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Zig Zag (Paperback)
Anthony Rudolf
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R301
R279
Discovery Miles 2 790
Save R22 (7%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Presenting a collection of poems that represent the author's
previous concerns, this compilation combines an interest in
autobiography, a return to the medium of poetry, a fascination with
documentary techniques, and a new exploration of fictional
possibilities. Humor and lyricism throughout enhance the
anthology's themes of memory, time, and loss.
Published under a pseudonym, A E Ellis, and appearing in 1958 to
considerable acclaim, The Rack is a novel about the ordeal of being
deathly ill. A young English student, Paul, is sent to a Swiss
sanatorium just after the end of the second world war. At a time
when effective medication for tuberculosis was unknown, Paul
undergoes an unimaginable regime of regimented medical
intervention, both physical and mental. His fellow patients fare no
better. Yet, as the poet Edwin Muir wrote in his original review in
the Observer: 'The Rack does not deal obviously with disease and
suffering; it describes, sometimes very amusingly, the life of the
sanatorium: the sardonic professional kindness of the doctors,
liable suddenly to break under pressure, the badness of the food,
the endless pre-occupation of the patients with their symptoms, and
the sexual promiscuity...Behind the book one has the impression of
an unusual and powerful mind.' Graham Greene considered it a
masterpiece; the Times Literary Supplement believed 'the book
exercises a complete fascination...a deeply impressive
performance', and Time and Tide hailed The Rack as '...terrific. To
read it is itself an experience.' Penelope Mortimer wrote: 'It is
often glibly said that a work of art is an experience - The Rack is
one of the rare instances of this actually being so. It is a book
which must, inevitably, have a permanent effect on the reader. In
this case the usual terms of praise become almost meaningless. So
powerful is Mr Ellis's inspiration, so driven by the urgent
necessity of expression, that one is not so much conscious of
having read a account of an ordeal as of having lived through two
years of unbearable physical and mental agony - and survived.' Long
out of print, the original Heinemann and Penguin editions cut out
some 60,000 words of the author's original text. Elliott &
Thompson's Gold Edition will restore the complete text to provide
today's reader with a chance to discover the definitive edition of
one of the great English novels of the last century.
Cultural Writing. Appearing in a revised edition ten years after
its first publication, Anthony Rudolf's ENGRAVED IN FLESH remains
the first book in any language on the work and life of Piotr
Rawicz, the author of one "wantonly brilliant novel," in the phrase
of Irving Howe. Angus Wilson is quoted on the cover of the original
UK translation (1964) of Blood From the Sky as finding it "fierce
in its impact . . . and often horrifyingly funny." Rudolf
campaigned long and hard to rescue the book from virtual oblivion
outside France; even in the author's adopted France, after critical
acclaim and the Prix Rivarol, the novel has not received the
attention it deserves. In 2003, forty years after BLOOD FROM THE
SKY first appeared in English, Yale University Press reissued the
unrevised original translation. The following year, Elliot and
Thompson republished the book in the UK in the revised translation
by Anthony Rudolf. ENGRAVED IN FLESH is the forth of five short
studies by Anthony Rudolf in a continuing series devoted to
literature and extreme situations.
For more than five decades Anthony Rudolf has been active as
translator, critic, editor, and publisher: all in all, an enabler
of writers and readers. His own poems come to him gradually, under
pressure of real themes and subjects, refined by the disciplines of
translation and co-translation. Reluctant to let a poem go, Rudolf
loves to inhabit the process of writing and re-writing.European
Hours represents a life's work severely curated. The poems, prose
texts, and prose poems which make the cut, from 1964 to 2016, are
diverse in form, and run parallel to his highly praised volumes of
memoirs.George Mackay Brown, reviewing Rudolf in the Scotsman,
noted his 'fine exact craftsmanship: no word or syllable wasted, so
that each image is stark and true'. Robin Skelton in the Malahat
Review spoke of his work as 'witty, precise, beautifully cadenced,
and courageously exploratory'. Reflecting on his own influences,
Rudolf mentions James Wright, Robert Creeley and Ian Hamilton early
on; and later, Central and East European poets including Paul
Celan, Miroslav Holub and Vasko Popa, as well as the American
Objectivists.
