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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...

https://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/sarah-gridley-addressee   ADDRESSEE   I mind less that you go far away in time Once I had to harden myself to the idea Now I ask more of it, and you, and the carryover Those I find time for presently do not bring this cup of stars your listening makes Few of us are free of petty necessity, hurts spun back to inflictions, ambition rocking to exhausted desire I worry less that I’m not into this I love the curtain between us The old space of sailing, the birds that fly so far from land      https://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/sarah-gridley-origin-is-your-original-sin   Origin is Your Original Sin —AR Ammons   Not to have touched your starting point Never to have reached for where you are To renounce ever splitting a single fruit in half Never to have fooled yourself or others To have no cause for redirection To let alone the long odds and the favourable Not to be this or that Neither spatialised or spiritualised To leave your bear in the eternal winter dream of spring Not to emerge Never to mate or part with time Not to be licked into shape, never to mind the branching acts, the superstitious rags you might have tied to trees beside the wells Never around the mossy depth of wells Never a question of holiness, the steadfast eye of subterranean water Never to wear entanglements of air and blood Never to see the salmon leap To feel no difference between up and down To get the soporific movement of the sea but neither its lifting or breaking dreams Never to feel the velvet curtain dropping at the end To touch as near

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...

READ NEXT

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November 2014

The Last Redoubt

Scott Esposito

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November 2014

As they say of politics, I have found essay-writing to be the art of the possible. Certain work can...

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

Grace

Sophie Mackintosh

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

14. It comes for me in the middle of the day when I am preparing lunch, quartering a tomato...

Interview

May 2011

Interview with Desmond Hogan

Ben Eastham

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2011

Desmond Hogan is probably the most famous Irish writer you’ve never heard of. In the early 1980s, with numerous...

 

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