The Reader - Magazine Editorial

“All poetry – all writing – is translation, isn’t it?”. In our Translations issue writers and translators ponder this question: is it possible to find the right words to translate, not only from a foreign language, not only someone else’s idea or expression, but one’s own interior world.

David Constantine tells us what we can learn from translators who write:

Tension, the further and further demands on the reading mind, a physically nervous testing of the reader’s power to grasp; then release, the rush of sense, the fulfilment.

Philip Davis champions Ruskin and the importance of rudeness:

Ruskin always wants to get through the conventionally habitual response to the passionately alive one

Robin Kirkpatrick discusses his translation of Dante’s Commedia:

It’s a bit like playing a fruit machine: the wheels or the words go round; you keep nudging, and very occasionally you hit jackpot.

ALSO: Robert Chandler weighs up foreignising and domesticising; Anne Stevenson on why we should trust poetry; Helen Constantine on locality and the spirit of the place; new poetry and fiction, reviews and recommendations.

editorial

Jane Davis - Right Words in Time

new poetry

Les Murray
Iain Britton
Andrew Shields
Alan Dunnett
Peter Gilmour
Eleanor Cooke
Elizabeth Whyman
Ken Cockburn

new fiction

Hugo Marsan - Blind Experiment

essays and interviews

David Constantine - Translators Who Write: What Can You Learn From Them
Robert Chandler - To Foreignise or to Domesticate
Anne Stevenson - Why Should We Trust Poetry
Frances Macmillan talks to Robin Kirkpatrick - Dante’s Commedia: Buttonholing the Locals
Helen Constantine - The Spirit of the Place
Philip Davis - The Importance of Rudeness
J. G. Nichols - Translator – Traitor

learning curve

Adam Piette - The Practice of Poetry: Incarnate Disclosure & Lawrence’s ‘First Morning’
Thera Read - The War Poetry of W. W. Gibson
Literary Problems: Which is the right translation?

reviews

Julie-ann Rowell - Lars Saabye Christensen, The Half-Brother translated from the Norwegian by Kenneth Steven
Michael Caines - Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters
B. F. Nellist - Michael Schmidt, The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets
Peter Fell - Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

recommendations

Jill Warriner - William Barnes: Poems of the Dorset Dialect
John Scrivener - Knut Hamsun & Growth of the Soil
Jane Labous - The Beauty of L’Etranger
Mike Horwood - That’s a Man Walking There: Vaino Linna, Under the North Star
Anne Jones - ‘Ordinary Woman’: Margaret Foster, The Diary of an Ordinary Woman

reading lives

Warren Hovland - More Like a Marriage

the back end

Enid Stubin - Our Spy in NY
Crossword
Buck’s Quiz
Contributors
Quiz and Puzzle Answers
James Bainbridge - Potted Crabbe

Issue 16 - Autumn 2004

Contents