A literary roundup
Rimbaud in Cork
ARTHUR RIMBAUD in Cork? It seemed so unlikely when John Montague's poem Rimbaud in Corkarrived that we asked the Irish poet, who himself lives part of the year in France, to elaborate .
"Rimbaud [1854-1891] joined the Dutch Army, and landed up in Java, one of their colonies. After three weeks of military training, he took to his heels, presumably gorging himself on wayside fruit as he journeyed to the port of Samarang. There he appears to have joined the crew of a small sailing ship, The Wandering Chief, sailing homewards with a cargo of sugar. In order to escape court martial, he disguised himself as an English sailor, called Edwin Holmes, who was paid less than the cabin boy. They sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, through a storm that had the crew on its knees. Ninety-nine days afterwards, the ship docked at Queenstown,'' says Montague (below).
Nothing is apparently known of Rimbaud's journey home from there. In Rimbaud in Cork, Montague imagines what might have happened if he had stayed the night in present-day Cork. "I was especially intrigued by how he would have reacted when he saw Bus Éireann signs to Charleville, his birthplace in Northern France,'' adds Montague, pointing out that quite a lot of French writers have spent time in Ireland including Michel Deon and Michel Houellebecq . "And there was the extraordinary pilgrimage of Antonin Artaud to Dublin, in search of the Bachall Íosa, or Staff of Christ. He also went to the Aran Islands and, not surprisingly, spent some time in a Dublin lunatic asylum.''
Moore Russian courtship
In August 1818, an official in the Imperial Russian Embassy in London sent some of the works of Thomas Moore to the court poet in St Petersburg. In the 1820s and 1830s, he was known to every literary Russian to the extent that in January 1821 , in Berlin, the Grand Duke Nicholas - later Nicholas 1 - took part in a tableau vivant of Lalla Rookh. All this is related in a slim bilingual edition, just published, of Moore's poems called Erin! The Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes. In his introduction, Irish poet Philip McDonagh, Irish Ambassador to Russia, makes comparisons between Moore and the Russian giant Pushkin and relates how some of the leaders of the revolutionary Dekabrist group translated Moore's work; one of them, MP Bestuzhev-Riumin, threw a translation of one of Moore's poems to his comrades in the prison square as a souvenir when he was being taken from his cell to hear his death sentence. Moore, says McDonagh, deserves to be placed alongside Irish composer John Field as a primary cultural link between Ireland and Russia .
Found in translation
A prize for young translators is a great way to help international writing reach a wider audience, and publisher Harvill Secker, with Waterstone’s, have launched one to celebrate 100 years of publishing in the field.
The annual £1,000 Young Translators' Prize will be presented to a new translator and will change language each year. In this inaugural year, it's Spanish, and entrants will be asked to translate El hachazo,a short story by the Argentine writer Matías Néspolo. His first novel, Seven Ways to Kill a Cat, will be published in English by Harvill Secker in 2012, and Argentina is the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair this autumn.
The prize is open to anyone, anywhere, aged 16 and 34. The winner will be announced in September. The judges are Margaret Jull Costa, translator of many Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago; author Nicholas Shakespeare; and editor Briony Everroad. The short story and entry details are at harvill- seckeryoungtranslatorsprize.com.
