Loose Leaves:Indian writer Anita Desai, who in 2006 became briefly better known as the mother of that year's Man Booker prize winner Kiran Desai, is coming to Ireland this spring to lecture at Trinity College Dublin.
Author of novels including Fasting, Feasting; Baumgartner's Bombay; and The Zigzag Way; she is also the author of a children's book, The Village by the Sea, which won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. Though she never won the Booker prize herself, Desai was shortlisted three times. She will be in Trinity to give the Hely-Hutchinson Memorial Lecture on April 8th. In 1976, Trinity celebrated the bicentenary of the foundation of the chairs of modern languages (French, German, Italian and Spanish), the earliest of their kind in the world. As part of the celebrations, the Earl of Donoughmore, the descendent of the provost of the college John Hely-Hutchinson, who founded the chairs, endowed a lecture in his ancestor's name to be given, in English, by a distinguished visiting scholar - in this case Desai.
The Best of the Booker
The organisers of the Man Booker Prize for fiction have announced that they will present a one-off award, The Best of the Booker, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prize. The Best of the Booker will honour the top overall novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded on April 22nd, 1969, and the public will decide.
Forty-one novelists have won the prize, because in 1974 and 1992 there were two winners. In 1974 Nadine Gordimer won with The Conservationistand Stanley Middleton with Holiday. In 1992, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patientshared the top spot with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. For The Best of the Booker, a panel of judges will select a shortlist of six novels. They are biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and John Mullan, professor of English at University College London. Their shortlist will be announced in May, and public voting will begin via the prize's website, www.themanbookerprize.com. The winner will be announced at the London Literature Festival in July.
Other celebrations to mark the anniversary include an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London telling the visual story of the prize, and The Booker at the Movies, a season in June at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London with films from Booker Prize-winning books and authors.
Glendinning says the judges are enjoying revisiting the now-classic novels that won the Booker long ago - as well as celebrated recent ones. "We look forward to hearing what voters think - and which, from our shortlist, they will judge the Best of the Booker."
Poetry in translation
It's been called the hidden art - the art of translation - about which the reader ideally knows little. A good translator will give us a text seamlessly, and glimpses into how it's done are rare. At the launch earlier this month at the Italian embassy in Dublin of Seamus Heaney - Poeta Dotto, a selection of the work of Seamus Heaney edited and translated by Italian scholar Gabriella Morisco, the veil was lifted a little when she spoke of translation as reading taken to its highest point. It was, she said, a reading that was more attentive but also more indiscrete because it penetrated the secret mechanisms of the poet's creative mind. But there were also moments when the translator became aware of his or her inadequacy, "of the impossibility, however hard he tries, to be not only the linguistic go-between but also the vehicle for conveying the complex intellectual and emotional world created by the poet".
Sometimes the translator felt a deep sense of frustration "because, as Maurice Blanchot says, he has experienced 'a constant and dangerous intimacy with something he can never possess'."
All that was left, said Morisco, was the choice to respect the original text as faithfully as possible; "And in my own case, since I am not a poet, not to attempt free interpretations but try to maintain the essence of the message. Although the contours of the translated text remain slightly hazy because it lives only on light reflected, the one consolation is that it has somehow been possible to transmit something of beauty by means of this form of 'minor art'."
Short-story writing workshop
Novelist and short-story writer Mary Morrissy, current Arts Council of Ireland Writer Fellow at the school of English in Trinity College Dublin, will be offering a free six-week short story writing workshop starting on April 2nd. Submissions are invited for places on the course, which will take place on Wednesdays from 7- 9pm. Samples of work, of 1,500 to 2,500 words, should be sent by post to: Writer Fellow's Workshop, Oscar Wilde Centre, School of English, Trinity College, 21 Westland Row, Dublin 2, by March 5th.