The first French republic was declared on this day in 1792. The man appointed as its first minister was sentenced to death two years later by a tribunal he had created http://econ.st/1LLiM2Y
'At bottom, no one believes in his own death, or, to put it another way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality. [...] Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude - something almost like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.'
- Freud, 'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death'
Everything’s looted, betrayed and traded, black death’s wing’s overhead. Everything’s eaten by hunger, unsated, so why does a light shine ahead?
By day, a mysterious wood, near the town, breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume. By night, on July’s sky, deep, and transparent, new constellations are thrown.
And something miraculous will come close to the darkness and ruin, something no-one, no-one, has known, though we’ve longed for it since we were children.
*
A legend in her own time both for her brilliant poetry and for her resistance to oppression, Anna Akhmatova—denounced by the Soviet regime for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference”—is one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. Before the revolution, Akhmatova was a wildly popular young poet who lived a bohemian life. She was one of the leaders of a movement of poets whose ideal was “beautiful clarity”—in her deeply personal work, themes of love and mourning are conveyed with passionate intensity and economy, her voice by turns tender and fierce. A vocal critic of Stalinism, she saw her work banned for many years and was expelled from the Writers’ Union—condemned as “half nun, half harlot.” Despite this censorship, her reputation continued to flourish underground, and she is still among Russia’s most beloved poets. Here are poems from all her major works—including the magnificent “Requiem” commemorating the victims of Stalin’s terror—and some that have been newly translated for this edition.
В этот день 125 лет назад родилась одна из известнейших русских поэтесс XX века Анна Ахматова. Уже к 1920-м годам она стала признанным классиком отечественной п⋯⋯更多 這一天，125 年前出生在二十世紀，安娜 · 阿赫瑪最著名的俄羅斯詩人之一。早在 1920 年她成為了公認的經典的愛國詩歌，但即使他死後，阿赫瑪遭受了嚴重的審查制度。她的許多作品不超過二十年，在她死後發表。 (翻譯由 Bing 提供)
If you'd like to hear Anna Akhmatova read a brief Russian poem IN RUSSIAN, go to Russian Poem and click on the .wav file format 935K, and shortly you will her her read! This page also has many links to other Akhmatova sites, and a brief anthology of her poetry.
For a brief biography of the poet, go to Biography.
For another brief biography, and a list of her works translated into English, go to the Academy of American Poets' page on Akhmatova at AAP page.
Translations of a number of Akhmatova's poems can be found at Translations
Several translations by one of the two best translators (D.M. Thomas -- tthe other great translation is the collaborative work of U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz and Max Haward) and annotated links can be found at Thomas translations
A page with almost twenty translations and a brief essay. What is notable about this page is that it is part of a series -- which can easily be accessed from the right column of this page -- on a multitude of Russian writers, inclduing Akhmatova's friends/contemporaries Gumilev, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, and Tsvetaeva. Click on Akhmatova, and her Russian contemporaries
Not under foreign skies Nor under foreign wings protected - I shared all this with my own people There, where misfortune had abandoned us. [1961]
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe this?' And I answered - 'I can.' It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face. [The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]
DEDICATION
Mountains fall before this grief, A mighty river stops its flow, But prison doors stay firmly bolted Shutting off the convict burrows And an anguish close to death. Fresh winds softly blow for someone, Gentle sunsets warm them through; we don't know this, We are everywhere the same, listening To the scrape and turn of hateful keys And the heavy tread of marching soldiers. Waking early, as if for early mass, Walking through the capital run wild, gone to seed, We'd meet - the dead, lifeless; the sun, Lower every day; the Neva, mistier: But hope still sings forever in the distance. The verdict. Immediately a flood of tears, Followed by a total isolation, As if a beating heart is painfully ripped out, or, Thumped, she lies there brutally laid out, But she still manages to walk, hesitantly, alone. Where are you, my unwilling friends, Captives of my two satanic years? What miracle do you see in a Siberian blizzard? What shimmering mirage around the circle of the moon? I send each one of you my salutation, and farewell. [March 1940]
INTRODUCTION [PRELUDE]
It happened like this when only the dead Were smiling, glad of their release, That Leningrad hung around its prisons Like a worthless emblem, flapping its piece. Shrill and sharp, the steam-whistles sang Short songs of farewell To the ranks of convicted, demented by suffering, As they, in regiments, walked along - Stars of death stood over us As innocent Russia squirmed Under the blood-spattered boots and tyres Of the black marias.
