Tuesday 29 June 2010

Books currently being read


Enough football for now and enough other things too. Here is some work in hand:

The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems of Peter Porter (for review in Poetry London)
The Invisible Bridge, Julie Orringer (for review in The Times)
Teach Us To Sit Still: Tim Parks (because Tim sent it and it's fascinating)
Life is a Dream, Gyula Krúdy (just posted review for TLS)

Also in intermittent progress:
Proud to be a Mammal: Essays on War, Faith and Memory, Czeslaw Milosz
A Short History of Decay, E.M. Cioran
...and the rest of the series, particularly including...
How I Came to Know Fish, Ota Pavel

Nibbled at but full meals to come:
Poetry in a Time of Terror: Essays in the Postcolonial Preternatural, Rukmini Bhaya Nair
The Poet Who Forgot, Catherine Cole (a book that must have been meant for me!)

And poetry, (part consumed):
The Dream in the Next Body, Gabeba Baderoon, which is very very good indeed. In fact rather wonderful.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

George,

Just out of interest, is it true (I read it somewhere!) that all Hungarian school-children are taught 'A walesi bárdok' at school?

Dafydd John said...

I didn't mean the above message to be Anonymous!!

George S said...

It's a famous poem by János Arany (1817-1882), Dafydd, and it certainly used to be the case. It might still be. In the poem, for Wales read Hungary, for England read Austria. Written after the defeat of 1848 revolution and before the ausgleich of 1867. There is a translation of it in the book I helped edit some years ago, The Lost Rider, done very nicely by Peter Zollman. Perhaps you've come across it.