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Showing posts from October, 2020

On ‘The Plague’

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        On ‘The Plague’   Tony Judt  November 29, 2001 issue Albert Camus; drawing by David Levine Penguin Books has just published a new translation by Robin Buss of La Peste , by Albert Camus, and the text that follows is my introduction, written some months ago. Many readers will be familiar with its fable of the coming of the plague to the North African city of Oran in 194–, and the diverse ways in which the inhabitants respond to its devastating impact on their lives. Today, The Plague takes on fresh significance and a moving immediacy. Camus’s insistence on placing individual moral responsibility at the heart of all public choices cuts sharply across the comf

Speaking for Language

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       Speaking for Language J.M. Coetzee February 1, 1996 issue Reviewed: On Grief and Reason: Essays by Joseph Brodsky Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 412 pp., $24.00 Joseph Brodsky; drawing by David Levine Buy Print In 1986 Joseph Brodsky published Less than One , a book of essays. Some of the essays were translated from the Russian; others he wrote directly in English, showing that his command

Borges’s Dark Mirror

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     Borges’s Dark Mirror J.M. Coetzee October 22, 1998 issue Reviewed: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley Viking, 565 pp., $40.00 1. In 1961 the directors of six leading Western publishing houses (Gallimard, Einaudi, Rowohlt, Seix Barral, Grove, Weidenfeld and Nicolson) met on the Mediterranean island of Formentera to establish a literary p

The Prisoner of History

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    November 5, 2020 Current Issue The Prisoner of History August 14, 2014 issue Charles Simic It is hard for me to believe that I was bo