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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...

We all have tombs from which we travel To reach mine I have to get a lift with some strangers to a place in the Catalan Coastal Range I’ll be spending the weekend taking part in a workshop called ‘Live your Death’ The main challenge of this adventure will be to relate my death in the first person, without really dying, I hope In the brochure they talk about us facing things very similar to NDEs (near death experiences), watching the film of our lives, glimpsing the light at the end of the tunnel, having out-of-body experiences and seeing languid and distant little men calling us affectionately from the threshold where it all ends It’s also possible, I think, that I’ll be put on a plane and taken to an island where weird things happen In the meantime I’m getting to know some of my fellow passengers   ‘Did we meet at “Recycling Ourselves”?’ asks the man   No, it was at “My Place in the Universe”,’ she replies   ‘Oh yeah and have you found it?’   ‘Not yet’   ‘After all these workshops you still haven’t found it?’   ‘I’m working on it’   ‘What you need is a clear objective,’ says the man, who despite all the money he’s spent on self-help workshops seems not to have grasped certain basic principles For example, that you don’t greet a woman by asking her if she’s figured out what to do with her shitty life yet I can think of various things to say to them both to solve their problems and earn myself some cash: that he try closing his mouth every now and again and that she tell guys who reckon they know more about her than she does where to go   ‘Well, girls, are you ready?’ This is the man’s second time at the death workshop and he claims to know what he’s talking about   ‘You have to take your clothes off, yeah? Get naked, yes siree’   The woman and I look at each other The man turns around and just speaks to me this time:   ‘You must have good lungs because you’re from over there, down south, people have good lungs there

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

June 2016

Interview with Cao Fei

Izabella Scott

Interview

June 2016

The Chinese artist Cao Fei documents life in her country’s rapidly changing urban and social landscapes. Her eclectic work...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Marina Warner

Elizabeth Dearnley

Interview

Issue No. 1

At the beginning of From the Beast to the Blonde, her study of fairy tales and their tellers, Marina...

Art

July 2014

Operation Paperclip

Naomi Pearce

Patrick Goddard

Art

July 2014

‘I began at this point to feel that politics was not something “out there” but something “in here” and of...

 

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