Lots of people speak about the difficulty of translating the first line of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, perhaps because it’s so well known (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/Ordnungen?). It’s a little like the opening line of Don Quixote, which can be used as a litmus test for any new translation of…
Category: On Reading
On Reviewing
In this month’s ALR Geordie Williamson and John Dale have their say about the current state of Australian literary criticism, partly as a contribution to the ongoing dialogue generated by Gideon Haigh’s piece ‘Feeding the Hand That Bites‘, and partly as an apperitif in preparation for a panel discussion at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre. Towards the…
Literary Quality Assurance Scheme
Here’s a little snippet from Richard Glover’s column in the weekend paper, which made me smile: Bring back the typewriter It was difficult to write a long novel using a typewriter. You’d have to pound away in a fog of Tipp-Ex and carbon fumes. Occasionally people like Dylan Thomas would write something really good and…
Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (shortlists)
For the past several years, I have had the honour of being one of the judges of Emerging Author Category of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. Judging this award is always exciting and challenging, calling on each of us to reconsider – each year – what it is the award should be looking for in…
Owl
Outside my office there is a beautiful, distracting swathe of native bushland. I’ve had many visitors in my office, most of them human, but occasionally some creature wanders in. A glorious green tree snake spent a few days curled up between the window and the screens, rock wallabies and koalas peer in, and every now…
Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s ‘The Lamplit Answer’
I’ve been reading a wonderful book of poetry by the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg: The Lamplit Answer. This collection was first published in 1982, and later included as part of the collection, Supernatural Love . I discovered it when a friend advised that it included a series of poems on Simone Weil. It’s a slim…
‘Why Translation Matters’ by Edith Grossman
Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters is part of a series of books – Why X Matters – published by Yale University Press, and based on a lecture series of the same name. The book is slim – compact. Three of the four chapters are based on lectures Grossman gave at Yale, while the fourth is…
‘The Submerged Cathedral’ by Charlotte Wood
Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about Charlotte Wood’s novel The Submerged Cathedral. It’s not her most recent book, but I returned to it after finding a copy during one of those days when you’re trawling the bookshelf looking for something to inspire you: to remind you why you read, and write. Charlotte is a…
Borges: macho, gaucho, skinny
If Borges had had his way – and he generally did – all polysyllables would have been replaced by monosyllables, especially in the third and fourth revisions, to which he often pressed his absent collaborators. People concerned about the legitimacy of the literal might well be scandalized by his mania for dehispanization. EH: He was…
Samuel visits his mother
I went to see her straight from the airport. (Was I, then, a good son, or only the semblance of one, going through the motions, performing goodness because, perhaps, there was someone up in the carpark above me, watching me swim back and forth, back and forth?) I knew my mother’s health had deteriorated. I…