Riding against the lizard
ON THE NEED FOR ANGER NOW ‘Anger is the political sentiment par excellence. It brings out the qualities of the inadmissible, the intolerable. It is a refusal and a resistance that with one step goes beyond all that can be accomplished reasonably in order to open...
Spicebag and the Guards – art in Ireland
An artwork that does not contain nudity or blasphemy provokes public outrage? What the hell is going on? It’s rare for a piece of art to make a stir in public discourse and when it does it’s usually because it’s terrible – the famous Anna Livia sculpture in Dublin is...
The fashion for fascism: Review of two recent books on Italian fascism
Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator, by Paul Corner, Oxford University Press, 179 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-0192866646The Pope At War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini & Hitler, by David I Kertzer, Oxford University Press, 621 pp, £25,...
On the fascist attack on the Students of Florence
On Saturday 18th of February, a group of high school students, members of Collective Sum , peacefully occupying their school in protest at a variety of problems, were attacked by a group of fascists from an organisation called Azione Studentesca (Student Action) which...
First they came for the communists
Today is the International Day of Memory. We remember not just the six to eight million Jews killed by the Nazis but all of those who died in the gas-chambers and work camps, in the massacres, in the torture chambers. They included communists, socialists, anarchists,...
Translation: Gramsci, Buttigieg and James Joyce
Translator’s Introduction It is, I believe necessary to rescue Joyce from the industry he created. I don’t know of any other writer who who has given employment to so many scholars with the possible exception of Shakespeare, who has had a longer run at it. Joyce...
Pasolini and Me – remarks on translation for the centenary of Pasolini’s birth
Presented at Trinity College Dublin Homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini 04/November/2022 When I was invited to take part in homage to Pasolini I was initially reluctant because it was framed as a discussion of my translation - or more precisely, from my point of view, my...
Review: The Tailor Of Ulm
The Tailor of Ulm (Il Sarto Di Ulm) by Lucio Magri (translated by Patrick Camiller) Honeymooning in 1979 on a package holiday to the Hotel Alaska, Rimini (it’s surprising how attractive the word Alaska sounds on a hot July day in Italy), I became friends with a man...
Review: Marching on Rome – the return of the undead
Blood and Power, The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism by John Foot, Bloomsbury Publishing, 416 pp, £25, ISBN 13: 978-1408897942 ‘They haven’t gone away…’ In a recent article in The Guardian, John Foot suggested that the extreme right was about to win the general...
Translation: The Sirens of Ventotene
by Chiara Tagliaferri* Translated by William Wall Chiara Tagliaferri a Ventotene Imagining a prison is easy, we all have in mind what a cell looks like: bars on the window, a couple of cots (usually bunk beds), a small desk, a sink, a few posters hanging on the walls...