EXTRA! EXTRA!
Chris Sawyer-Laucanno's Libretto for Lorca,
an Operatic Cycle in Five Parts
and
an Éduoard Roditi Zoom
In 2015-2017, our esteemed Consulting Editor at Large, memoirist, polyglot, polymath, translator—need I go on?—Chris Sawyer-Lauçanno wrote a libretto for an opera about Federico García Lorca.* He modeled the arias after Lorca poems; and the music was composed by Andrey Kasparov. Part 1 was performed in Virginia, but Covid cancelled all subsequent performances, and so far have not been rescheduled.
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Sawyer-Lauçanno has fond memories of his mother reading poems by García Lorca to him as a child, and, if readers will recall, we published Sawyer-Lauçanno's "A Note on Salvador Dalí’s “Saint Sebastian,” a short essay which featured not only his translation of Salvador Dalí's little known "San Sebastian" but also noting the friendship between the two and its intimations of homoeroticism, at least on Lorca's part.
He has also translated Lorca’s prose poems and short plays in the late-1980s— Barbarous Nights: Legend and Plays from the Little Theater ( City Lights, 1991) as well as Lorca's "Ode to Salvador Dalí," in The American Poetry Review and as a broadside. |
But, Dear Reader, that is not all!
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I sit here at my desk with a copy of Ince Mehmed by Yashar Kemal, the Kurdish writer from Turkey. My copy is the English translation entitled, Mehmet, My Hawk. Ordinarily blurbs are not of much interest to me, but do note that this book is blurbed by none other than Gunter Grass and John Berger. The book is the first (and Yashar Kemal's first novel), the first in aa series about the lives of what in Turkey are euphemistically called "Mountain Turks" during the time of Turkey's transition into the Republic.
Now, the translation was rendered by Édoard Roditi. |
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As the image above right happily announces, Clifford Endres, who has lived in Istanbul for some time now, and recently contributed his and Selhan Savcıgil-Endres' translations of poet, Enis Batur in Witty Partition's Issue 13— Endres and our redoubtable Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno will be joined by Saliha Özçelik at Istanbul's Boğaziçi University in a Commemorative Zoom honoring Eduoard Roditi. Sawyer-Lauçanno has also contributed a fascination series of essays on Édoard Roditi to that same Issue 13. Endres has long researched Roditi and Sawyer-Laucanno has worked with and known him as well.
If you live on the east coast of the US, bear in mind that 17:00 (5:00 PM) is 10:00 AM ET, 9:00 AM Central Time, and—be brave!—8:00 Mountain Time, and 7:00 AM Pacific Time. (All refer to daylight savings at this time of year.)
If you live on the east coast of the US, bear in mind that 17:00 (5:00 PM) is 10:00 AM ET, 9:00 AM Central Time, and—be brave!—8:00 Mountain Time, and 7:00 AM Pacific Time. (All refer to daylight savings at this time of year.)
