The finalists for the translation category of the Some Blind Alleys Writing Competition have been chosen. They are:
Inma Lara-Jáen, From One Hundred Bottles in the Wall by Ena Lucía Portela
Keith Payne, “First Love” by Victor Balcells Matas
Nora Butler, “The Crooked Hat” by Kurt Tucholsky
Congratulations to the finalists, and thanks to all who entered.
The finalists for the short story category have been chosen, and the stories are being printed and sent to the judge, Ed O’Loughlin. The finalists are:
Adrian Duncan
“The Only Woman I Can Say for Certain I Satisfied”
Cathy Sweeney
“The Coin Machine”
Justin Kidd
“Is this regression? Or, Break-up break-down break-dance breakfast: mental notes, Or, A lounge in space 193″
Congratulations to the finalists, and thanks to all who entered.
Identifying three finalists from a large pool of good work is never easy, and this is further complicated in the category of translation, where multiple factors are at play.
To pick three finalists in the essay category, the complicating factor has been that – and it is an old cliché – there are lots of worthy finalists. Yet the decision crystallizes with every read – in part because the very best get better each time, while the others plateau on the fifth or sixth read. But even that is pretty good – considering the fact that a lot of what you read out there can barely be read once.
Judging translations in multiple languages and from different periods – in this case, from Pushkin to Lucía Portela – is nearly so difficult that one might call it impossible. I submit that it was always going to be impossible, but there are ways to try and be as transparent and fair as possible about committing an injustice.
There are seven longlisted translators. Here are the names again, with links to those that have been published already:
The first thing you must throw out is the quality of originals. I don’t think there is anyone on earth who would reasonably argue that an excerpt from Lucía Portela’s One Hundred Bottles in the Wall, for example, can match Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades” – the most famous story every written.
Today’s translation of the draft prefaces of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil is a showcase of 1) Baudelaire’s lasting ability to persuade us that what we call evil is beauty and 2) Allyson Dowling’s considerable talent as a translator. It’s also an expression of a desire to encourage submissions from writers and translators and visual artists who would like to create some havoc.
There is, in Irish letters, a pervasive fear of committing offense – in writing and in the public opinions of authors. No literature of a time or place has ever been less exciting, except for maybe New York in the late 1990s. One finds very little evidence of ruthlessness here.
This is, I think, not the case in visual art. Yet the intent to commit offense often falls flat when the offense itself is not an intent to extract beauty from the vulgarity or honesty or filth that causes offense. Like everything, it’s a fine line.
I received a press release this weekend from Exchange Dublin about an upcoming evening of stand-up comedy, spoken word, etc. Spoken word, I had presumed, was kind of like stonewashed jeans, but I have gotten old now and perhaps stonewashed jeans are back in.
I am sort of mildly fascinated by Exchange Dublin, for a few reasons. I feel very old and tired and cynical, and these people are young and full of enthusiasm and, it increasingly seems, one of the better-organized arts bodies on the island.
The evening, part of Exchange Words – the literary satellite of Exchange Dublin – will feature a variety of acts. And even though I believe spoken word and stand-up are the same thing (except stand-up comedians want people to laugh), and even though I fundamentally believe that alcohol is required at all literary events, it’s good to see that the talking and debate and public meetings have given way to production.
I hope that amid what appears to be a spirit of inclusion, collaboration, belonging, sobriety, and organization, there is also some violence, some character assassination, some filth, degradation, and chaos.
Preface
France is going through a vulgar phase. Paris, the heart and power of universal stupidity. In spite of Moliere and Beranger, one would never have thought that France would go so far in the name of Progress. -Questions of art, terrae incognitae. The great man is a fool.
My book may have done some good. This doesn’t cause me distress. It may have done harm. This doesn’t make me rejoice.
The aim of poetry. This book was not written for my wives, my daughters or my sisters.
