A short one.

Just learned this morning that we are having dinner Friday night with the great French poet and playwright, Rene de Obaldia. I could give you about 2000 web links to him, but they’d be meaningless to you, in part because they’re in French or Spanish. He’s incredibly well-known in Europe, and certainly here in France he’s a national hero. Unfortunately, the translations of his work have been so bad that in America he is virtually unknown in the English speaking world outside of a couple of Broadway presentations. The Frenchman’s doctoral thesis at Princeton included Obaldia’s work. He wrote a book about him.

The Frenchman made reservations at one of the best restaurants here in Paris and dropped Obaldia’s name so that we could find a quiet area to eat. He’s 91, and his hearing is not what it used to be.

I’m incredibly nervous. This is like dinner with Stoppard except I’ll probably understand less of the conversation. Which is a miserable shame…