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• Date: 29 January 2003
• Type: mp3
• Length: 95mins 47secs

Claudio Magris reads extracts in Italian from his novel Microcosms, with Iain Halliday reading his translations into English. Claudio Magris talks about the connection between writing and reality (or how "fictional truth is arrived at by inventing everything but the facts") and the experience of both translating and being translated, while Iain Halliday discusses the mixture of humility and ambition demanded by the act of translation. Iain Halliday then reads a passage from Danube (translated by Patrick Creagh) and To Have Been (translated by Gerald Parks). Magris answers questions on crossing borders, the books and writers (ranging from the Odyssey to Kafka to Laurence Sterne) he is most influenced by, how to catch the originality of reality, and whether he would consider his writing political.