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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...

Hunt for American Heiress Continues With Bizarre Manuscript Found in Cave in Altamira By ALICE SHIFT 7:00 AM ET   A compact disc bearing a manuscript and the fingerprints of Eugenie Lund, an American heiress missing since August 19–, has been found in a cave in Altamira, Spain Dr Erik Lund, Antarctic explorer and heir to the publishing empire established by his late father, has offered a $2m reward for any information leading to the safe return of his daughter The compact disc was found by a tourist visiting the famous Paleolithic cave paintings 200 metres into the cave No further information regarding Lund’s disappearance has surfaced Below is an excerpt from the manuscript found on the compact disc   We were told that our mother’s life was terminated by killer bees while vacationing in San Marcos, Mexico with Dr Vargas at his family home Vargas described how the insects had gone for the insides of her ears – a deliberate technique to destabilise the victim Mother fell off the horse, waving her hands in the air to beat them off and hit her head on a rock Vargas thought it more prudent to spring the brutal truth upon us rather than the fiction of a prolonged hospital stay in Mexico followed by eventual death He bent down close to our faces with a pained expression and shining white teeth, miming the scene – Mother inert on the ground, Vargas swatting his way through the lethal cloud of screeching insects, his eventual defeat as he was heavily bombarded in a kamikaze-esque onslaught he likened to the attack of the USS Bunker Hill during World War II  Vargas assured us Mother was unconscious and had not suffered The killer bee specialists informed him that the perfume she was wearing (Fleurissimo, commissioned by Prince Rainier III for Grace Kelly composed of tuberose, Bulgarian rose, violet, and Florentine iris) had incited the bees to violence If she and Dr Vargas had been smoking cigarettes, the attack would never have happened Killer bees abhor smoke, even from one cigarette   Our father was in the midst

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

May 2013

Techno-primitivism

Vanessa Hodgkinson

David Trotter

Art

May 2013

What follows could have been an essay or an interview. In the event, it resembles the one as little...

Interview

May 2012

Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2012

Much has been written about the precocity and talent of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose debut novel Everything is Illuminated...

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Issue No. 8

The White Review No. 8 Editorial

The Editors

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Issue No. 8

The manifesto of art collective Bruce High Quality foundation, the subject of an essay by Legacy Russell in this...

 

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