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ReadySteadyBlog
La Feuille: "un site de critique indépendant et plutôt de qualité"
Blog entries on '13 July 2006'
Thursday 13 July 2006
Robert Gernhardt
According to signandsight (thanks Steve), Robert Gernhardt was one of Germany's most-loved poets. He died in Frankfurt at the end of June:
Born in 1937 in Reval in Estonia, Gernhardt studied painting and German in Stuttgart and Berlin. From 1964 until his death he lived in Frankfurt, where he worked as writer, painter and caricaturist. His lively cross-genre publishing activities soon made him the leading figure of the New Frankfurt School of writers and artists behind the satirical magazine Pardon in the 1960s and 70s and after 1979, Titanic. Here is a small selection of his poems translated into English by Ursula Runde, some of which have appeared in Poetry Magazine, and sketches from Gernhardt's German Readers series.
Definitely worth taking the time to look around signandsight's literature features too whilst you are at it.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere
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Thursday 13 July 2006
Kertész wins Wingate Prize
Imre Kertész's Fatelessness (Harvill) has won the 2006 Wingate Prize ("established in 1977 by the late Harold Hyam Wingate, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize is now in its 29th year. The prizes for fiction and non-fiction are each worth £4,000 to each category winner, with £300 also awarded for the runners-ups in each category"):
At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider.
The genius of Imre Kertész’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.
Let us hope that this will mean all of Kertész's other titles will get translated.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, awards
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Thursday 13 July 2006
Home and away
Do, please, forgive the radio silence. I've been away on a wee mini-break to Big London Town (I'd headed down because PN Review were having a 30th birthday bash). As well as the party, I did some wonderful tourist things (went to Sir John Soane's Museum and Dr Johnson's House and saw the excellent Modigliani and His Models exhibition at the Royal Academy). Now I'm back ... and I'm shattered.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, rsb
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Serendipoetry
To a Stranger
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me
as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate,
chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours
only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you
take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or
wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
-- Walt Whitman
-- View archive
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