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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...

After a while you memorise the steps You read the addresses and your calves just know, hey They just know it’s going to be a long morning   These holiday homes on the steps don’t get a lot of mail The German okes who buy them park in Frankfurt all year and only fly in when winter hits Maar dis altyd mooi in die Kaap, né? Who even buys a house they don’t live in? And houses like these, too Most okes don’t see them, so they don’t even know what they’re like But let me tell you what: if I had one of these, on the beach, jir’, I wouldn’t leave   But, ja, anyway – most of these places don’t get a lot of mail Some municipal stuff, some late Christmas cards that’ll sit in their boxes until next December Sometimes I get these double – sealed envelopes met logos van strange banks al oor geskryf Most of these okes dodge tax, heyThey have to No one has that much money   Some of the okes at the depot are jealous of me They all say, ‘O, Piet, all you have to do is walk around all the laanie houses by the beach all day’ But most of them don’t know Clifton, hey They don’t know how many stairs there are Jirre fok, man, all those stairs Next time you go to Clifton 3rd, count the number of houses you pass on the stairs down Ja, and that’s my that’s my what’s the word? Ja, jurisdiction My route Yoh, they would die in a day if they had my job And like, none – none of these houses have driveways No paths All of these houses are on the steps, going down the cliff No other way in   No, you have to chain your bike to the rails on the side of Victoria Road – ja, chain it with a combination lock because the skollies will take it quick – quick, even a Post Office bike, hey , they’ve got no skaam – then take the stairs down Ja, the stairs Fifty down, fifty

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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poetry

January 2015

My Beloved Uncles

Tove Jansson

TR. Thomas Teal

poetry

January 2015

However tired of each other they must have grown from time to time, there was always great solidarity among...

fiction

January 2016

Good People

Nir Baram

TR. Jeffrey Green

fiction

January 2016

Good People opens in Berlin in 1938. Thomas Heiselberg has grand plans to make the company he works for the...

Art

September 2014

Semi Floating Sculpture

Luke Hart

Patrick Langley

Art

September 2014

Luke Hart will meet me at Gate 7. I get the text on the DLR, heading east past Canary...

 

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