I
You were taken away at dawn. I followed you As one does when a corpse is being removed. Children were crying in the darkened house. A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God. . . The cold of an icon was on your lips, a death-cold sweat On your brow - I will never forget this; I will gather
To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy (1) Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers. [1935. Autumn. Moscow]
II
Silent flows the river Don A yellow moon looks quietly on Swanking about, with cap askew It sees through the window a shadow of you Gravely ill, all alone The moon sees a woman lying at home Her son is in jail, her husband is dead Say a prayer for her instead.
III
It isn't me, someone else is suffering. I couldn't. Not like this. Everything that has happened, Cover it with a black cloth, Then let the torches be removed. . . Night.
IV
Giggling, poking fun, everyone's darling, The carefree sinner of Tsarskoye Selo (2) If only you could have foreseen What life would do with you - That you would stand, parcel in hand, Beneath the Crosses (3), three hundredth in line, Burning the new year's ice With your hot tears. Back and forth the prison poplar sways With not a sound - how many innocent Blameless lives are being taken away. . . [1938]
V
For seventeen months I have been screaming, Calling you home. I've thrown myself at the feet of butchers For you, my son and my horror. Everything has become muddled forever - I can no longer distinguish Who is an animal, who a person, and how long The wait can be for an execution. There are now only dusty flowers, The chinking of the thurible, Tracks from somewhere into nowhere And, staring me in the face And threatening me with swift annihilation, An enormous star. [1939]
VI
Weeks fly lightly by. Even so, I cannot understand what has arisen, How, my son, into your prison White nights stare so brilliantly. Now once more they burn, Eyes that focus like a hawk, And, upon your cross, the talk Is again of death. [1939. Spring]
VII THE VERDICT
The word landed with a stony thud Onto my still-beating breast. Nevermind, I was prepared, I will manage with the rest.
I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, Turn my living soul to stone Then teach myself to live again. . .
But how. The hot summer rustles Like a carnival outside my window; I have long had this premonition Of a bright day and a deserted house. [22 June 1939. Summer. Fontannyi Dom (4)]
VIII TO DEATH
You will come anyway - so why not now? I wait for you; things have become too hard. I have turned out the lights and opened the door For you, so simple and so wonderful. Assume whatever shape you wish. Burst in Like a shell of noxious gas. Creep up on me Like a practised bandit with a heavy weapon. Poison me, if you want, with a typhoid exhalation, Or, with a simple tale prepared by you (And known by all to the point of nausea), take me Before the commander of the blue caps and let me glimpse The house administrator's terrified white face. I don't care anymore. The river Yenisey Swirls on. The Pole star blazes. The blue sparks of those much-loved eyes Close over and cover the final horror. [19 August 1939. Fontannyi Dom]
IX
Madness with its wings Has covered half my soul It feeds me fiery wine And lures me into the abyss.
That's when I understood While listening to my alien delirium That I must hand the victory To it.
However much I nag However much I beg It will not let me take One single thing away:
Not my son's frightening eyes - A suffering set in stone, Or prison visiting hours Or days that end in storms
Nor the sweet coolness of a hand The anxious shade of lime trees Nor the light distant sound Of final comforting words. [14 May 1940. Fontannyi Dom]
X CRUCIFIXION
Weep not for me, mother. I am alive in my grave.
1. A choir of angels glorified the greatest hour, The heavens melted into flames. To his father he said, 'Why hast thou forsaken me!' But to his mother, 'Weep not for me. . .' [1940. Fontannyi Dom]
2. Magdalena smote herself and wept, The favourite disciple turned to stone, But there, where the mother stood silent, Not one person dared to look. [1943. Tashkent]
EPILOGUE
1. I have learned how faces fall, How terror can escape from lowered eyes, How suffering can etch cruel pages Of cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks. I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair Can suddenly turn white. I've learned to recognise The fading smiles upon submissive lips, The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh. That's why I pray not for myself But all of you who stood there with me Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat Under a towering, completely blind red wall.
