The Other Worlds of Teffi
An excerpt and translation notes from a new collection of short stories. May 2, 2021
This Translation by Robert Chandler
Teffi is difficult to translate. I have said a little in the foreword about her Pushkinian grace and deft use of repetition. She also makes the most of two freedoms the freedom to omit words and an extreme freedom of word order that are available only in a highly inflected language like Russian or Latin. And the precision of her psychological understanding, visual descriptions, and references to details of nineteenth-century Russian life leaves a translator with no room to maneuver.
Posted by Culture Is Life |
Tuesday 6 October 2020, 05:45 PM (AEDT) Archie Roach AM, music legend and Stolen Generations survivor, is one of Australia’s most powerful songwriters and storytellers. His deeply personal song stories and more recently his books, Tell Me Why and Took the Children Away, shed light on the devastating government policies that still impact thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their families. The Archie Roach Stolen Generations resources were created during COVID-19 by Culture Is Life, in collaboration with the Archie Roach Foundation, to honour the 30th anniversary of Took the Children Away from Uncle Archie’s multi-award-winning 1990 debut album Charcoal Lane.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize
The critics’ top eight choices based on Christmas selections in national newspapers, the London Evening Standard, the TLS, The Spectator and the New Statesman. Plus, we take a look at some of the other best books which were released in 2020.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
The winner of this year’s Booker Prize is a tale of poverty, addiction and abuse set in and around Glasgow in the 1980s. Shuggie Bain’s mother is an alcoholic; his father, a violent, fitfully present taxi driver. As family members drift away, he becomes his mother’s sole carer – and it is their relationship that forms the novel’s emotional core. First-time author Douglas Stuart was praised for his poetic, slang-studded prose, and for his ability to find good in his characters, no matter how despicable their behaviour. Some critics, however, thought the book would have benefited from more rigorous editing.