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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...

A spectre haunted the Lützow-Ufer – the spectre of Dadaism It hung from the ceiling and peered down from the walls, it sat on pedestals and screamed from posters:‘TAKE DADA SERIOUSLY’ – only to add, winking at the visitor, ‘it’s worth it’  In Summer 1920 the Kunsthandlung Dr Otto Burchard, a Berlin art gallery near the bustling Potsdamer Platz and lush Tiergarten, was the venue for the First International Dada Fair, and its invitation card promised revolution   The Dadaistic person is the radical opponent of exploitation; the logic of exploitation creates nothing but fools, and the Dadaistic person hates stupidity and loves nonsense! Thus, the Dadaistic person shows himself to be truly real, as opposed to the stinking hypocrisy of the patriarch and to the capitalist perishing in his armchair  This exclamatory mood prevailed inside the small venue In a mockery of an academic, salon-style exhibition, its walls were covered with large typographic posters, small frames with photomontages, with cut-outs, and with expansive paintings that used traditional oils as much as rough materials that looked like they were picked up from the gutters which the paintings depicted Collage, montage and found images were the common denominators in the cacophony of carnivalistic commands hurled at the spectator: ‘Finally open up your mind!’ shouted one large photographic poster; ‘Against Art!’ another From the ceiling hung a horrible mannequin, a human shape with a pig’s mask stuffed into a German military uniform, looming grotesquely over artworks and visitors alike   The artist list reads like a who’s who of the Berlin Dada art world in the 1920s: Jean Arp, Johannes Baader, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Wieland Herzfelde and many other now famous figures of European art history all contributed to the exhibition: Hausmann, agitator and polemicist, had penned the invitation’s pointed manifesto; Dix had sent paintings certain to antagonise traditional taste; Grosz played a central role in organising the event and Herzfelde contributed significantly to the exhibition’s catalogue  Theirs was a rambunctious, chest-beating, clamorous affair The fair asserted its opposition to the traditional tastes, artistic media, and forms of organisation of

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 2014

Diane Williams: Two Stories and an Interview

Harriet Pittard

Interview

June 2014

Editor’s Note: By way of an introduction, we’ve included two previously unpublished stories by Diane Williams, ‘Beauty, Love and...

poetry

October 2012

Saint Anthony the Hermit Tortured by Devils

Stephen Devereux

poetry

October 2012

  Sassetta has him feeling no pain, comfortable even, Yet stiffly dignified at an odd angle like the statue...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Daisy Lafarge

poetry

September 2016

siphoning   habitual catalogue of the day, intro ft. blossom fallen from a gated property and crisping on the...

 

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