Last week saw the release of The Bird that Swallowed its Cage: The Selected Writing of Curzio Malaparte, translated by our friend and sonic hero, Walter Murch.<\/p>\n
Here’s a description of the book from the Counterpoint Press website<\/a>:<\/p>\n Walter Murch first came across Curzio Malaparte\u2019s writings in a chance encounter in a French book about cosmology, where one of Malaparte\u2019s stories was retold to illustrate a point about conditions shortly after the creation of the universe. Murch was so taken by the strange, utterly captivating imagery he went to find the book from which the story was taken. The book was Kaputt, Malaparte\u2019s autobiographical novel about the frontlines of World War II.<\/p>\n Curzio Malaparte, an Italian born with a German heritage, was a journalist, dramatic, novelist and diplomat. When he wrote a book attacking totalitarianism and Hitler\u2019s reign, Mussolini, in no position to support such a body of work, stripped him of his National Fascist Party membership and sent him to internal exile on the island of Lipari. In 1941, he was sent to cover the Eastern Front as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera, the Milano daily newspaper. His dispatches from the next three years would be largely suppressed by the Italian government, but reverberated among readers as painfully real depictions of a landscape at war.<\/p>\n The film editor, fluent in translating the written word over to the languages of sight and sound, began slowly translating Malaparte\u2019s writings from World War II. The density and intricacy of his stories compelled Murch to adapt many of them into prose or blank verse poems. The result is a body of work never before available to English readers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Tosca Cafe<\/a> is hosting a celebration of the book’s release tomorrow night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week saw the release of The Bird that Swallowed its Cage: The Selected Writing of Curzio Malaparte, translated by our friend and sonic hero, Walter Murch. Here’s a description of the book from the Counterpoint Press website: Walter Murch first came across Curzio Malaparte\u2019s writings in a chance encounter in a French book about … Continue reading The Making Of… a Translation<\/span>