New stone women of New York

It is 'Korean season' in the retail outlet of MOMA in Manhattan.

So to brighten a dark wet day I could have bought a designer-nail-clipper for the pet dog I don't have.

Presumably,  when Koreans eat dogs, they like the claws to be as short as possible.. 

Or perhaps, since the device allows the clippings to be kept in a white plastic compartment,  the Seoul-inspired pet-lovers of New York have separate culinary plans for the canine calcium parts.

Korean designers also offer buttons-as-art, each blue-and-white striped badge made of cloth from discarded shirts.

There is a red credit card that can be used  to crush garlic.

And a wine glass imprisoned in a wine bottle - which may make sense somewhere that isn't here.  

On this brief trip, I've discovered too that there is a newly published  translation of Dante's Rime (see previous posts).

Apparently, the poems have been out of print in English for years.

That seems unlikely - but a crowded internet cafe on 10th Avenue and 52nd Street is not the best place to hang around and check it out. 

Any such neglect will surely never happen to dog-nail-clippers from Korea.

With a new English/Italian parallel text in hand, anyone with a bit of language and some patience can work their way through the poems for cold times and cold hearts that concerned this blogger last week after  Valentine's Day.

The translations are by J.G.Nichols and Anthony Mortimer.

Mortimer is the one who gets his chance with ‘Al poco giorno’, the poem I idly thought might suit the sad man in the card queue in Reading last Saturday.

Of course, if my searcher after seriousness had been looking instead in the designer shop at the Museum of Modern Art, his day would have been wholly different.

He could surely have found some much more suitable love-tokens.