Bishop Museum fetes lunar eclipse

Head on over to Bishop Museum for a howling good time Tuesday night at the Return of the Blood Moon party celebrating this week’s lunar eclipse.

The event from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. includes telescope viewing with members of the Hawaiian Astronomical Society. The museum will be open, and special shows will be screened at the Watamull Planetarium.

The eclipse will begin at 11:14 p.m., and from 12:25 to 1:24 a.m. the moon will be in total eclipse — wholly within Earth’s shadow — giving it a copperish hue, an effect known as a blood moon. Hawaii and the western U.S. are the only parts of the country that will experience the total eclipse.

Special tours focusing on the moon and the Hawaiian lunar calendar will be offered in the museum’s Hawaiian Hall. The new traveling exhibit "Scream Machines: The Science of Roller Coasters" will be open as well. For those 21 years and over, the Eclipse Lounge Bar will feature live music and special cocktails.

Admission is $10 ($5 for Bishop Museum members and kids ages 4 to 12). Pre-sale tickets are available at www.bishopmuseum.org. For more eclipse information, visit eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/ eclipse.html.

Maui poet honored for translations

Maui-based poet W.S. Merwin’s "Selected Translations," (Copper Canyon Press), which translated poems from at least 30 languages into English, recently won the$1,000 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Merwin’s language expertise includes French, Spanish and Latin. To translate languages he does not know, he retranslates works from those languages or uses native speakers to explain the works to him.

Award judge David Hinton described Merwin’s book as "a museum of world poetry, collecting artifacts from a vast range of cultures and times."

Also this year, Merwin published "Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson," a translation of works by one of Japan’s greatest classical poets.

Merwin is the author of more than 30 books of poetry and more than 20 books of translation. He served as U.S. poet laureate from 2010 to 2011 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award and the Wallace Stevens Award, among many honors.