Personal

Yes, this is where it gets personal. Check out the monstrosity above, reshaped with the aid of Denis Constales's famous photo squeegee to correct the distorting effect of a passport camera and hide the lobotomy scars.

Here's my name in katakana, for those who can read Japanese.

Below are the rest of my sordid details. I'll add anything else that I think is worth knowing later.

Name: Paul St John Mackintosh

Date of birth: 29 October, 1961

Place of birth: Leamington Spa, England

Alma mater: Trinity College, Cambridge

Status: separated

Academic qualifications: B.A. (Cantab.), History/Art History;
M.A. (Cantab.) [i.e., not one of the real ones, but the ones that Cambridge gives away two years after graduation.]

Prizes: Japan Festival Award, 1995 (for translation Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids)

Societies/Institutions: School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London
Society of Authors
Translators Association (Executive Committee Member)

Favourite Poets (in no particular order): Geoffrey Hill, James Wright, Henry Vaughan, Walt Whitman, John Donne, John Keats, Thomas Stearns Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Basil Bunting, Austin Clarke, Wallace Stevens, Charles Tomlinson, Weldon Kees, Stephen Romer. Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Else Lasker-Schüler, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Gérard de Nerval, Aloysius Bertrand, Jules Laforgue, Émile Nelligan, Yves Bonnefoy, Cesar Vallejo, Rubén Darío, Octavio Paz, San Juan de la Cruz, Dante, Li Bai, Li He, Li Shangyin, Fujiwara Teika, Hagiwara Sakutaro, Miyazawa Kenji.

Favourite Writers (in no particular order): Samuel Beckett, Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, John Ruskin, Wyndham Lewis, Marcel Proust, Mircea Eliade, Raymond Queneau, Georges Darien, Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Blanchot, Donatien Alphonse François Comte de Sade, Georges Bataille, Jean Ray, Zeami, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Miyazawa Kenji.

Favourite Artists (in no particular order): Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann, Egon Schiele, Alberto Giacometti, Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Ernst Ludvig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Titian, Giovanni Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Giorgione, Veronese, Tintoretto, Diego Velázquez, Jan van Eyck, Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan Vermeer, Antoine Watteau, Claude Lorrain, Francisco Goya, Caspar David Friedrich, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Harunobu, Ando Hiroshige, Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Stephen Conroy.

Favourite Composers (in a particular order): Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gustav Mahler, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jean Sibelius, Claude Debussy, Joseph Haydn, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Georges Bizet, Maurice Ravel, Antonio Vivaldi.

Favourite Pleasures: Good food, good drink, good company, good conversation, good clothes, various Belgian beers, travel (que le monde est petit!), various languages, Orientalism, idleness, bullying the cat, being bullied by the cat, BDSM, laughing at everything (especially me).

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