Zigzag

Rudolf Anthony

Zigzag: five sequences marks the welcome return of Anthony Rudolf – publisher, translator, autobiographer, essayist – to his first vocation, poetry. Apart from collaborations with artists, this is his first book containing poems for more than thirty years. Zigzag consists of five sequences: two verse, one prose and two combining prose and verse. Among the texts are a recitative in the voice of the author's grandfather, a story about Kafka for grownups written according to the conventions of a children's story, and a sequence of prose and verse after Schumann's "Kinderszenen". Autobiography, poetry, documentary, fiction: the book zigs and zags with humour and lyrical lightness, complicating Rudolf's concerns with memory, time and loss.

About the Author

Born in London in 1942, Anthony Rudolf has two children and two grandchildren. He is the author of books of literary criticism (on Primo Levi, Piotr Rawicz and others), autobiography ("The Arithmetic of Memory") and poetry ("The Same River Twice" and collaborations with artists), and translator of books of poetry from French (Bonnefoy, Vigee, Jabes), Russian (Vinokourov and Tvardovsky) and other languages. He has edited various anthologies. His essay on R. B. Kitaj was published by the National Gallery in 2001, and he has published essays on other painters. He is Paula Rego's partner and main male model. He has completed a volume of short stories and is now at work on two new memoirs. His reviews, articles, poems, translations, obituaries and interviews with writers have appeared in numerous journals. Rudolf is an occasional broadcaster on radio and television and founder of Menard Press. After a lifetime of uninvolving day jobs, he became Visiting Lecturer in Arts and Humanities at London Metropolitan University (2000-2003) and Royal Literary Fund fellow at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Westminster (2003-2008). In 2004, he was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture and, in 2005, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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