2. The hour has come to remember the dead. I see you, I hear you, I feel you: The one who resisted the long drag to the open window; The one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar soil beneath her feet; The one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,
'I arrive here as if I've come home!' I'd like to name you all by name, but the list Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look. So, I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble words I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always, I will never forget one single thing. Even in new grief. Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth Through which one hundred million people scream; That's how I wish them to remember me when I am dead On the eve of my remembrance day. If someone someday in this country Decides to raise a memorial to me, I give my consent to this festivity But only on this condition - do not build it By the sea where I was born, I have severed my last ties with the sea; Nor in the Tsar's Park by the hallowed stump Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me; Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours And no-one slid open the bolt. Listen, even in blissful death I fear That I will forget the Black Marias, Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman Howled like a wounded beast. Let the thawing ice flow like tears From my immovable bronze eyelids And let the prison dove coo in the distance While ships sail quietly along the river. [March 1940. Fontannyi Dom]
FOOTNOTES
1 An elite guard which rose up in rebellion against Peter the Great in 1698. Most were either executed or exiled. 2 The imperial summer residence outside St Petersburg where Ahmatova spent her early years. 3 A prison complex in central Leningrad near the Finland Station, called The Crosses because of the shape of two of the buildings. 4 The Leningrad house in which Ahmatova lived.
A sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, especially in reference to fictional narrative:the peripeteias of the drama1936 is the peripeteia, the point where the action turned
第13章：優秀的情節應該表現有缺點或犯了某種後果嚴重錯誤的好人，由順達之境，轉入敗逆之境。...... 2005年：回來讀「紐約時報雜誌」，注意到In ancient theater, a play began with a protasis, or introduction, and ended with a catastrophe, or conclusion, driven by some irresistible cause; in French, that finish was the ''denouement.''根據『詩學』（陳中梅譯注，北京商務，1999）此翻譯為：「一部悲劇由結與解組成。」所以「解」為DENOUEMENT 的真義。
第8章： 情節應摹仿一個完整的行動。部分的組合要環環相扣，緊湊合理。 第13章：優秀的情節應該表現有缺點或犯了某種後果嚴重錯誤的好人，由順達之境，轉入敗逆之境。...... 2005年：回來讀「紐約時報雜誌」，注意到In ancient theater, a play began with a protasis, or introduction, and ended with a catastrophe, or conclusion, driven by some irresistible cause; in French, that finish was the ''denouement.''根據『詩學』（陳中梅譯注，北京商務，1999）此翻譯為：「一部悲劇由結與解組成。」所以「解」為DENOUEMENT的真義。
將它推薦給rl 。 今晨知道，這一denouement 數日前在問 Voltaire 的一句 « personne ne peut deviner le dénouement de cette tragédie » rl說過：「根據我的了解，這句的大意是： 沒人能料到這場悲劇的結局。」 rl再說：這denouement他每日一字專欄去年已介紹過」 查一下，為 「1. 【古】解結；解開 2. （戲劇、小說的）結局 3. （事情的）解決；結束 」 ----- Source: Aristotle: Poetics of Aristotle: XVIII. Further rules for the Tragic Poet XVIII. Further rules for the Tragic Poet. Every tragedy falls into two parts,--Complication and Unravelling or Denouement. Incidents extraneous to the action are frequently combined with a portion of the action proper, to form the…
根據『詩學』（陳中梅譯注，北京商務，1999）此翻譯為：「一部悲劇由結與解組成。」所以「解」為DENOUEMENT的真義。 《矇矓的七種類型》與《羅生門》(Rashomon) College is not only where you hit the books. It also should be where you learn not to judge a book by its cover.
一九三三年，北平協和醫學校代理校長顧臨先生（Roger S. Greene）同我商量，要尋一個人翻譯西格裏斯博士（Henry S. Sigerist）的《人與醫學》（Man and Medicine）。恰好那時顧謙吉先生願意擔任這件工作，我就推薦他去做。我本來希望中基會的編譯委員會可以擔負翻譯的費用，不幸那時編委會沒有餘力，就由顧臨先生個人擔負這個譯本的稿費。
-----文藝復興時期，李奧納多．達文西（Leonardo da Vinci，1452~1519）為解剖學而研究解剖學，進行了最勤勉的解剖學研究；維薩流斯（Andreas Vesalius，1514-1564）在解剖學大放異彩之際，為外科學紮下深厚的科學根基，也直接促進了現代外科學的一日千里。
Andreas Vesalius
Physician
Andreas Vesalius was a Brabançon anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica. Vesalius is often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy. Wikipedia
[ARTWORK OF THE WEEK] The Cathedral is a combination of two right hands. This work emphasizes #Rodin’s fondness and passion for these hands, in order to give them a more finished and autonomous form.
