An Interview with Gregor Von Rezzori [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next focus on Gregor Von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol, we dug up this interview with Von Rezzori that appeared in BOMB magazine way back in 1988. Bruce Wolmer: I’m tempted to begin by asking the question interviewers on French TV like to pose: “Gregor von Rezzori, _qui ...
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Interns–They Grow Up Too Fast
Back in the tumultuous summer of 2009, Timothy Nassau was an intern here at Open Letter. He read some manuscripts, he packed some orders, he listened to a variety of rants, wrote a few blog posts and reviews, and returned to Brown University a bit wiser and with ambition in his heart. Fast-forward two years, and young ...
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The Ermine of Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next selection is The Ermine of Czernopol, the first in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical works by Gregor von Rezzori (The Snows of Yesteryear, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite), all of which are available from New York Review Books. We chose this book because of its unique and revealing perspective: von ...
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Job
Job, recently published by the consistently incredible Archipelago Press in a new translation by Ross Benjamin, is the first, and still only, book by Joseph Roth—a household-canon-grade writer in Europe—I have read. (I did have to get this review out in a timely fashion, and his other, more infamous masterpiece, ...
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Interview with Alberto Moravia [Read This Next]
To finish off this week’s Read This Next feature on Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, here’s an interview from the Paris Review with the man himself: Interviewer: You write, then—? Moravia: I write simply to amuse myself; I write to entertain others and—and, well, to express myself. One has ...
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Klagenfurt Update: Ernst Willner and More
In addition to Leif Randt’s Ernst Willner prize, the Festival of German-Language Literature has also announced its Ingeborg Bachmann, Kelag, 3sat, and for the first time ever, Audience Award for its submissions of new German literature. The Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, one of the most prestigious that the Festival awards, ...
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Two Friends
One of the beautiful things about translation, to my mind, is that it polemicizes the easy notion of the complete and whole work of art, of the perfect and sacred original. Translation is a subjective reading, a series of choices made by an individual with their own background, experience and politics. It’s a common adage ...
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