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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

feature

Issue No. 12

George Szirtes

feature

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...

FEBRUARY 2008   * I’m outraged, but I’ve learned a way of reasoning that quickly defuses my exasperation This morning, a sudden rage when I see that Noam Cohen of the New York Times is re-inventing the wheel with the news that Borges, in his stories set in a pre-technological past, predicted the arrival of the internet I would not have been annoyed by such a fossilised ‘discovery’ on the part of the New York Times if it weren’t for the fact that the author of the piece, with ridiculous self-importance, dismisses Borges as an ‘Old-World librarian’ and ‘a fusty sort’, when in actual fact the man who is out of date is Cohen himself, more behind with the latest news than the cyclist Godot when he arrived behind time at each stage of the Tour   Writing – Roberto Bolaño said – is a rational, visionary activity, an exercise in intelligence and adventure From among the multiple adventures, readers of the visionary Borges will never forget the spiral staircase, which plunges down and soars up off into the remote distance in his memorable tale ‘The Library of Babel’ When this story was first published in 1941, few could have imagined that this staircase would end up turning Borges into a demiurge, a strange visionary who described the Internet before it existed   We have known for years now that Borges, in an exercise of intelligence and intellectual adventure, anticipated the World Wide Web in ‘The Library of Babel’, and also in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, another of his stories from that period: ‘Who, singular or plural, invented Tlön? The plural is, I suppose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously discarded It is conjectured that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, guided and directed by some shadowy man of genius’   In his story, Borges tells us that in this secret society there is a great number of individuals skilled in the most varied disciplines,

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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Art

Issue No. 17

Water

Batia Suter

Art

Issue No. 17

Sources: Achate, Bilder im Stein / Josef Arnoth, Naturhistorisches Museum Basel Buchverlag, Bild der Wissenschaft 12, Dezember 1971, DVA StuttgartBasler Zeitung, Birkhäuser...

fiction

Issue No. 19

Once Sublime

Virginie Despentes

TR. Frank Wynne

fiction

Issue No. 19

The music is sick! This guy’s a genius. Always trust Gaëlle. When they first saw him, everyone thought who...

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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