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George Szirtes
George Szirtes's many books of poetry have won various prizes including the T. S. Eliot Prize (2004), for which he is again shortlisted for Bad Machine (2013). His translation of László Krasznahorkai's Satantango (2013) was awarded the Best Translated Book Award in the US. The act of translation is, he thinks, bound to involve fidelity, ambiguity, confusion and betrayal.

Articles Available Online


Foreword: A Pound of Flesh

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Issue No. 12

George Szirtes

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Issue No. 12

1.   ANALOGIES FOR TRANSLATION ARE MANY, most of them assuming a definable something on one side of the equation – a fixed original...

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January 2014

Afterword: The Death of the Translator

George Szirtes

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January 2014

1. The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks. 2. Je est...

It was not only avoiding thoughts of home that helped the good sniper to carry out his mission as he lay on the roof of a building in Tulkarem It was not only the disconnection from his mother, that not thinking about her constituted a kind of rest for him Sniper number two, Hai-Ad Gonen, had given him a bit of cocaine earlier, and Dael could already feel its blessed effects Dael Gruber, who all the guys in the army and in civilian life called Gruber due to the difficulty in pronouncing the two vowels one after the other, was regarded by his friends as a sensitive sniper with a delicate soul And indeed, he was an example to contradict what people generally say about snipers in armies, that they detach themselves from feelings and simply say to themselves, ‘Someone has to do the job,’ and execute their task with cold-blooded composure   This was a sweeping generalisation, and it didn’t apply to Dael Dael went for it in a big way, in other words he shot to kill, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked for him It’s a question of psychological makeup Sometimes it was a little hard for him to shoot at a concrete target, but then he concentrated and took targets from his life instead and set them up in his imagination in the place of the wanted man In many cases he imagined the father of Moran Eliot, his girlfriend when he was at the end of the eleventh grade, when she was at the end of the twelfth grade   Moran Eliot was his first love It lasted for June–July–August and half of September Moran was his first, but he wasn’t her first, and she said that after the first it didn’t matter anymore what number he was It ended badly between them, and with hindsight he didn’t care Her father was in his sights because he threw Dael out of the house in the most humiliating way, after Moran didn’t want to see him and called him a

Contributor

August 2014

George Szirtes

Contributor

August 2014

George Szirtes’s many books of poetry have won various prizes including the T. S. Eliot Prize (2004), for which...

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

poetry

November 2013

George Szirtes

poetry

November 2013

And so they shone, every one of them, each crazy, everyone a diamond shining the way things shine, each becoming a gleam in his...
Rescue Me

poetry

November 2013

George Szirtes

poetry

November 2013

Pain comes like this: packaged in a moment of hubris with a backing band too big for its own good. It isn’t the same...

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Interview

March 2013

Interview with Amit Chaudhuri

Anita Sethi

Interview

March 2013

Think of the long trip home.  Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?  Where should we...

Interview

April 2012

Interview with Grant Gee

Evan Harris

Interview

April 2012

As the theatre is relit and the credits roll on Grant Gee’s latest film, Patience (After Sebald), an essay on...

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December 2012

Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim

Dylan Trigg

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December 2012

The title of my essay has been stolen from another essay written in 1919.[1] In this older work, the...

 

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