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Bradford Gray Telford is one of the most talented young poet/translators that Host Publications has come across in recent years. His translations of French poet Geneviève Huttin appear in The Dirty Goat 18 and a selection from his original Flaubertgasms is featured in The Dirty Goat 16. Check out his website, where you'll learn more about Brad's work. Read Brad's poems and you will simply be amazed.
Alasdair Gray, the greatest living Scottish writer, is little heard of
here in the United States. His work seethes with energy, imagination,
and righteous anger. Please take time to visit his website and blog;
both recent discoveries of mine, though I have loved Gray's work for
years.
His blog can be found here
An Austin Chronicle Review of the 20th Anniversary Dirty Goat!
This month marks the 20th anniversary of The Dirty Goat, the long-running literary journal based in Austin and New York City. From humble roots in 1980s Austin, when each new volume was launched with a keg party in Harris Park, the journal has expanded in size and reputation – as has Host Publications, the independent press that grew up around it. From its new headquarters in downtown Manhattan, Host continues to deliver high-quality international literature with friendly, irreverent energy and a Texas drawl.
By Anna Frajlich.
Translated and with an introduction by Regina Grol. Cover art by Rafał
Olbiński. Austin, Texas: Host Publications, 2006. xii + 143 pages. ISBN
10: 0-924047-41-0. Paper. $15.00.
Dubbed "the best Polish poetess of her generation," Anna Frajlich has developed an extensive body of work, which reflects her struggles and triumphs as a woman, immigrant and Polish ex-patriot. Part of the 1968 Jewish exodus from Poland, Frajlich has infused her poems with sensitive and penetrating notations of changing attitudes toward emigration. She has gone through life recording her insights, reflections or moods and has miraculously found terse and unpretentious artistic forms for their expression. This second edition contains several recent poems not included in the original version and it is clear that Frajlich's poetry continues to speak to our hearts and minds.
Sensitivity is Anna Frajlich's poetic domain. Sensitivity toward the beauty of the world, toward seasons, toward the landscape...Two realms overlap in her poetry: the realm of eros and the realm of memory. In the interpenetration of these two voices, in the vibrating tissue of her poems Anna from Brooklyn is a poetess of exile. And that comprises Frajlich's unique, inimitable and personal sphere of sensibility.
– Jan Kott
"Life As It Is"
short stories by Nelson Rodrigues
translated by Alex Ladd
The Arts Fuse review
Still relatively unknown in the United States, Nelson Rodrigues (1912 -1980) is considered by many to be Brazil's greatest playwright. He wrote seventeen full-length plays, as well as movie scripts, soap operas and novels. The fifty-eight stories in this collection are gathered from his newspaper column, A Vida Como Ela É (Life As It Is). Written in the 1950s, these stories have since been republished numerous times in Brazil, where they have been adapted for theater, television and cinema.
Enrique Lihn's writings, both creative and critical, are considered in Chile some of the most significant in the country's distinguished literary history. This bilingual volume is the most complete collection of Lihn's work in English. As well as some of Lihn's familiar poems, this volume includes representative poems from a number of his later books, previously uncollected pieces, and selections from his final moving sequence, Diary of Death.
A review by Tim Feeny of the University of Illinois
The Young Man from Savoy is the story of Joseph Jacquet, "a young man unlike others." The existence of this village boy, hired out as a hand on a schooner, seems fated to unravel from the moment he glimpses the mesmerizing Miss Anabella, a high-wire artiste with a traveling circus. She becomes the object of Joseph's fantasizing obsession, and a catalyst for the bizarre and brutal acts that ensue.
Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in a French mountainside village overlooking Lake Geneva, this tale of all-consuming love plays out against a backdrop that is at once idyllic and askew. Vividly imagined and masterfully wrought, The Young Man from Savoy is a meditative page-turner, a novel whose spare, mutedly lyrical prose stands in contrast to the dramatic tale it recounts. In this remarkable work, acclaimed French Swiss writer C-F Ramuz has left us a lasting legacy, a work of laconic and unsettling power.
A book by Host Publications
A nice review, check it out!
Right Reading
poetry by Ivan Diviš
translated by Deborah Garfinkle
bilingual Czech/English
8.5" x 5.5"
171 pages
Adopting the persona of the eponymous Old Man, celebrated Czech poet Ivan Diviš (1924-1999) writes of the comfort of memory, the nature of faith and the pain of exile. In this moving chronicle of loss and isolation, Diviš transports us through space and time, from the pristine mountain peaks of Tibet to a Prague gutter, and from the Big Bang up to the barbarous century of Hitler and Stalin, right through to the brink of the new millennium and the threshold of his mortal existence. With alternating lines of earthy vulgarity and lyric transcendence, the poems in this moving collection expose the longing, pathos and absurdity of human existence. Available to English-speaking audiences for the first time, The Old Man's Verses is a provocative, darkly humorous collection from one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary poets.
This book has been nominated for a 2008 Northern California Book Award in the category of literature in translation.
Nominees in the translation category are:
Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated by Katherine
Silver. New Directions.
The Old Man's Verses, by Ivan Divis, translated by Deborah Garfinkle. Host
Publications.
Odes and Elegies, by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Nick Hoff.
Wesleyan University Press.
State of Exile, by Cristina Peri Rossi, translated by Marilyn Buck. City
Lights Books.
Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians around the World, edited and translated
by Niloufar Talebi. North Atlantic Books.
The Northern California Book Awards were established by NCBR (formerly the
Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, or BABRA) in 1981 to honor the work
of northern California writers and recognize exceptional service in the
field of literature here in northern California. In addition to the book
awards, the Fred Cody Award is presented annually for lifetime literary
achievement and service to the community. This year novelist, publisher,
and playwright Dorothy Bryant will be honored.
The 28th Annual Northern California Book Awards will be on Sunday, April
19, in the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library, 100
Larkin Street at Grove. The Awards Ceremony is from 1:00-2:30 pm, with a
book signing and reception immediately following. The ceremony and
reception are free and open to the public.
More info can be found here.
The Old Man's Verses is available for purchase here.
