“So what happened to Uncle Ivan and Aunt Eva?” “I didn’t find out about that until later, from my parents. The house had burned to the ground that night. Their burnt bodies were found in the ashes.” “And had they been,” I hesitated before saying the word, “murdered?” – from Places That Are Not on […]
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Alex Cigale on Mariengof
Translator Alex Cigale has spent years working on bringing the “lyrical excesses” of Anatoly Mariengof’s Russian prose from his 1928 novella Cynics into English. In the latest Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y he offered up a sample of some of Mariengof’s shorter prose in “Aphorisms, Anecdotes, And Other Literary Trifles” and now […]
Anatoly Mariengof in B O D Y
“Of all things, I am most likely an epicurean. ‘Death has no bearing on us,’ Epicurus had said, “For when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we no longer exist.” And that is, roughly speaking, also my attitude toward ‘non-existence’ (to use the euphemistic philosophical term). But, when […]
Literary roundup: Polish books, anti-fascist and writing in Bulgaria
Culture.pl offers a listing of new Polish books being published in 2018, including novels from writers such as Olga Tokarczuk, Dorota Masłowska and Jerzy Pilch as well as a two-volume biography of the great Zbigniew Herbert among many others offerings. Tokarczuk has a few books translated into English, most recently the novel Flights, translated by […]
Hungarian Fiction Week in B O D Y
All this week B O D Y is featuring newly translated Hungarian fiction, starting with Sándor Jászberényi’s story, “Banana Split“, of a lurid, drunken, drugged night in Cairo that veers into the borders between the hallucinatory and magical realism. Then there’s the excerpt from Vilmos Csányi’s novel The Scent of Perfection, in which a young […]
Andrea Gullotta, curator of the exhibit Beauty in Hell
Beauty in Hell: Culture in the Gulag is an online exhibition at The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow on one of the Soviet Union’s earliest prison camps, Solovki. Recently, B O D Y published a poem by a former Solovki inmate Yury Kazarnovsky, “Tram“, and an example of some of the amazing cultural and […]
Balla in B O D Y
“The writer bought a literary magazine, leafed through it, and was gratified: he hadn’t submitted anything and none of his work had been published. A few weeks later the annual nominations for the national literary prize were announced: to his relief, he wasn’t nominated…” So begins Balla’s short story “Paper Planes“, translated from the Slovak […]
World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2017
World Literature Today has issued its list of the 75 notable translations of the year and it includes three books that were excerpted in B O D Y as well as numerous writers, translators and publishers whose work has previously appeared in the magazine’s pages. An excerpt of Balla’s In the Name of the Father […]
Yury Kazarnovsky in B O D Y
In 1927, Russian poet Yury Kazarnovsky was arrested along with 11 other students as part of what the Soviet authorities considered a subversive literary circle and was sent to the Solovki prison camp, generally considered the first Gulag. Despite its brutal hardships the camp had a cultural and intellectual life, among which is the literary […]
Interview with Aleksandar Gatalica
Serbian Fiction Week gets some context with an interview with novelist and translator from Ancient Greek Aleksander Gatalica, whose novel The Great War was excerpted in B O D Y back when it was published in 2014 in a translation by Will Firth. Gatalica talks about contemporary Serbian writers and the different generations, makes some […]
