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The Flower Show / The Toth Family by István Örkény (New York City: New Directions, 1982) Although the scene and characters [of The Flower Show] are those of Budapest, the idea behind them came to Örkény in New York. Switching on the television set on the last day of a visit to America, he happened […]
Another YouTube videos post, where the videos have under 1,000 views, this time related to Andrei Platonov. I guess there is a tie-in between the previous post and this one: Vasily Grossman gave the main speech at the funeral of Platonov. The first video is Alexander Petrov’s animation of the Platonov story “The Cow” (which […]
Richard at Caravana de recuerdos has recently covered Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a novel I give my highest recommendation to without any hesitation (see here for the summary of my posts on the novel). Both of us read the NYRB edition, translation by Robert Chandler. While poking around recently some of Chandler’s other translations […]
One Minute Stories by István Örkény, selected and translated by Judith Sollosy (Budapest, Corvina Books Ltd.) I had been reading about some Hungarian plays and ran across István Örkény’s name several times. The more I read about him the more I wanted to read something by him. I selected a collection of his shortest works […]
A few weeks ago I wanted to see how the boys (ages 6 and 9) would react to learning Latin…were they too young? Would they even be interested? We’re not quite a quarter of the way through William E. Linney’s Getting Started with Latin: Beginning Latin for Homeschoolers and Self-Taught Students of Any Age but […]
Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) Update: I have included links to the posts in the list of chapters. I may include links to other books that tie in with the chapter posts (such as N. M. Penzer’s essay on Poison Damsels) as I get to […]
Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) Except for the account of the west coast of Africa with Cerne and the trade in Attic pottery, to which we have already referred, the Periplus of Scylax is not a particularly exciting work, nor has it any pretensions to […]
Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1978), translated by Anthony Olcott Posts on the novel: Links on Platanov and Chevengur: helpful posts and articles, not intended to be all-inclusive A note on translations: when Robert Chandler’s translation comes out I will happily read this again. In the meantime, read Chandler’s ideal translator of […]
Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1978), translated by Anthony Olcott This will be the hardest post on Chevengur since it gets to the heart (and main character) of the novel, the town. The difficulty lies in both the complexity of the message and some ambiguity Platonov leaves in the story. I’ll apologize […]
Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1978), translated by Anthony Olcott In reply to a comment from Miguel I ended up linking three articles related to Platonov and translator Robert Chandler, info I think worthy of its own post. The first article is an interview with Chandler at the Guardian, mostly focused on […]