#adrian west

[eternalhavenn]

adrian and jack r so cousins arhhrhghhg

[eternalhavenn]

decided to finally show of arthur and maven's son he was born in 1898 or 1899??? he never really met his father and only heard stories from them from maven or john (who visits here n there) he also looks a lot like arthur so that breaks maven's heart a lot but makes him love him more

[solarluxuriance]

Author Updates: February 18th, 2015

Aurora Linnea Author of This Mutilated Woman's Head

Despoiler, Linnea's industrial-noise-snarled-word-performance project, has a new tape out on GROVL.

A new work, PARiAH IV (beastly, her red hunger) --zine from purgatory. limited ed., contact [email protected] for inquiry

▲

Jon Leon Author of ADULTS ONLY

Sheets of Mist, a new book with the artist Alex Israel published by KARMA (First brand new book of poems in over 2 years)

A new essay on Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara in Art Book Review

A short piece about my cars in Spike Art Quarterly #42 (Vienna)

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Chris Moran Author of Poison Vapors and Ghostlord

An excerpt from the book-length poem Chant of the Nether-Spheres appears in the new issue of eccolinguistics.

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Adrian West Author of The Russian

A translation excerpt of the graphic novel A Human Act is up at Words Without Borders.

[dannygoodmanwriting]

If no one notices this, then it’s pointless. At the same time, every language tolerates lexical and syntactical repetition differently. Kingsley Amis says that if you use the same word twice, it has a jarring effect because the reader may think you unaware of having done it, but if you say it three times, it is acceptable because the rhetorical intention is made plain. It’s a casual insight but one based in a deep acquaintance with the English language and its literature, and it’s the kind of thing I try to keep in mind.

Adrian West, on writing and translation

[solarluxuriance]

Solar▲Luxuriance is proud to announce our 2013 OBELISK SERIES line up. Selected from submissions during our only open-reading period to date, OBELISK SERIES is a quarter-size chap series based around ideas of narrative, transgression, and form. Images above were chosen through an oblique process of google-image-searching the title of each authors' book (announced soon on our website) & then manipulated using a series of formal techniques while entertaining minor variables. I'm really excited about this series, and hope you are too. Titles will be available for pre-order both individually and as a collection soon.

(Note: Above images are *not* the final cover images)

[fwriction]

In the early morning, in a dream, over the clapping of wooden sandals against the naked soles of the monk’s feet, as their procession wended down to the shore of the Ganges, I saw a man in a kilt swinging a golf club on a green lawn, and behind him stood ten golf bags, lined up like soldiers, with vultures crouched inside them, their wings hanging down into the recessed pockets of the other golf bags at their side. At the steps of the Assi ghat, a dog rolled from one side to the other, twitching its body and spraying foamy spittle. Eagerly on the lookout for customers, a man beat an iron chain against the upholstered red seat of his bicycle rickshaw and shouted at the passing pilgrims on their way back from the shore of the Ganges: 'Rickshaw?! Rickshaw?!'

Josef Winkler, from Domra, On the Shore of the Ganges, translated by Adrian West

[fwriction]

Translator Trio: Adrian West

For each translated work published by the journal, Associate Editor Laura Brown will ask three questions of the translator, in order to illuminate the joys garnered and bruises earned during the literary process of translation. This Trio is a conversation with Adrian West, translator of a selection from Josef Winkler’s collection of tales, 'Domra, Am Ufer Des Ganges,' currently up at the journal.

LB: How were you first introduced to Josef Winkler’s writing?

AW: Pierre Joris posted a link on his blog to an interview with Winkler from shortly after he won the Büchner prize on a now-defunct German literature page called Sign and Sight. The interview is short but I was caught by the titles of Winkler’s novels, which were so strange: 'I tear out an eyelash and stab you to death with it,' for example. So I went to Amazon and ordered the two that were translated into English, 'Flowers for Jean Genet,' which was done by Michael Roloff, and 'The Serf,' by Michael Mitchell. The first is a beautifully taut and lugubrious, but I had already read dozens of books by and about Genet, and I don’t know that it would have stimulated my interest on its own; the second was one of the strangest books I had ever read. At that time I was going to Europe a lot because my wife still lived in Spain, so I asked her to order me the various titles that had been translated into Spanish and French (meticulously, I should add, by Miguel Sáenz and Bernard Banoun). If you read a lot of book-chat you’re constantly being told that some antic or naughty but fundamentally commonplace book is “a revelation,” “searingly original” and other associated nonsense, and these kinds of comments look risible when you read an author like Winkler who, at least for an American audience, is sui generis. By the end of the year in question, Winkler had turned into a verifiable obsession, and I ended up reading his complete works in German and as many interviews and critical articles as I could find.

LB: One stylistic feature that seems to recur in Winkler’s writing is repetition. Does this ever present itself as a challenge to you while translating?

AW: Repetition seems to serve two functions in Winkler: it structures, and, as it were, beatifies certain images and their mode of interaction—I believe this is related to the effect of Catholicism, of the liturgy and church songs, on the author’s psyche in his youth; and it serves to impress upon the reader the intractable persistence of trauma. If no one notices this, then it’s pointless. At the same time, every language tolerates lexical and syntactical repetition differently. Kingsley Amis says that if you use the same word twice, it has a jarring effect because the reader may think you unaware of having done it, but if you say it three times, it is acceptable because the rhetorical intention is made plain. It’s a casual insight but one based in a deep acquaintance with the English language and its literature, and it’s the kind of thing I try to keep in mind. I don’t think, pace certain assertions of Nabokov to which he himself was rarely faithful, that one does any service to an author by preserving accuracy at the expense of eloquence.

LB: You’ve spoken to me, and I’m sure others, about how frustratingly unknown Josef Winkler’s writing is to the English-reading world. Unfortunately, this happens all too often with foreign authors––the translator has to at the same time take on the mantle of advocate to have his translation read. Has this happened to you? Have you found yourself taking on both roles?

AW: Undoubtedly. I decided to translate 'Wenn es soweit ist' on a whim, without the least notion of what trying to publish it would mean. It is difficult because most publishers, even small ones, won’t look at work submitted over the transom, but it’s not your book, so you can’t really pass it along to an agent. At the same time, many of the best-known fiction journals, their professed desire to see “innovative” fiction notwithstanding, are content to keep publishing the sort of zany, anecdotal yarns James Wood accurately denounces under the rubric “hysterical realism.” For a writer as unique and rebarbative as Winkler, there is far less room than there should be. I have been fortunate, though, in encountering fwriction : review, Asymptote, and the fiction editors at Brooklyn Rail as well as some book publishers that have given me the time of day. Also Petra Hardt, the foreign rights director at Suhrkamp, has been extremely supportive.

[fwriction]

Translator Adrian West's song selection—to accompany his translation of Josef Winkler's excerpt from Dorma, On the Shore of the Ganges—for fwriction : review’s Waffle-Rocking Playlist