Search Results

“... Little frogs why don’t I hear you any more? This is your time of the year. It was your custom to croak. All through the night, the throb. Spellbound, repetitive, too, I was in the house, enslaved. A frog should croak in deep water. Your creek was dry, you were frogs, not princes, I was never a slave. Where are your needling, primordial contradictions? I heard them ...”

“... Now the dead button does not stick, Where should we put it? The rock face We hit, propellers feathering, off the map, Provided our skeletons, but first Sorrow, deep, no news, a lacuna cut out In the air. Twenty-six I was, ships below. Our bombs away we headed for home. No home. Told it was under attack, we Deviated, where to, beneath us brown Rice-paddies, we supposed, then up Soaring toward those mountain temples Ancient painters faintly inked in ...”

“... 1 Now they stand quite still on level doorsteps, Outside the Drug Store and the Post Office. A white sky, two buildings underneath it, Outside the buildings half a dozen people. Across the dust like dice the buildings rolled, Stopped under the white sky. Soon the people prised them open, clambered out. Here at last. Here, they said, is Dorrance. 2 Stiff, like effigies, almost, Made of language; speaking The people came to be real for one another ...”

“... Relatives with Latin names faces of hide and plume hands of leather and horn eyes like glass you can see through to the depth of evolution where the simple feelings live fear and longing old and dark shadows Your gaze comes back from there changed by the journey strange it looks at you as if you had no part in it now ...”

“... Christopher Middleton​ hated New York. Among the things he particularly disliked, I suspect, is New York’s position as a cultural bazaar, where reputations are bought, sold and traded, with the attendant buzz of speculation. He was incapable of schmoozing, and his career suffered accordingly. New York’s greatest draw, people action and brute energy, would have been lost on him ...”

“... as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humoured, sweet Beckett.’ Christopher Middleton writes: ‘Well before the 1920s, the text for Walser is a non-thing, as much so as a Cubist guitar or Magritte’s apple (“Ceci n’est pas une pomme”).’* Other comparisons include the composer Satie, the painter Rousseau, the ...”

“... fascinating literature about the act and art of translation, often described metaphorically, as by Christopher Middleton: ‘The translator has to imagine his way on the tentacles of language through to the bedrock sea bottom of the imagination of his author.’ Some translators, like Middleton, are poets, most are ...”

“... leaves England for America as, conceptually, nowhere. Emigrating to Texas in the early Sixties, Christopher Middleton seems to have projected such a dissolution. Among the ‘limestone belts’ and ‘miles of scrub’ he sought ‘to move once, / free, of himself, into some few things’. Without doubting the material persistence of creativity ...”

“... would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I have taken the full measure, or anything like it, of Middleton’s Carminalenia, an intensely difficult collection about as far removed from ‘mainstream’ English poetry as it’s possible to be and yet remain, in part at least, accessible. I say ‘in part at least’, but the fact is that ...”

“... illness. Until recently, aside from a pioneering selection of stories assembled by the translator Christopher Middleton in 1982, his work has barely been available in English. But now, thanks to a steady accumulation of volumes from New York Review Books, and a gifted group of translators willing to wrestle with the often fiendish difficulties of his ...”

“... themselves than as furnishing the perfect polemical points de repère; over the years the poems of Christopher Middleton, of J.H. Prynne, and of C.H. Sisson, have all found themselves not so much constituting the grounds of Davie’s argument as figuring in it. But Milosz is too stubborn and faceted to be functionalised, even in the most high-minded ...”

“... historian really sees a pure narrative before him. III Poems is a generous selection from five of Christopher Middleton’s books of poetry: Torso 3 (1962), Nonsequences (1965), Our Flowers – Nice Bones (1969), The Lonely Suppers of W.V. Balloon (1975) and Carminalenia (1980). There are also 11 new poems. ‘Old Man, Looking South’ is slightly ...”

“... After thirty years teaching German literature and writing radio plays, my father suddenly began to write fiction. Our Conquest was his fifth book in five years, and the second to be translated into English. (He has since published three others in Germany). The sense of the possessive in the title is objective: it is we who have been conquered. The book plays for roughly the first 24 hours of peace in a small town in Germany, on a Wednesday in May 1945; and yet, as we shall see, and as the translation has it, a little fortuitously, because the word is Ruhe (‘quiet’), ‘there’s never a moment’s peace in our town ...”

“... one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his work: Fulcrum, Oasis Books, Pig Press, Galloping Dog, Paladin, Slow Dancer, North and South, Leafe ...”

“... accommodations: J.B. Leishman rendered many of the odes into graceful Alcaics and Asclepiads; Christopher Middleton and David Constantine, in contrast, resorted to looser paraphrases. Hamburger takes the more challenging route – with considerable success. The opening lines of ‘Bread and Wine’ catch the rhythm and flow of Hölderlin’s ...”