#George Szirtes

[fiction-quotes]

To hope is to fear what you desire, the things in which you neither trust nor genuinely believe. You don't place your hopes in what you already have: what is possessed simply exists, as if by default.

  —  Portraits of a Marriage (Sándor Márai), translated by George Szirtes

#book quotes #historical fiction #romance fiction #psychological fiction #sándor márai #george szirtes #portraits of a marriage #psychology #hope #fear #desire #trust #distrust #belief

[impoliticwestie]

Currently Reading

#Art #bookshelves #siesta #Thierry Paquot #Harry Clifton #George Szirtes #Blind Field #black and white #john perivolaris

[poem-today]

A poem by George Szirtes

Meetings

The drowned return, the travellers come home, All is forgiven in that breathless cry. The statue weeps secure beneath her dome, Delightedly she wipes her stony eye.

It is the end of literature to meet With what was offered once and then withdrawn, To make up stories and to give the sweet Illusion that we’re only as alone                                                            

As we would wish. I wish now we had kissed Before you left me, but it is too late. I cannot find your ear or lip or breast. I’m going back to books. The rest can wait.

George Szirtes

Image: La mémoire by René Magritte

#george szirtes #english poetry #meetings

[ukdamo]

Preston North End

George Szirtes

Tottenham Hotspur versus Preston North End. Finney’s last season: my first. And my dad with me. How surprisingly well we blend

with these others. Then the English had the advantage, but today we feel their fury, sadness and pity. There were some bad

years in between, a lot of down-at-heel meandering. For me though, the deep blue of Preston was ravishment of a more genteel,

poetic kind. They were thrashed five-one, it’s true, and Finney was crocked by Mackay. Preston went down, hardly to rise again. But something got through

about Finney the plumber, Lancashire, the Crown, and those new days a-coming. The crowd dissolves, but we are of the crowd, heading into town

under sodium street lights. This year Wolves will win the title. Then Burnley. I will see Charlton, Law and George Best. The world revolves

around them and those voices on TV reading the results. I’m being bedded in – to what kind of soil remains a mystery,

but I sense it in my marrow like a thin drift of salt blown off the strand. I am an Englishman, wanting England to win.

I pass the Tebbitt test. I am Alan Lamb, Greg Rusedski, Viv Anderson, the boy from the corner shop, Solskjaer and Jaap Stam.

I feel no sense of distance when the tannoy plays Jerusalem, Rule Britannia or the National Anthem. I know King Priam. I have lived in Troy.

I always had a love of football - my father took me to my first football match in Budapest when I was a child, and he took me to my first English football match when we came to England. 'Preston North End' the poem describes the first match I ever went to which was Spurs versus Preston North End. It's a poem about belonging, about belonging in a crowd, about belonging to a nation, about belonging to a nation with a specific history to which you may become attached in some way, of which you may become a part.

#poetry #community #belonging #pride #identity #preston #football #lancashire #George Szirtes #life #story

[underthebeechtrees]

“There are places people go that others can never see.”

From THE PHOTOGRAPHER AT SIXTEEN by GEORGE SZIRTES

#quotes #George szirtes #the photographer at sixteen #nonfiction

[librarycards]

Hello all, and happy September! I'm excited to share my third quarterly book rec post for 2023. I had a great summer, particularly reading-wise, mixing books like Anna Édes (picked up at an indie bookshop in Budapest), Angel Blood (foraged at my hometown library's book sale), and Blue Flame (found at a new-to-me indie I found while pre-move shopping).

If you like these posts, you can find my very, very extensive archive of recommendation posts here, and my substack, where I recommend media every month for free, here. If you really like my work, and want commenting privileges + access to occasional essays/musings, consider becoming a paid subscriber –– it's totally not required, but means a lot!

Now, without further ado, my top nine books read between mid-June and now, in no particular order. I can't wait to see what you come up with on your own posts!

Emily Petit, Blue Flame

Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

Dezső Kosztolányi tr. George Szirtes, Anna Édes

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included

Kwon Yeo-sun, tr. Janet Hong, Lemon

Fiona Mozley, Elmet

Davey Davis, X

Becky Chambers, The Galaxy and the Ground Within

John Singleton, Angel Blood

I tag @thepixiediaries @discworldwitches @smokedgoudagirl @gwenderqueer, @capricornpropaganda, @wirefoxedterrier @fatehbaz @punkkwix @patchworkstudies, @growtiredofpublicvulnerability, @biomaterial @probablymoons @materialisnt @bioethicists @slowtides, @stephen-deadalus, @artuhmes @felgueirosa @myalgias, @metamatar, @heavenlyyshecomes, @osmanthusoolong, @passerea, @txttletale, @aldieb, @sawasawako, @voidofcourse, @boykeats, @tirragen, @sadhoc @campgender @r-ob-yn, @querxus, @grimesapologist, @closet-keys, @abstractlesbian, @vawoolf, @feypact, and anyone else who wants to!