不過它的故事卻忘記了. 可悲........ 索维斯特（Emile Souvestre）的《屋顶间的哲学家》（Un philosophe sousles toits），那踽踽独处阁楼一角的法国智者，如何以洞彻的眼神，在安贫中、在乐道里，默默 ... Un Philosophe sous les toils, which received in 1851 a well-deserved academic prize
Émile Souvestre (April 15, 1806 – July 5, 1854) was a French novelist who was a native of Morlaix, Finistère. He was the son of a civil engineer and was ...
一個在巴黎「屋頂間」（一種貧民窟）的哲學家，從他高踞在上的屋頂間，俯視下界蠅營狗苟的眾生，生動地寫下了這部日記體裁的小說，由「屋頂間的年禮」、 「謝肉節」、「窗前隨感」、「互愛頌」、「補償」、「莫利斯叔叔」、「名勢論」、「厭與悔」、「米雪爾的家庭」、「祖國」、「爐邊漫意」、「歲杪」等十二 個分散的故事組成，每一個故事都像一段美麗動人的詩篇。書中充滿著愛和同情的人生哲學，處處表現出恬淡謙挹的人生觀。那種對窮人的無限關懷和對罪惡的深切 痛恨，充分透露出一個有良心的知識份子處身亂世不肯隨俗浮沉的磊落胸襟，以及「先天下之憂而憂，後天下之樂而樂」的博大精神。本書曾得過法國學術院獎，至 今還被法國各校採用為教材與課外讀物。 ****** 《鬼池 》 (La mare and diable),(法)桑.喬治(Sand,George, psend 1804-1876)/黎烈文/ 大業書店印行, 1957
La Mare au diable (1846) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sand 其實早在1846年，喬治·桑就已經開始對田園生活感興趣。這一年她發表了著名的田園小說《魔沼》，全書沒有複雜的情節和冗長的理論闡述，而是自始至終充滿詩意。這部作品奠定了作家晚期創作的基調。
[P.552] He mingled in society, and he conceived attachments to other women. But the constant recollection of his first love made these appear insipid; and besides the vehemence of desire, the bloom of the sensation had vanished. In like manner, his intellectual ambitions had grown weaker. Years passed; and he was forced to support the burthen of a life in which his mind was unoccupied and his heart devoid of energy.
書名/作者 Flaubert-Sand : the correspondence / translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller and Barbara Bray ; with a foreword by Francis Steegmuller ; based on the edition by Alphonse Jacobs ; with additional notes by Francis Steegmuller
出版項 New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1993
[ARTWORK OF THE WEEK] The Cathedral is a combination of two right hands. This work emphasizes #Rodin’s fondness and passion for these hands, in order to give them a more finished and autonomous form.
HC：「你的英漢bovarism顯然錯誤。這字在英文早有定論【bovarism (domination by) a romantic or unreal conception of oneself: conceit; hence, bovaristic - conceited [after Madame Bovary] ；bovarize view oneself in romantic or unreal light 】。你可看你有的周本施康強之序。這個字之發明家原文為何？真的是他嗎？我的Short OED 只說，它是20世紀早期之字。
rl：「我認為…….若指"包法利主義"本身的話，我相信是正確的，因為社會寫實小說之產生，必定是在某一現象存在之後；…..從儒勒‧德‧戈吉耶還原成法文，我相信是指Jules de Gaultier。 我們從其生殁年籍（ 1858 — 1942 ）與《包法利夫人》發表年分（1856）來推斷，若此字彙為戈吉耶所發明，顯然必定在《包法利夫人》發表之後，請參考其作品Le Bovarysme, la psychologie dans l'œuvre de Flaubert (1892)……剛瀏覽到魯昂大學福婁拜爾中心的相關資料，前面大半是法文，但是關於包法利主義部分特別有英文介紹。」
Emma Bovary's bovarism The notion of bovarism (in French: bovarysme) was coined by the French essayist Jules de Gaultier (1858-1942), who gave it two meanings: 1) special persons' romantic escape from reality, and 2) man's general, and inevitable, faculty to conceive reality other than it actually is. Once one recognises, with Gaultier, that Flaubert's Emma Bovary illustrates both these meanings of the notion to which she has lent her name, she can no longer be considered as just a stupid, alienated country woman. She has become a representative of human beings in general. A more favourable conception of Madame Bovary is that, however inauthentic she is, her search for authenticity is authentic. The tension between inauthenticity and authenticity even lets her be regarded as a tragic character, as Baudelaire, Auerbach and Ross Chambers have suggested.
