razor-sharp, hilarious and moving. The sedate Mr. and Mrs. Ransome have been to the opera "(...Cosi, as Mrs. Ransome had learned to call it)" and returned home to bicker quietly over whether they have just been "burgled" or "robbed." Every single thing they own is gone--every lamp and switch and fixture, every hairbrush, toothbrush, light bulb, and battery. But for the clothes they are wearing, the Ramsomes suddenly have nothing, not even (they can barely say it) a square of paper for the loo. For Mrs. Ransome, who will soon stride out into the unfamiliar depths of her Notting Hill neighborhood, worlds upon worlds are about to open. Pending settlement from their insurers (handled with opportunistic aplomb by her husband, a solicitor whose only passion is Mozart) she sets out to re-feather their nest, but temporarily, with maiden visits to secondhand markets (where she buys an Afghan prayer rug), the Asian grocer, the Egyptian chemist. These are the establishments that had replaced the ones of the defining years of her marriage: Miss Dorsey's for baby gifts and knitwear; Timothy White, across whose counter one whispered the sizes of one's intimate foundations; the eternally hushed tea shop on the corner. The world, Mrs. Ransome suddenly sees, had turned over. And it is marvelous, full of "characters" with new ways of speaking and moving and eating. Everything calls out to be relearned, including conjugal desire. The plot twists and turns. The burglary (or robbery) turns out to have been an error of baroque complications, and is repaired. The Ransomes' little world looks as it did before. But everything is different.

Karmic Traces (New Directions, $15.95, 192 pp.) is the third volume of essays by Eliot Weinberger, translator of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, among other authors. The twenty-four pieces gathered here reflect voracious curiosity, wanderlust, and encyclopedic knowledge of peoples, places, rituals, and religions. Set in Iceland, Hong Kong, India, and Mexico, and spanning three millennia, these essays are rife with vivid particulars and astounding oddities. In "Sex Objects," Weinberger leads up to Sappho with a catalogue of the fancy mating habits of birds and fish and a couple of pint-sized mammals. His portraits of the poets Hugh MacDiarmid, James Laughlin, and Omar Caceres--contrasting figures, to put it mildly--are finely etched in terms of character, place, and time. On literature and politics, Weinberger is informed, edgy, and tart: In "What Was Formalism," he lambasts an anthology called Rebel Angels as being full of "wimps, cafe Republicans measuring out their lives in coffee spoons that keep changing size" (that is, not one of these so-called formal poets can reliably create a sonnet, let alone a villanelle). Weinberger is a rare treat: Montaigne, who invented the essai, would love him.

One of the great poets of Spain's Generation of 1927, Jorge Guillen went into permanent exile during the Spanish Civil War. His bent is metaphysical and literary, but his (very modern) eye is focused on the world. In Manhattan, he exults among the skyscrapers only to exhort: "Look: space." Guillen has been translated before and well, but Horses in the Air and Other Poems, translated by Cola Franzen (City Lights, $15.95, 248 pp.) is a landmark. Winner of The Academy of American Poets Prize for Translation, this bilingual collection is at once faithful and inventive, elegant and immediate. As a reader, Franzen has the penetration of a laser; a grammarian, she knows how to pick her way among the landmines; a poet herself, she knows that poetry is borne on the breath. From "A Window":

   There are polished words,
   But I would like to know as the June air knows.
   The poplar's stirring makes a visible breeze,
   in a circle of peace the evening encloses me,
   and a soaring sky adapts to my horizon.

There is no hint in Franzen's work of the difficult choices presented in every line. Here is "Freckles," seasonal and entire:

   Mallarme, pen-brush,
   compares the dry leaves
   of autumn to skin with freckles:
   Sun loves that skin so much.
   Woman! When fair between the freckles
   I am reminded of ripe wheat,
   witness of summer.
   That whiteness! So bright
   it needs a shelter
   of golden shadow.

The history of the world is in great measure the history of translation. In this season of sun, let there be light on Cola Franzen, one of our finest living translators.