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Author Archives: A S H Smyth

Questions – LXIII (after Neruda)

Saturday, January 24, 2015

How is the translation of their languages agreed upon with the birds? How do I explain to the tortoise that I am even slower than he is? How should I quiz the flea about his championship statistics? Or address the carnations, in my appreciation of their fragrance?

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The Pikey Laureate introduces Whitman to the high street

Monday, January 19, 2015

O ye women who go down unto the Co-Op in your onesies: What do you think you look like!?

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Debriefed by Captain Underpants

Thursday, January 15, 2015

A day out in darkest South Wimbledon, with David Gandy and Rich Hardcastle. — For The Spectator

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I’ll play along (after Da Ponte)

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

You wanna dance, you little count? You wanna dance? If you really wanna dance then I’ll dig out the banjo. Why not? I’ll play along with you. If you wanna learn how I’ll even show you the moves: I could teach you a thing or two. I will, I will – I promise! But gently […]

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Translator’s Note (after Khemiri, after Heti, after Valtat, after Coetzee, after Nooteboom, after Martin, after Kierkegaard)

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

What I would like to say by way of introduction to my essays on the art of writing, by A.B.C.D.E.F. Godthaab* (* Bear with me, please, while I endeavour to explain what is going on here.) . Twelve years ago, I wrote, with considerable emotional anguish, a long novel about a war against the languages. […]

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Epigraph (after Ondaatje)

Monday, December 1, 2014

K:  Am I ‘K’ in your book? A:  No.

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Story

Monday, November 24, 2014

We still get MamanBébé fliers for our childless former flatmate.

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Mortality 101 – or; Catullus at the graveside

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

‘I want to explain about the Catullus poem … Catullus wrote poem 101 for his brother who died in the Troad.’ – Anne Carson I have travelled, brother, over lands and oceans, to this field of bones to observe the rituals of the final hour, and mumble pointless words above your ashes. Misfortune took you […]

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St Paul’s (Knightsbridge) and the Great War

Monday, November 10, 2014

A blog piece for Culture House on the Royal Naval mobilisation of the Rev Wilfrid Hannay Gibbins, and the parish mags of a church in West London over the course of the First World War. — For The Spectator

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Flak Jacket to Dust Jacket

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Men at War: What Fiction Tells Us About Conflict, from The Iliad to Catch-22 By Christopher Coker (Hurst 325pp £25) My Life as a Foreign Country By Brian Turner (Jonathan Cape 240pp £16.99) Seamus Heaney once remarked upon the heroes of antiquity that it is ‘not so much their procedures on the page which are […]

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