Sunday, 31 August 2008
Sunday Night is...
...The opening shots of Béla Tarr's action-packed Satantango, the book by László Krasznahorkai that I am currently translating.
Not many people know that this is an out-take from Mamma Mia. What you may think is a cow mooing is in fact Pierce Brosnan's voice warm-up. Track's just a little slow. Meryl Streep is about to burst into Dancing Queen. She's third cow on right, next to Julie Walters, about 7'33" in. Well worth the wait. A Béla Tarr-Phyllida Lloyd co-production
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5 comments:
A very beautiful sequence. Brings me back to my gradparents' farm.
It is beautiful indeed. Have you seen The Werckmeister Harmonies by Tarr? Quite stunning. The film is based on parts of another book by Krasznahorkai that I translated with the English title, The Melancholy of Resistance.
No, I haven't seen Werckmeister yet. Did make it through Damnation, but was either too drunk or in the wrong mood, forget which.
A Hungarian once corrected me when I spoke his name from left to right. So do they call you 'Szirtes George' there?
A complicated question, but you have the order right. In Hungary, if we had stayed, they would be calling me Szirtes Gábor (Gábor, or Gabriel, that being my first given name), but since we didn't stay they tend to call me Szirtes György (George, my second given name.)
Werckmeister is well worth it. There is even quite violent action in it. You have to wait a bit though. What Tarr does is build-ups. The build-ups are, in effect, the point of the film.
Hello, mr Szirtes. I'm halfway through "The Melancholy of Resistance", and it's quite astonishing, probably the best work of fiction of the last few decades I've read (next to Thomas Bernhard's novels).
I just saw this link to the Almost Island on a blog by an indian friend who has a great taste for literature, marcelproust.blogspot.com, and I wonder when Sátántangó (hope I got those diacritics right) is going to be published and by whom. Have you finished translating it, sir? Also, are there any plans to publish other of his fiction in English? (I read this review of his latest short stories book on hlu.hu, it seems extraordinary).
Sorry for the poor English, I'm writing from Brazil.
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