Thursday, March 10, 2022

Briefly Noted

Some news items of potential interest to readers of this space.
The translator Edmund Keeley has died. Known for his versions of the work of modern Greek poets like Yannis Ritsos, George Seferis, and C. P. Cavafy, he taught for many years at Princeton University, where he directed the creative writing program. The New York Times has an obituary.

Musician and songwriter Peter Case is the subject of a new documentary by Fred Parnes entitled A Million Miles Away, which is premiering at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this month. No word yet on wider distribution.

Hayao Miyazaki's 1983 graphic novel Shuna no tabi (Shuna's Journey) will finally have an authorized English translation when it is published this fall by First Second Books. The translator is Alex Dudok de Wit. A news report can be read here.

3 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

CNN recently had a piece about the widespread decline of university support for literary journals:

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/the-believer-literary-magazines-closing-down-struggling-cec/index.html

It feels like a world is disappearing.

Chris said...

Michael,

Thanks for that article. I have mixed feelings about having colleges subsidize general-interest literary magazines, not because I think it's not a good thing for colleges to do (and they've done it for a long time) but because I think it's important to the magazines for them to be able to support themselves. Sponsorship, I think, poses a risk of encouraging sameness or safeness. Having said that, the fact is that in today's market few literary magazines, at least print literary magazines, are able to stand alone without support from a wealthy patron of one kind or another, and with something as ambitious as Conjunctions it would be inconceivable. It's somewhat akin, I suspect, to the situation with jazz. Universities can, and should, support jazz education, but at the same time I suspect that a vital connection between the public and the musicians is being lost.

Chris said...

Bard has now rethought its decision, so Conjunctions is apparently safe for now.