translation
Helen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.
Read MoreIsraeli Stage’s readings are consistently the best attended in the Boston area, thus demonstrating that there is a great appetite for Israeli culture beyond folk dance and hummus.
Read MoreThis handsome edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s recent poetry and prose in English translation is a stunning presentation of a major poet.
Read MoreA strange mix of characters who all have complicated pasts gives rise to a novel that blossoms — exactly as a flower does — into a complex drama that includes several points of view and a wide range of emotions.
Read MoreIn light of the many translations of Cyprian Norwid’s verse into English, Danuta Borchardt thought carefully about what she was going to focus on.
Read MoreItalian writer Niccolò Ammaniti usually writes with an unadorned style about moral predicaments of the young in small-town Italy. “Me and You,” a slender effort in all respects, covers this ground as well, with the difference that fourteen-year-old protagonist Lorenzo Cumi is from an affluent Roman family.
Read MoreCertainly part of the power of Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry resides in how, having established a jagged consciousness, he leaves us in between—in a world full of questions that are not easily resolved.
Read MoreAs the year nears its end, time is running out to write at length about some of the new books that gave me pleasure. Thus this quick list of favorites. As usual, my taste runs to prose that’s off-the-beaten-path.
Read MoreMahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008 at the age of sixty-seven, was best and heroically known for his complex perspective on political and spiritual borders — as both a poet and a spokesman for his Palestinian people.
Read MoreThe brilliance of Alberto Moravia’s cool diagnostic vision — sleek, clear, cruel, and existential no matter how emotional the conflict — puts us off. His male protagonists often self-consciously analyze their puerility to the point of comic masochism.
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Arts Remembrance: In Memoriam — Tom Stoppard