You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Poetry. Women's Studies. Essay. Translation Theory. Translated from the German by Sophie Seita. "This bi-floral or even tri-floral book of poems is for falselandy neighbouring nearspeakers who prefer to hold ear to phoneme to wit. Arranged according to the pleasures of a collaborative conversation between co-translating poets, sinuous between the structured palate and the muscular tongue, Subsisters coheres by means of a joyous principle of augmentation. Wolf and Seita have rendered authority moot; Value here is chosen conviviality. Lightness, charm and play clarify the discovery that all language is polylingual, all worth in shared joy only."--Lisa Robertson
"Gone, finito, The End, I say. A father who puts an end to it all before he wears down the whole family deserves more praise than damnation." Two sisters travel to Sofia--in a convoy of luxury limousines arranged by a fellow Bulgarian exile--to bury their less-than-beloved father. Like tourists, they are chauffeured by the ever-charming Ruben Apostoloff--one sister in the back seat, one in the passenger seat, one sharp-tongued and aggressive, the other polite and considerate. In a caustic voice, Apostoloff shows them the treasures of his beloved country: the peacock-eye pottery (which contains poisonous dye), the Black Sea coast (which is utterly destroyed), the architecture (a twentieth-century crime). His attempts to win them over seem doomed to fail, as the sisters' Bulgarian heritage is a heavy burden--their father, a successful doctor and melancholy immigrant, appears in their dreams still dragging the rope with which he hanged himself. An account of a daughter's bitterly funny reckoning with her father and his country, laden with linguistic wit and black humor, Apostoloff will introduce the unique voice of Sibylle Lewitscharoff to a new and eager audience.