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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...

I broke three contracts in 2016 The first was verbal, a monogamy clause But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody is psychic; I’d just become attuned to it The second was an NDA A man who gave me money asked me to sign it when we first met at the Hyatt near LAX But he got my name wrong, took my Twitter handle for the real thing, so I signed smiling The third and last was this reality show deal Making a documentary about my new, younger friends and their home in Koreatown   It’s been one year since I signed my friends’ lives away during my temporary stay, and two months since I officially joined their lease As is the nature of La Mariposa, most of them have since flown the co-op Morgan is living with her parents in the Bay Alicia is in New York Miffany’s been all over Ditto Max I can’t keep up The only one left is Nadezhda, the one who initially brought me in   Our relationship is sisterly I never had one She keeps asking me if I’m going to do something with this writing I was sharing it with her and the other girls as it came to me, checking my mirror, so to speak They consented yes, always I was told I was trusted, which is a large part of why I knew I had to break our contract – I didn’t want to risk compromising that   In many ways, I feel even more than a year older now I have been Saturn Returning, which is an astrological concept I’m no longer sure I believe in I’ve spent much of the last two years trying to determine how belief determines reality and how much Just last week a Kundalini instructor in Santa Monica speculated that one’s beliefs manifest as event and circumstance She was raised by a Vietnam-born mother, she said, who followed the Chinese zodiac Her mother believed that those years forecast to be bad for her astrological sign would be She feared them And they turned out to be

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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Issue No. 17

Ada Kaleh

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 17

When King Carol II of Romania set foot on the tiny Danubian island of Ada Kaleh on 4 May...

poetry

May 2014

Rain on the Roof (to James Schuyler)

David Andrew

poetry

May 2014

Degrees of distance Who all died at different dates, known to each other: not just in the human race...

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September 2012

Negation: A Response to Lars Iyer's 'Nude in Your Hot Tub'

Scott Esposito

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September 2012

I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I do...

 

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