For Anthony Rudolf, reading is a profoundly serious and intense
activity, as well as a major source of pleasure and solace. At the
same time, it is always interrupted by day jobs, friendships,
politics, and, paradoxically, by the act of writing. All of this
comes together in "Silent Conversations: A Reader's Life", a canny
and insightful memoir of Rudolf's life in books. A quest for hope
in dark times, "Silent Conversations" captures Rudolf's inimitable
style and his own admitted tendency to digress - with invariably
fascinating and revealing results. Among the threads that
crisscross all the sections are fragmentary dialogues with a number
of interlocutors - including Paula Rego and Yves Bonnefoy, whom
Rudolf has been translating for nearly fifty years - that explore
the essentials of the life of a thoughtful and committed individual
in a troubled and frightening world. At once old-fashioned and
completely contemporary, Rudolf seeks in this work to share his
reflections with others through story and image. In this network of
voices, a labyrinth of collage and quotation come to life, doing
the work of analysis and critique (of himself and others), and
following threads of interest through and across its pages. With a
deft lyricism, a light touch, and a sharp wit, Rudolf provides a
detailed account of his passions and obsessions: memory and
mortality, painting and music, the fate of the earth, and many
other things that touch on his life as a reader and as a writer.
"Silent Conversations" is characterized by Rudolf's witty and
tender approach to life and literature. Notwithstanding his
lifelong need for mentors, including Octavio Paz, George Oppen, and
Primo Levi, Rudolf is very much his own man.
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Martin Ryle's Letter (Paperback)
Martin Ryle; Volume editing by Michael Rowan-Robinson; Michael Rowan-Robinson, Anthony Rudolf
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R65
Discovery Miles 650
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Prose (Paperback)
Yves Bonnefoy; Edited by Anthony Rudolf, Stephen Romer, John Naughton
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R925
R743
Discovery Miles 7 430
Save R182 (20%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal
essayist and thinker. This companion volume to Yves Bonnefoy: Poems
contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a
generous selection from all periods. In his art criticism, as in
his literary essays, Bonnefoy manages that rare thing: to impart
metaphysical urgency to each discreet encounter with a painting or
a poem, born of his constant quest for intensity, for 'presence'.
Whether he is examining an early Byzantine fresco, a Shakespeare
play, a Bernini angel, a drawing by Blake, a poem by Rimbaud, the
exigency, the high seriousness and the challenge is the same: to
affirm presence, and finitude, against all forms of life-sapping
conceptual thought. If they cannot always deliver ecstasy or hope,
the great poets, argues Bonnefoy, are pledged to 'intensity as
such', sustained by 'une mélancolie ardente'.
Journey Around My Flat is the fourth in a series of five memoirs.
Previous volumes are The Arithmetic of Memory (on growing up in
Hampstead Garden Suburb), Silent Conversations (where the author
draws on the books in his library to generate thoughts about
reading and re-reading) and A Vanished Hand (a short illustrated
account of his long-lost autograph album from the 1950s). The final
volume is a work-in-progress: In the Picture: Office Hours at the
Studio of Paula Rego, an account of the author's ongoing close
association with the painter since the two first met in 1996.
Journey Around My Flat continues his practice - in the footsteps of
Georges Perec and other French writers - of using objects to
trigger memories. Rudolf takes the reader on a guided tour of each
room in the North London flat, where he has lived for forty years,
and includes a generous supply of photos. The book - running
parallel to Silent Conversations - is a chronological successor to
The Arithmetic of Memory, which ended with the author about to
leave for university.
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Break of Noon - Partage de midi (Paperback)
Paul Claudel; Edited by Anthony Rudolf; Translated by Jonathan Griffin, John Naughton, David Furlong, …
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R514
R445
Discovery Miles 4 450
Save R69 (13%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Break of Noon (Partage de midi) is a collaborative attempt, edited
by Anthony Rudolf, at preparing an English-language edition of Paul
Claudel's remarkable and complex play, an unstable text which gave
Claudel many problems throughout his life. These are explored in
essays by David Furlong of Exchange Theatre in London, which put on
a production of the play in 2018 and John Naughton, a leading
authority on Claudel. The critical apparatus is completed by the
late Susannah York's essay on her own involvement with the play and
recounts her interaction with her fellow translator, Jonathan
Griffin. The instability of this strange and compelling work in its
various original versions is mirrored by the three critical essays
in the present work, which do not always see eye to eye. It is
thirty years since Jonathan Griffin died and nearly fifty years
since Pierre Rouve's Ipswich production of Jonathan's translation,
starring Ben Kingsley and Annie Firbank.