I have been accused of all the crimes I am telling you about. Amusement of hatred and scorn. The elegiac is sentimental twaddle. Et verbum Caro factum est. – Yet the poet has no part to play in that. Otherwise, he would be a mere mortal.
The devil. Original sin. Virtuous man. If desired, you could be the Tyrant’s favourite; it is harder to love God than to believe in him. For the people of this century, however, it is harder to believe in the Devil than to love him. Everyone serves him and no one believes it. The Devil’s sublime subtlety.
Continue reading ‘Draft prefaces for The Flowers Of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire’
It’s the Longlist!
You’re nothing in this world without a longlist. So here’s mine. Originally I had planned to just announce the finalists, but I saw lots of exceptional work, particularly in translation and essays, and I wanted to acknowledge it. Congratulations to all those on the longlist.
Also, thanks to everyone for submitting. There were just under 250 submissions in total across the three categories, and it was a real pleasure to read absolutely everything. The finalists – three in each category – will be announced later this week.
Short Story
Adrian Duncan, “The Only Woman I Can Say for Certain I Satisfied”
Bryan Butler, “The Duel”
Cathy Sweeney, “The Coin Machine”
Justin Kidd, “Is this Regression?…”
Patricia Holmes, “Santa”
Translation
Allyson Dowling, Draft Prefaces of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil
Gabriela Ailenei, From “Three Solutions” by Nicolae Steinhardt
Inma Lara-Jáen, From One Hundred Bottles in the Wall by Ena Lucía Portela
Keith Payne, “First Love” by Victor Balcells Matas
Nora Butler, “The Crooked Hat” by Kurt Tucholsky
Patricia González Bermúdez, From Mist by Miguel de Unamuno
Maria Elner, From “The Queen of Spades” by Alexander Pushkin
Essay
Adrian Duncan, “Shapes I Know”
Bairbre Guilfoyle, “Ashram”
Barbara Mogerley, “On Parrots”
Barbara Mogerley, “On Peace”
Cathy Sweeney, “What the Fuck Are you Doing in Arizona?”
Donald Mahoney, “The Death of Johnny Massacre”
Gabriela Ailenei, “Reading Max Blecher”
Helen Chandler, “Hook me up to the National Grid…”
Helen Chandler, “A Month in the Life..”
Helen Crawford, “Airport”
Karl O’Neill, “A Trip to the Soviet Union”
Susan Leahy, “The Hall Had a Thousand Windows”
Theresa Barnett, “On Discarded Shells”
There are three spots still available in the Creative Writing 1 course that starts September 22. Have some fun, get serious and helpful criticism (the kind you won’t get in any other creative writing course), meet some new people, go for drinks, read the best stuff ever written, improve as writers, and change the way you think about literature.
If you have any questions, email workshops [ at ] someblindalleys.com.
…It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. -TS Eliot
About a hundred new stories and a dozen essays arrived through the online submissions form last night, and a handful of translations. So, a huge thanks to everyone for the interest in the competition.
Traffic this week has been high – every day has been a new record.
Here’s my plan for the weekend and early next week:
My priority is to identify the finalists as soon as possible. I’ll be reading everything, doing a mental shortlist, reading the shortlist again, then identifying three submissions as the finalists in each category.
I can already see this is going to involve some difficult decision-making. But since I will publish everything that I like, please don’t be disheartened if your piece is accepted but you’re not a finalist. Sometimes the difference between a very very good piece of writing and a finalist is a single, brave, true, original, explosive sentence.
Five pages of clumsy, rough meanderings with one great sentence beats five pages of beautiful, polished, mistake-free artistry. I have always believed that, and that’s why I created Some Blind Alleys.
Good editing can make the rough stuff around the great sentence read just fine.
Because I have to identify the finalists immediately, I won’t be getting back to everybody straight away. It could take weeks for me to get back to all the essayists, because I suspect that I’ll publish many more than the three finalists. I have had over two hundred stories sent in so far, and my plan is no longer to respond to individual submissions. I’ll be getting back to a few people who submitted good stories, and probably publishing very few beyond the finalists.
