Our bestest friends, Minimalbooks, an on-line journal going the other way – publishing lots of English language writing in Polish translation, as well as some fabulous Polish language writing in the original, has just revamped.
Cleaner and sharper than before, pay them constant visits…
click on the image to go there…
OFF_EDS
Frankfurt, Flughafen
I
The restaurant is rather empty. The blank tables, their very centres, set with salt and pepper. White Chinese women, with the air of porcelain dolls, help themselves to heaped plates of colourful food from the buffet.
II
White sausage-shaped planes are laid out in even rows, each one labelled with a brightly coloured rudder. Those waiting in the departure lounge from time to time cast hungry looks their way.
Poems
The writing of a poem is the shielding of uttered words (words with simple meanings) with additional dependencies: phonetic links, semantic relativities, visual connections – we protect them, make access more difficult, in the understanding that we are no longer in Eden, and therefore words should not go naked either. Not to write poetry means: to behave as if one were still in Eden.
…
Marek K went to the Bedroom Bar in Shoreditch yesterday, met a whole heap of young, talented, keen2create Poles.
If all goes well, OFF_ will be collaborating with PdC on monthly live events… Here is a quote from their (soon to be rebuilt) website;
After a very successful Discussion Forum held at the Guernica Space, Whitechapel Gallery in London Polish deConstruction is in motion of planning an exciting year of events. With the new committee on board PdC is also in a process of uplifting its website so watch this space.
For regular updates on our progress and upcoming events sign up to our newsletter. Alternatively you can find us on Facebook.
From January 2010 PolishdeConstruction returns with its informal monthly meetings. All of you who love to chat about art join us in a mix of vibrant conversation and some edgy jazz.
Such sweet October. Leaves the shade of mud, rain, dried out spit.
As if today decay started a sequence – death’s lining.
It seems last night the river broke its banks, the wind tore up the rails.
Christopher Reid wins Costa book prize and picks up £30,000 prize
and huge increase in readership for A Scattering –
which has sold less than 1,000 copies
courtesy of The Guardian
Please visit our Multimedia section for a selection of photos from our recent filming trip around Poland…
Samuel Johnson remarked that “a translator is to be like his author, it is not
his business to excel him” — and there is something in this.
To convey the writings of other languages is a noble and necessary art -
an article in recent Times…
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First editorial movie meeting of the year… Lilian in the directorial seat, 
Marek script advising – our task to edit 16 hours of footage from our trip right across Poland back in October if last year in time for the launch in March.
The film covers our meetings with the five Polish authors in our OFF_ANTHOLOGIA #1 and shows Lilian, Marek and Sam stumbling across 7 cities in 7 days, trying to discover, and film, the heart of this fascinating land…
Hence the working title – Through a Grey Zone…
We carry ripe poppy heads. So many violets, bunched in hand.
Whispering hourglasses sift through us at the tail end of summer.
A trolley vanishes behind the mound. The battered road hammers downhill.
Dogs drag bones down back roads. Sniff the tibiae of tree roots.
poetry review by Marek Kazmierski
If you don’t already know about Melissa Mann – read about her here – regular visitors to these e-pages should, so I won’t labour the introduction. Her latest collection of poems, Baby I’m Ready To Go, has recently been published by Grievous Jones Press. It’s founder David Oprava has gone on record as saying “The Beats are dead and no one has stepped up”. Big words from a big man, who opened the recent launch of the first three Grevious Jones titles at the Betsey Trotwood talking about “voices which needed to be heard” and all that visionary propaganda I do not want to hear but see from publishers (especially those who print and bind their own writing). Readings from the three GJ authors on offer that night proved to be a wonderfully mixed bag;
– panicked laughter racing through confessionals of rape and personal rebellion
– dull rendering of misogynistic ramblings which should never have troubled ink to page
– perfectly introduced, almost perfectly formed poems of love and its multi-layered lessons
read more here…
“There is one problem with the myth about pirates bringing literature to the masses:
street-level vendors tend to congregate in the same middle and upper-class neighborhoods
where you find the bookstores. Their clients are people with money. One critic calls it
a cultural problem: “The same people who would never consider buying fake whisky
think nothing of buying a pirated book. There’s no respect for intellectual production
in this country.”
courtesy of today’s Guardian… click on the image to see/read more and come back later in the week
to check out OFF_VIDEO interview with John Freeman, the Editor of GRANTA
…
…have come to be accurate. We’re OFF_ again!
new gallery showing some highlights from OFF_2009
Evening time. Workers streaming out of factories and workshops, vanishing somewhere in empty space. The chill of rotting leaves slowly envelopes all. Before us once more the vast and rather inconsequential mystery of life playing itself out – slowly seeping through everything.
Icy silence, black abandoned trees, grey empty parks, hollow streets, the smell of chimney smoke, alleys abandoned and extinguished, littered with leaves. The light cool already, slowly departing, so unlike that which fully warms in July. Now is time to put on a thick sweater, a woollen scarf and hole up somewhere far from people. Reading books, firing up the stove, taking long walks in deserted parks, studying this slow and silent provincial life; shrunken women wandering through the dusk after work, shopkeepers noticing and with some ever so subtle gestures letting us know they too sense the same melancholy and the cool, ancient sadness, in spite of their inherent coarseness. Read the rest of this entry »
London snow-bound, perfect for working on the website. Launch date nearing – Wed the 13th be our lucky lady tonight
At dawn
we emerge
from our cocoons
three hundred and sixty-five
times a year
not counting leap years
or periods of depression
In the evening Read the rest of this entry »
Claudia Roth Pierpont on the Arabic novel in translation.
What drove them to come here, among the tables
of the station’s chrome and coarse design
with its foreign lexis (“latte”, “donat”, “mocha”)
and apparent comfort? What important holiday –
granddaughter’s first communion, godson’s wedding? –
drew them from their apartment by bob and cap,
tossed them from one ticket office to the next
and had their green valise of ordinary things
rumble across the Central Station’s slabs?
