Festival::Festival
I joined M. in attending the final day of the Sydney Writers Festival, going to hear a group of Australian and German poets for a reprise of their activities from last year’s Berlin Poetry Project, where they’d translated and performed each other’s work in pairs. Luke Davies, whose novel Candy we both admire, was one of the participants, and we ended up going home with his latest collection of poems, Totem, which is also excellent. I could have done without the German, of course, English-only dullard that I am, but the counterpoint between the German poets’ content and that of the Australians was fascinating. The Germans were either hip or overly erudite for the most part, whereas the Australians were more generally expansive, less despairing even when the topics included poverty and degraded lives. It would be tremendously interesting to hear more such pairings, although the excuse of translation wouldn’t necessarily be available. Paris vs. Sydney, New York vs. Melbourne, Brisbane vs. Beijing. Perhaps Giramondo could be induced to sponsor a series?