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 […]
“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 […]
“And so, it once happened that Nikolay Ivanovich found himself in Hotel Europe, in their restaurant. Nikolay Ivanovich sits at his table, and the table over from him is occupied by some foreigners, and they’re gobbling up apples. And that’s when Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself: ‘A curious thing,’ Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself, […]
“Applause to the mosquito – its blood-gorged pitch, Its trembling shadow, threaten the hunter with Rapture and prick of sorrow, once the battle is done And your combatant’s bitten the dust, filled with you.” From one of the three poems by Polina Barskova in B O D Y translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale. […]
“Better still if I begin with the heart of the matter. That we are poets, and that life has already maimed us quite a bit. At the hearing, I will say what I had told my boss while he was writing my last check: ‘When you read biographies of the greats, you come across mention […]
In The Nation there’s a thorough and fantastic article about Bulgarian writer and exiled dissident Georgi Markov titled “A Captivating Mind: How Georgi Markov became the truth-teller of Bulgaria’s communist era, and paid for it with his life.” Playwright, novelist, essayist and journalist, Markov was murdered on orders of the Bulgarian secret service in London […]
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