Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the non-fiction book, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He lives in New York, and teaches at Yale University.
Michael Cunningham
Articles by Michael Cunningham
Tuesday February 4
Cavafy Before He Was Cavafy
Why do they insist on remembering us as old men? The profile frowning on the plaque or the statue standing regally in the park almost inevitably depict the vanished hero as time-worn, if undaunted; the slightly battered survivor of his own remarkable life.
Wednesday June 17
Death In Venice
All novels are translations, even in their original languages. This has been revealed to me over time, as I’ve worked with the various dedicated (and inevitably underpaid) people who have agreed to translate my own books. When I started working with translators, I couldn’t help noticing that many of the problems that vexed them—questions of
Monday January 29
On Translation
Translation is of course conspiracy. Whatever else it is or may intend, translation represents a concerted move of the few against the many, the foreign against the domestic, there against here. It is the paradox of the solitary army, taking orders from a distant text, parlez-vous’ing these commands into some semblance of the speech heard