On 13 November 1943, Jerzy Feliks Urman (known as Jerzyk) killed
himself, thinking the Gestapo had arrived. He was eleven and a
half. He and his family were in hiding in Drohobycz, during the
German occupation of East Galicia, now western Ukraine. A year
earlier the family had quit Stanislawow in the wake of brutal
round-ups and deportations of Jews. The boy's parents, uncle, and
grandmother survived the war. He kept a diary and jottings during
the two months before he died. Anthony Rudolf, Jerzyk's second
cousin once removed, published these texts in 1991 in a translation
made from a family typescript of the original. The recent discovery
of the diary of Sophie Urman, Jerzyk's mother, led Rudolf to
commission a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She has also
revised the earlier translation of Jerzyk's own diary after
comparing the typescript and the original manuscript, which is now
in Rudolf 's possession. The editor has written new introductions
and made extensive annotations in an attempt to clarify complex and
troubling issues.Drawing attention to specific remarks and
episodes, he interprets the death of Jerzyk - the only child
suicide in the extensive archive at Yad Vashem - not only as the
tragic action of a child under pressure but also as a noble and
heroic act. Likewise, the keeping of a diary, as with Anne Frank
and other children in hiding, was a form of defiance, an example of
what has come to be called spiritual or cultural resistance. The
book also contains two more texts by Sophie, testimonies by
Jerzyk's father and uncle, maps and family photographs. It ends
with Rudolf 's account of the tragic death of Mark Rothstein,
another second cousin. Mark was a few months younger than Jerzyk
when he died in the East End of London on 27 March 1945, during the
last day of the V2 bombing raids.
A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album is a postscript to Anthony
Rudolf's memoir of childhood, The Arithmetic of Memory (1999) and
accompanies the newly published Silent Conversations: A Reader's
Life. The autograph album, testimony to Rudolf's teenage years, was
presumed lost for thirty years until it emerged, energies intact,
beneath a pile of books in the author's loft. Describing the
circumstances of each autograph, he is led down unexpected trails,
such as a visit to Bushey Jewish Cemetery, where he explores the
wording on Alma Cogan's tombstone, only a few yards from that of
the author's parents. All the autographs are reproduced, among them
Rudolf's summer hero, Denis Compton, and his winter hero Billy
Wright. A high point is the hilarious account of the longest table
tennis point ever played, triggered by the autograph of Alex
Ehrlich. In addition to these three memoirs, Anthony Rudolf, born
in London in 1942, has written several other books, most recently,
Zigzag (2010), a volume of poetry and related prose. His writings
include literary and art criticism, short stories under the
narrative influence of Paula Rego and poetry translations from
French and Russian. An occasional broad-caster, he was visiting
lecturer in Arts and Humanities at London Metropolitan University
and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Universities of Hertfordshire
and Westminster. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
and of the English Association, and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts
et des Lettres.
Nonfiction. Memoir. Literary Criticism. WINE FROM TWO GLASSES is a
quasi-autobiographical meditation, a literary work, rather than a
scholarly lecture, especially in this elaborated and revised
printed version. Among other things, it tells the story behind the
story of the author's cousin, who wrote a diary for a few weeks
before committing suicide in Nazi-occupied West Ukraine in 1943. It
explores the links between documentary and "a rhetoric to think
atrocity." The author engages with writers such as George Oppen and
Vaclav Havel, Primo Levi and Paul Celan, and the filmmaker Claude
Lanzmann, and examines private and public concerns in the
post-Auschwitz and post-Hiroshima world.
In A Time to Speak Out, a collection of strong Jewish voices come
together to explore some of the most challenging issues facing
diaspora Jews. With articles on such topics as international law,
the Holocaust, varieties of Zionism, self-hatred, the multiplicity
of Jewish identities, and human rights, these essays provide
powerful evidence of the vitality of independent Jewish opinion as
well as demonstrating that criticism of Israel has a crucial role
to play in the continuing history of a Jewish concern for social
justice. At once sober and radical, A Time To Speak Out reclaims an
often intemperate debate for those both inside and outside Israel
who prefer to confront uncomfortable truths. Nearly all
contributors were associated with the Independent Jewish Voices
declaration which, when launched in Britain in 2007, opened a
floodgate of responses. Independent Jewish Voices is a group of
Jews in Britain from diverse backgrounds, occupations and
affiliations who have in common a strong commitment to social
justice and universal human rights.
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