Month: December 2014

Chicago Tribune Review of “Breathturn into Timestead”

12/31/2014 By Shoshana Olidort The last five poetry volumes of Paul Celan are collected in “Breathturn Into Timestead” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) The poem, Paul Celan once said, “is lonely,” and in its loneliness it reaches outward, “intends another … goes toward it.” In this way, Celan went on to explain, the poem creates the possibility for an encounter with the reader, for being heard and understood. One of … Read more Chicago Tribune Review of “Breathturn into Timestead”

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Uri Avnery on the Maccabees & more

27.12.14 My Glorious Brothers WHEN I was 15 years old and a member of the Irgun underground (by today’s criteria, an honest-to-goodness terrorist organization), we sang “(In the past) we had the heroes / Bar Kochba and the Maccabees / Now we have the new ones / The national youth…” The melody was a German military marching song. Why did we look for heroes in the remote past? We … Read more Uri Avnery on the Maccabees & more

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Hyperion, Volume VIII, No. 2 (Winter 2014)

Treat yourself to a great free read over these Xmas days: The new issue of Hyperion just came out, chockablock full of excellent writing that will take you miles away from all the bad jinglebelly stuff going on. Below, the table of contents; here the link to the full PDF the magazine.

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2014: Year of the Arabic Poem (in Translation)

via Arabic Literature (in English): BY MLYNXQUALEY on DECEMBER 16, 2014 • ( 0 ) There were at least nine contemporary Arabic poetry collections published in translation this year, a number of them stunning, ground-breaking, beautifully produced: Certainly there were more novels than poetry collections — I have yet to do a full tally, but there are always many more novels. Yet to have nine poetry collections translated in … Read more 2014: Year of the Arabic Poem (in Translation)

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George Hunka on Celan

New books: Paul Celan Paul Celan remains one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century. The two great poems of his early career, “Death Fugue” (circa 1945) and “Stretto” (1958), were respectively informed, if not inspired, by the Holocaust and the detonation of the atomic bomb. His body of work was a response, if not a riposte, to Adorno’s speculation that poetry was impossible in the wake … Read more George Hunka on Celan

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On Kamel Daoud’s “Meursault, Counter-Investigation”

via the always excellent Arab Literature (in English) Why Did ‘Other Press’ Stick Through Heated Auction to Get Debut Algerian Novel? BY MLYNXQUALEY on DECEMBER 14, 2014 • ( 0 ) Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, Counter-Investigation was the subject of a heated auction at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. Why did Other Press stick it out to acquire world English rights?  Publishers Weekly talked to Other Press publisher Judith Gurewich. First — … Read more On Kamel Daoud’s “Meursault, Counter-Investigation”

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Review of Robert Kelly’s Collected Essays

Ian Dreiblatt just posted a longish blog post on drunken boat that starts with a review of A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly. I am reproducing the opening section below; you can read the whole piece here: Stone Stair New York, Part 1 by DB Guest Blogger Ian Dreiblatt contra mundum press has just published a voice full of cities, a heaping anthology of … Read more Review of Robert Kelly’s Collected Essays

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Gaza writers receive death threats from IS

This article via Al Monitor: THE PULSE OF THE MIDDLE EAST by Hana Salah Posted December 5, 2014 Translator(s)Pascale el Khoury GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Mystery still surrounds the presence of the Islamic State (IS) in Gaza. Statements in the name of the radical group threatening or claiming responsibility for previous bombings in Gaza are not enough to prove the existence of active members in the besieged Gaza Strip, though IS’ … Read more Gaza writers receive death threats from IS

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Alain Veinstein’s Final Broadcast

In the early eighties I moved from London (impossible to make the rent in Thatcherite England) to Paris where I found freelance employment as radio-author, commentator, translator and other guises at France Culture (I still listen to that station nearly every night). The people who had just recently revolutionized those French cultural airwaves were the poet Alain Veinstein (by founding the superb nightly program Les Nuits Magnétiques in 1978) and … Read more Alain Veinstein’s Final Broadcast

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