The Marsh (Ryuunosuke Akutagawa, translated by John Gardner)

A short story about a man who happens to find a painting of a marsh in an art gallery and is greatly moved by it despite having a professional art critic ridicule the artist, the painting and the narrator himself for declaring that he personally finds it ‘a masterpiece’.. Despite being an Akutagawa story and therefore full of a sense of hopeless, helpless doom, I found it strangely moving too. Many thanks to Wabei Translation for sharing.

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