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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...

2011   I In 2011 the world ended: I killed myself   On July 23, at 3:29 in the afternoon, my death set out from Catania Its epicentre was my thin, supine body, my three hundred grams of human heart, my small breasts, my puffy eyes, my brain clubbed senseless, the wrist of my right arm draped over the edge of the tub, the other wrist submerged in a grim mojito of mint bubble bath and blood   On July 23, in the full heat of summer, down the dusty steps of my apartment building, oozing downward insidiously like oily, boiling veins of asphalt, my death propagated from Via Crispi 21 through all the neighbouring streets, to the cathedral with its pigeons and shorts-clad tourists, to the Amenano River, which reeks of carrion, and then vanished underground From my central nervous system to the streets of the city centre, from cold to hot, a perfect breakdown from which there is no return Down into the black heart of the lava stone, from the Roman aqueduct to the dirt paths of the Parco Gioeni, overgrown with weeds and littered with empty beer cans, to the scalding steps of the Church of the Santissima Trinità, to the dingy gray faces of saints Peter and Paul outside the Church of Sant’Agata al Borgo From there it shot off to the narrow sidewalks of the Scogliera, a scream in the depths of the sea, a puff of air in the seagulls’ lungs Amidst the noise of the beaches, the sweat, the wafting clouds of deodorant and suntan lotion Geometric under the spray of the shower, brutal down in the drains, down among the cigarette butts, inside used condoms, swirling down, martyred, into the sewers, down into the darkness and shit, tangled up in hair and the tails of passing rats After four hours my body temperature plunged, especially that of my internal organs   First the brain   Then the liver   Then the epidermis   Then the Ionian Sea: it hardened like a fist   At that point my death once again took wing It flew all the way up to Mount Etna, darting among

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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fiction

November 2015

Wolves

Jeon Sungtae

TR. Sora Kim-Russell

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November 2015

The Chief   The sound of the bell for the closing of the temple gate reaches my ears. I...

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September 2013

Outside the Uniform

Kaya Genç

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September 2013

I.   The first time I had to wear a uniform I looked like a madman struggling against a...

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January 2014

Afterword: The Death of the Translator

George Szirtes

feature

January 2014

1. The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks. 2. Je est...

 

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