Translations

Twentieth Century Australian Poetry edited by Yasuko Claremont

September 1986, no. 84

Written in Japanese, this is an introduction to Australian people through Australian poetry. Yasuko Claremont is a long-time Japanese resident in Australia who studied Australian literature at Sydney University. Finding unacceptable the image, widely-propagated among the Japanese, of ‘jolly Australians who do not work as hard as the Japanese,’ she wrote this book to help the Japanese ‘get to the heart of the Australians,’ which, she thinks, can be done effectively through reading Australian poems in the language of the Australians.

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The Australian Stage edited by Harold Love & Reverses by Marcus Clarke, edited by Dennis Davison

by Helen Thomson •

May 1986, no. 80

Helen Thomson reviews 'The Australian Stage' edited by Harold Love, 'Reverses' by Marcus Clarke, and 'Les Emigres aux Terres Australes' by Citizen Gamas, translated and edited by Patricia Clancy

The Australian Stage represents an interesting intersection between the academic world and the creative arts, between the long perspective of the historian, and the ephemerality of theatre performances. Its methodology is academic; it proceeds from an examination of documents, of written records of an art form only one aspect of which we think of as being written, the actual texts of plays. However, these are not the documents in question (although some bibliographical information about the plays is also included); rather it is the responses to performances, particularly reviews, written reminiscences, playbills, newspaper reports, which provide, collectively, the material for a historical survey of theatre in Australia.

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Aesychlus: The Oresteian trilogy: A theatre version by Rush Rehm

by Dennis Pryor •

June 1979, no. 11

Aeschylus, they say, was killed when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a smooth, shell-cracking rock, dropped a tortoise on him. Ever since then translators have been dropping translations on the head of his plays with comparably fatal results.

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The Mysterious Tales of Ivan Turgenev edited by Robert Dessaix

by Judith Armstrong •

February–March 1980, no. 18

Judith Armstrong reviews 'The Mysterious Tales of Ivan Turgenev' edited and translated by Robert Dessaix

This volume of stories adds to the spate of books by or about Turgenev that have appeared recently yet it cannot be said to be redundant, as it provides an English version of five novellas not readily available in a collected form. Since the translator’s argument rests on the importance of the frequently neglected later part of Turgenev’s oeuvre (i.e. the shorter works appearing after the major novels) to a true understanding of Turgenev’s philosophical and spiritual history, then obviously the English-speaking world must have access to it, and they should be pleased to make the acquaintance of this accurate and easy translation.

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