hc：「施康強先生之序文在網路可找到。他還可以，不過凡碰到ism等等都翻譯愁主義的做法，太粗縣線條…….又，我發現Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms收入 Bovarysme，解釋也更精彩。」
From the only Australian writer to win the Nobel Prize—
“Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest. ” ― Patrick White, Voss
The character of Johann Voss is based on an actual nineteenth-century explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt, who attempted to cross the entire continent of Australia from east to west in 1848 but disappeared in the attempt. With visionary intensity, Patrick White imagines Voss's last journey across the desert and the waterlogged plains of central Australia. But this magisterial novel is also a love story, for the explorer is inextricably bound up with an orphaned young woman whose inner life, like his own, is at odds with the world. In language poetic and passionate yet grounded in shrewd, often comic, social observations and naturalistic portrayals of farmers, convicts, employers, servants, and aborigines, White creates both a spellbinding adventure and a myth for our time. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/220370/voss/
Patrick White
Writer
Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian writer who is widely regarded as one of the most important English-language novelists of the 20th century. Wikipedia
In March 1984, Jorge Luis Borges began a series of radio “dialogues” with the Argentinian poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari, which have now been translated into English for the first time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of the Argentinian master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, best known for his intriguing short stories that play with philosophical ideas, such as identity, reality and language. His work, which includes poetry, essays, and reviews of imaginary books, has had great influence on magical realism and literary theory. He viewed the realist novel as over-rated and deluded, revelling instead in fable and imaginary worlds. He declared "people think life is the thing but I prefer reading".Translation formed an important part of his work, writing a Spanish language version of an Oscar Wilde story when aged around 9. He went on to introduce other key writers such as Faulkner and Kafka to Latin America, liberally making changes to the original work which went far beyond what was, strictly speaking, translation.He lived most of his life in obscurity, finding recognition only in his sixties when he was awarded the International Publishers' Prize which he shared with Samuel Beckett. By this point he was blind but continued to write, composing poetry in his head and reciting from memory.So how has Borges' work informed ideas about our experience of the world through language? How much was his writing shaped by his travel abroad and an unrequited love? And how has his legacy inspired the next generation of great Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa?With Edwin Williamson, Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford University; Efraín Kristal, Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, Los Angeles; Evelyn Fishburn, Professor Emeritus at London Metropolitan University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London.
Essay
Borges on Pleasure Island
By RIVKA GALCHEN
Published: June 17, 2010
Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical proof with the emotionally profound wit of Dostoyevsky. Or: He courts paradox so primrosely, describing his Dupin-like detective character as having “reckless perspicacity” and the light in his infinite Library of Babel as being “insufficient, and unceasing.” But see, such worship is pale.
And problematic as well. More than any other 20th-century figure, Borges is the one designated — and often dismissed as — the Platonic ideal of Writer. His outrageous intellect is cited as proof of either his genius or of his bloodless cerebralism. But Borges did have some mortal qualities. He lived most of his life with his mother. He loved detective and adventure novels. (His first story in English was published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.) Though he started to go blind in his 30s, he never learned to read Braille. And in his later years he made some unappealing political remarks about being happy that, following the military overthrow of the Perón government, “gentlemen” were again running the country. (Perón, to be fair, had “promoted” Borges from head of the National Library to head of poultry inspection.) Such remarks are perhaps why he never won the Nobel. But perhaps Borges’s most glorious and provocative “fault” was that he lived to be 86 and never wrote a novel. “It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one,” he wrote, in the introduction to a 1941 collection of his short stories, “the madness of composing vast books. . . . The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.” He certainly did read vast books, however. For us Borges may be the ur-writer, but he thought of himself primarily as a reader; writing was just among the most intensely engaged ways of reading. In his essay “Literary Pleasure,” reprinted in ON WRITING (Penguin Classics, $15), one of three new Borges anthologies appearing this month under the general editorship of Suzanne Jill Levine, he says of his youthful reading — “the greatest literary joys I have experienced” — that he “believed everything, even errata and poor illustrations.” Reading was faith; writing a call-and-response form of prayer. To love a text: isn’t that just to find oneself helplessly casting about for something to say in return? Which brings us back to worship. If serial