If you submitted a story and don’t hear from me, you can be assured that I’m grateful for your interest in the site, and I hope that you’ll consider writing an essay. If you’re not familiar with the personal essay, The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate is a great place to start.
This is not intended as a judgement against the quality of the very good stories I have received and will receive. It is simply a statement about the direction Some Blind Alleys has taken – which is toward the essay (personal essay, reportage, criticism, dispatch, literary journalism), translation, and visual art, and away from the short story.
Once the finalists have been identified, the editing process will begin. I’ll be working with authors to identify the best 1,000 words from their piece and cut it down to around 800 words. These selections will be read by the judges. The winners will be announced a few days before the launch, which takes place on October 16.
On the night, the winners will read the selection that the judges see.
In order to be a finalist, you must be prepared to read on October 16. Anything received after midnight tonight will be a regular submission to the site.
Stuart McLaughlin, CEO of Business2Arts, writes in today’s Irish Times that the arts sector needs to get its act together and come up with a transparently arrived at amount of money required to fund itself.
Business2Arts is an organisation focused on private funding for the arts – particularly in linking arts organisations to sponsors – and McLaughlin (judging by his article) is a believer in the philosophy that a survival-of-the-fittest mentality in the private sector creates efficient organisations.
This argument is often used for healthcare, and it’s true that private hospitals are nicer to attend, unless the problem is really serious, and then the private sector wants nothing to do with you.
I don’t really have an opinion on the matter, and it’s good to have something to read in the paper that’s critical of the status quo. But it seems to me that if art’s most valuable effect (which I believe it is, and I am probably wrong) is to throw itself into the wheels and gears of the factory of societal efficiency and populism and eagerness and figures and coherence and stop the machines for a little while, then an approach linked to “efficiency, quality, value for money and impact” is not really that attractive to up-and-coming arts organisations that aspire – even if they are deluded – to become agents of change.
Nevertheless, I’m more than in agreement that there’s a lot of money in the private sector for arts funding, money that could take some pressure off the State. I wonder how easy it is to attain. Every time I send a press release out about the workshops or a competition, I nearly faint from the total nauseating embarrassment. I couldn’t possibly walk into (name of business) and ask them for money. I don’t know how to market. Or rather, I know precisely how to market (I see twenty press releases a day in my real job) and I’m not prepared to sound like that.
It would be great if there were some service – like a sponsorship agency – to whom organisations could submit a plan or whatever, and that sponsorship agency could choose the organisations it wants to represent, and go around trying to get money for them, and take 15 percent.
McLaughlin also calls for reform of the Arts Council:
We require significant reform within the Arts Council if the arts sector is ever to establish itself as an effective voice, and this, I believe, is critical in supporting the case for retaining ministerial representation. In this context, it’s useful to look at the work of Gerry Robinson with Arts Council England. When Robinson became chairman in 1998 and set about transforming the council, his work was underpinned by the belief that efficiency and accountability within the council was necessary before making the case for increased funding to government.
If you can criticise the Arts Council in the public domain, then you are most certainly not an artist. The Arts Council is the Death Star of subjects when it comes to public conversations about art by artists, because it’s important for your career that the Council doesn’t think you’re an asshole. If you are on their shit list… well, even finishing that sentence could get me on their shit list.
But this also proves a point. Guys like McLaughlin can affect change by calling for radical reform and criticizing organizations no one else can. I meet a lot of aspiring writers, for instance, with drive like you cannot imagine, and a true love for books and the culture of books, but they are not very good writers. This is not a mean thing to say. It might be like someone saying Frank O’Connor could not make a salad. As I understand it, the man could not make a fucking salad. But it goes to show you that administrators and people behind the scenes are vitally important for the people trying to make and sell art.
