When Christine dies at the end of Theodor Fontane’s No Way Back, it is felt less as a consequence of … More
Category: Literature in Translation
250. (Jean Racine)
I write as a novice, an initiate into Racine’s imaginative world, and I enter with just enough French to feel … More
243. (Franz Kafka)
Kafka’s The Trial revolves around the parable of the law; it is the hermeneutic puzzle that promises to be a key … More
240. (Franz Kafka)
To understand a work by Kafka, only a comparison with another work by Kafka will suffice. To make sense of … More
201. (Sarah Kirsch)
The 2014 Ice Roses: Selected Poems of the German poet Sarah Kirsch, published a year after her death (Kirsch was … More
179. (Theodor Fontane)
Effi Briest: a nineteenth-century European bourgeois world that doesn’t have the melodramatic horrors of hell or the hopeless delusions of … More
150. (Cao Xueqin)
This morning, I deleted, for the first time, one of the posts on this blog, the most recent, on Marguerite … More
143. (Marina Tsvetaeva)
And, in part, 143. (Elaine Feinstein), since it is Feinstein’s translations (written with the assistance of Angela Livingstone) from the … More
115. (Italo Svevo)
Italo Svevo, whose talent was recognized and whose career was partially rescued by Joyce, is not much read nowadays. Joyce’s … More
110. (Eugenio Montale)
Montale’s best translator, William Arrowsmith, writes of the collection La Bufera e altro: “these are love-poems, both personal and cosmological, without … More