#sorry for tagging so many ppl i just know a lot of you like this and don't want to leave people out! #but even if i didn't tag you feel free to do this i read EVERYONE'S if they @ me in it #mine #book rec #id in alt text #described #my description

[when-did-this-become-difficult]

my favorite six books I read for the first time this year

Alphabetically:

Children of the Alley by Naguib Mahfouz

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Portraits of a Marriage by Sándor Márai (translated by George Szirtes)

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta by Mario Vargas Llosa

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carré

...it was gonna be top nine but then I realized I hadn't read enough books to make that top nine my ultra faves, it was gonna end up being six greats and three "they're very good but I don't love them as much as the other ones" books

anyone do theirs and tag me! i just tagged a lot of people in my top nine movies of 2023 post and i don't want to double tag, so here's just a couple people that I didn't tag in that first post anyhow: @saathi1013, @oldshrewsburyian

#j.2023.all #the state of the union

[crucifiedlovers]

...we’re all nothing but bodies, end of story, though there’s so much you can tell from these bodies, if you catch one in a moment of desire, at the moment when the body is most alive and burning with lust, how deep and mysterious and irresistible is the desire that forces you to want—to demand—possession of some object for which you are willing to sacrifice everything...

László Krasznahorkai, 'The Bill' (trans. George Szirtes)

#László Krasznahorkai #quote #the bill #desire #literature #words #lit #prose

[wiiwheel]

What are some of your favorite poets/poems currently?

Fricatives, Eric Yip

"Our Hunting Fathers", W.H. Auden

Prussian Blue: Dead Planets, George Szirtes

[hairtusk]

just found out that my poetry professor who collabed with jenny hval was taught by denise riley AND george szirtes...I need to network with this woman so badly

#agi please help me gain industry connections I'm begging #not gonna mention her by full name bc once she pulled up her whole ass tumblr blog by accident in the middle of class

[ginnelfotofest]

No Place. Photography by MKL. Hello, you have seen this image on my personal account @eyende . Over the next week or so I will be showing the photographs I exhibited during Ginnel Foto Fest 2022. As founder of the Ginnel Foto Community it is the first time in the seven year history of the festival that we decided to show a body of work produced by me over the past six month and still in progress. I started off by deciding to pack my camera when going to work. Usually I walk the same route to get to college but the way home became a detour to get through different neighbourhoods, all in and around the town centre. The mundane of Everyday caught my eye. During the Fest a person approached me and told me they lived in this property when they were in their early teens. Unexpected I got a life story that I couldn’t have imagined. There are of course different layers to my work. But when the unexpected happens the photograph becomes more than just a visual representation. It reminded me on a phrase by George Szirtes from his book The Photographer At Sixteen, “Photographs are skin. Sometimes the skin is healthy and fresh, at other times it is hardly there. Old skin is cracked and creased: what it hides it also reveals…” #photography #ginnelfotofest #exhibition #storybehind #documentaryphotography #mundane #everyday #talkingaboutphotography (at Ipswich, Suffolk) https://www.instagram.com/p/Chkt12soa1o/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#photography #ginnelfotofest #exhibition #storybehind #documentaryphotography #mundane #everyday #talkingaboutphotography

[fiction-quotes]

All I know of politics is that no one trusts anyone, and everyone thinks he knows better than the next man.

  —  Portraits of a Marriage (Sándor Márai), translated by George Szirtes

#book quotes #historical fiction #romance fiction #psychological fiction #sándor márai #george szirtes #portraits of a marriage #politics #arrogance #distrust

[lamilanomagazine]

Per la prima volta in Italia esce per i Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni di Stefano Donno, RE EZRA di Michael G. Stephens

