AustLit

'I should have sent you this letter years ago, my most subtle, sagacious and reclusive friend David. Probably early in the years around the new millennium when unexpectedly an invitation of yours arrived asking if I would participate in a joint course on translation. I was taken aback. I was alarmed. The hermeneutics of suspicion took over the best of me. Why? What could I say? Can I do it? It was the first time that a colleague from a mainstream big department had asked another from a small and marginal to work together. That was the beginning of my iniquities. I accepted and I started working frantically on preparing the course. It was frightening and exciting. It gave me the opportunity to discuss and, to use an unfriendly term, problematise, my own experience of translating Patrick White. It was also a unique moment to develop a deeper bond with you and our university, a strange place of perpetual parallel monologues, and submerged creative tensions.'  (Publication abstract)