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That Szirtes lecture

George Szirtes’s TS Eliot lecture is now available online at The Poetry Library. The Paterson lecture he comments on can be read here.

4 replies on “That Szirtes lecture”

It was a good lecture. So was Paterson’s. Paterson was funnier, Szirtes more serious.

I emailed him a few days ago in appreciation of his translation of Montale’s “The Eel”, and sent him a link on a comparitive study of Paul Muldoon’s and Robert Lowell’s translations of the same poem. Well he actually emailed me back – a personal email, not just a form – to thank me for sending it, which is pretty good considering the number of emails he must get sent.

Good for him. He was quite interesting in the Q&A after the lecture about translation – not that I can remember what he said in detail. I was quite surprised, loosely on the subject, at the markedness of his accent – he was eight when he moved to England, which I would have guessed would be young enough to speak almost unaccented English. It gives poems a different flavour being read in another accent, somehow.

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