Per la prima volta in Italia esce per i Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni di Stefano Donno, RE EZRA di Michael G. Stephens. Per la prima volta in Italia esce per i Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni di Stefano Donno, RE EZRA di Michael G. Stephens. M. G. Stephens ha scritto un romanzo su una delle figure più controverse del movimento modernista: Ezra Pound. Durante la seconda guerra mondiale, Ezra Pound lavorò come propagandista per i fascisti italiani, aiutando la loro causa con le sue regolari trasmissioni radiofoniche. Questa attività portò Pound a essere accusato di tradimento, anche se non fu mai processato per questo. Invece, fu internato per oltre un decennio in un ospedale psichiatrico di Washington, D.C. King Ezra porta il lettore dall'incarcerazione di Ezra Pound da parte dell'esercito statunitense dopo la seconda guerra mondiale fino ai suoi ultimi giorni a Venezia nei primi anni '70. M. G. Stephens attinge alle sue riserve letterarie come poeta, scrittore di narrativa e drammaturgo per raccontare questa tragica storia di un genio imperfetto. La prosa di Stephens può essere veloce e idiomatica o introspettiva e contemplativa, ma è sempre vivida, coinvolgente e sorprendente. "Aveva percorso a piedi la Provenza, da giovane; certo poteva camminare da Roma alle Alpi italiane, malgrado la distanza. Ma il viaggio era improvvisato, ricco di impulsività (si legga: irriducibile indifferenza per il dolore che poteva arrecare a lui, o ad altri) e se lo fece a piedi, saltellando, alle volte, smentendo la propria età (era quasi sessantenne), con gli abiti stracciati, ma del resto tutti avevano abiti stracciati. C'era la guerra, e l'Italia non se la passava bene. L'esito era dubbio. Il nuovo governo s'era insediato a Salò, sulle sponde del Lago di Garda. Lui aveva una mappa. Ma una mappa non era il territorio, pensò. (...)" MG Stephens ha pubblicato 25 libri, inclusi i romanzi Season at Coole e The Brooklyn Book of the Dead. Il 2022 segna il 50° anniversario della pubblicazione di Season at Coole per E.P. Dutton. L'anno precedente (2021), MadHat Press aveva pubblicato l'opera ibrida (prosa e poesia) in cui MG Stephens ha scritto su un attore disoccupato che ottiene la parte di Amleto, il cui titolo è: History of Theatre or the Glass of Fashion. MG Stephens ha ricevuto lodi da romanzieri come Hilma Wolitzer e Richard Price, nonché da poeti come George Szirtes e Michael Anania. I suoi libri di saggistica includono il memoir di viaggio Lost in Seoul (Random House, 1990) e la raccolta di saggi Green Dreams, vincitrice del premio AWP per la saggistica, successivamente selezionata da Joyce Carol Oates come uno dei 100 più importanti libri di saggistica americani del 20° secolo. La sua commedia Our Father è andata in scena a Theatre Row (42° Strada, a New York) per oltre cinque anni è stata più volte rappresentata a Londra, Chicago e Los Angeles. Nel 2001, Stephens si è trasferito all'estero, a Londra, dove ha vissuto per quindici anni. Durante quel periodo è stato attivo sui palcoscenici di Londra e ha prodotto spettacoli per il Pentameters Theatre nel nord di Londra (Hampstead) e per il Bread & Roses Theatre nel sud di Londra (Clapham). Tutti i suoi titoli li ha conseguiti dopo i trent'anni, incluso un dottorato presso l'Università dell'Essex a Colchester, in Inghilterra, che gli è stato assegnato all'età di 60 anni. Prima di trasferirsi all'estero, Stephens ha insegnato seminari di scrittura creativa a Princeton, New York e alla Columbia University; a Londra, ha insegnato all'Università di Londra (Queen Mary). Insieme al suo romanzo King Ezra, Spuyten Duyvil ha recentemente pubblicato il suo terzo romanzo sulla famiglia Coole, Kid Coole, incentrato su un giovane pugile, peso piuma, emergente della Hudson Valley a New York. Season at Coole, The Brooklyn Book of the Dead e Kid Coole costituiscono la Coole Trilogy.... #notizie #news #breakingnews #cronaca #politica #eventi #sport #moda Read the full article

[writtenexistence]

“—it was just the darkness of the forest that would recede into the distance, just the meadow, the street corner, just the scent of that emerald-colored mist vanishing into time forever, into infinity, beyond recall.”

Excerpt From

The World Goes On

László Krasznahorkai, George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet & John Batki

https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-world-goes-on/id1222336511

#lászló krasznahorkai #literature #quotes

[loki1987]

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a Word! worksop this morning hosted by George Szirtes.

#writing #creative writing #poetry #original poem #original poets on tumblr #haiku poetry #haiku poem #love haiku #cinquain

[derangedrhythms]

One might further argue that since we know that no one translation of a poem can ever be wholly satisfactory there might be greater satisfaction in reading more than one version of it and that, by reading the various translations, in effect superimposing them on each other, one might build up a stereoscopic effect, or at least help convey the variousness of the poem itself.

George Szirtes, Centres of Cataclysm: Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation; from 'The Voronezh Variations: Versions of a Mandelstam Quatrain'

#george szirtes #centres of cataclysm #translation #on poetry