rereading is one way to define worship, then one of Borges’s most revered gods was Robert Louis Stevenson. This even though in Borges’s time, Stevenson’s work was basically considered kid stuff. The first seven editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature do not deign to include Stevenson, though he finally surfaces in the eighth edition, published in 2006. Borges not only commented on books that didn’t exist. He read books — pulpy and arcane alike — that few others bothered to see. The Stevenson book Borges revisited most often was “The Wrecker,” a relatively obscure novel that Stevenson wrote with his stepson. Published in 1892, “The Wrecker” is a story of high seas adventure, high stakes speculation and high interest loans; it’s part mystery novel, part adventure novel, part mock Künstlerroman. The title refers to the practice of auctioning off the remains of wrecked ships along with any recoverable cargo, which is, yes, an irresistibly resonant metaphor for neglected books. On the surface, “The Wrecker” could hardly resemble a Borges story less. At 500 pages, and full of incident, “The Wrecker” has the feel of a 27-course Victorian feast, served on a table crowded with doilies and finger bowls and odd utensils whose functions we can’t even imagine; Borges’s stories are more like truffle oil. Stevenson can barely go a page without mentioning bankruptcy, smuggling or sea captains; Borges, though he writes of bar fights and criminals, more often mentions Zeno’s paradox and the “Annals” of Tacitus. In the false dichotomy of the sword versus the pen, Stevenson is red and Borges black. The main character in “The Wrecker,” Loudon Dodd, is a wealthy, untalented, unglamorous and highly likable young American man who cares nothing for his unearned money and longs for the life of an artist. Dodd goes to Paris to become a sculptor, fails at that, abruptly loses all his money, becomes involved in a series of wild business adventures through his charismatic friend Pinkerton, and eventually finds himself entangled in a maritime adventure involving opium trading, bunk stocks, debt and deception. All this adventure, it is almost explicitly said, eventually makes of him a kind of artist, or at least his life a kind of work of art, if a very pulpy one. So why did Borges read and reread “The Wrecker”? What was it that he believed every detail of? And how was his own writing a way of reading Stevenson’s sacredly profane text? Borges’s readerly attention re-invents Stevenson, just as his writerly attention created those vast unwritten books that Borges chose not to write, but just to imagine and comment on. Dodd and the other characters often marvel at how their lives have become as full of surprise and drama as a dime novel, and this is, basically, a happy thing. It’s as if to say that here, finally, are circumstances that do justice to the scope and scale of my emotions. It’s the idea of the objective correlative, done extra boyishly. In “The Wrecker,” the hyperbolized material world measures up to the outsize passions of the heart. Think of it this way: there is a vast unwritten book that the heart reacts to, that it races and skips in response to, that it believes in. But it’s the heart’s belief in that vast unwritten book that brought the book into existence; what appears to be exclusively a response (the heart responding to the book) is, in fact, also a conjuring (the heart inventing the book to which it so desperately wishes to respond). In his work, Borges achieves a related effect, by different means. Stories like “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and “The Book of Sand” refer to epic plots, but it’s the ideas and erudition, more than the action, that are colossal. Time, eternity, infinity and dreams — these are the only subjects commensurate to the passions of this quiet man who lived in Buenos Aires and in Geneva, though mostly in the vast nutshell of his own mind. In “The False Problem of Ugolino,” an essay on Dante not included in “On Writing,” Borges quotes from an essay by Stevenson that makes the rather Borgesian claim that a book’s characters are only a string of words. “Blasphemous as this sounds to us,” Borges comments, “Achilles and Peer Gynt, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote, may be reduced to it.” Borges then adds: “The powerful men who ruled the earth, as well: Alexander is one string of words, Attila another.” The great deeds of the past may become no more than words, and no more than words are necessary to summon a power as grand and enduring even as Quixote or Achilles. Among the vast books that do not really exist, and that Borges has commented on, are the innumerable pages of the future. Borges’s work answers the unanswerable weight of his reading, the boyish and the arcane at once. The pages of both what he wrote and what he only traced the shadows of present us with their own wavering interrogations; we are happy and afraid to be lost amid our insufficient and unceasing responses. Borges created his precursors, even Stevenson. We still do not know how to create Borges.
Rivka Galchen is the author of the novel “Atmospheric Disturbances.”
The title of this article contains the character ü. Where it is unavailable or not desired, the name may be represented as Kuenstlerroman.
A Künstlerroman ("artist's novel", German pronunciation: [ˈkʏnstlɐ.ʁoˌmaːn]; plural -ane) is a specific sub-genre of Bildungsroman; it is a novel about an artist's growth to maturity. Such novels often depict the struggles of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois society of his or her time.
I stepped from Plank to Plank A Slow and cautious way The Stars about my Head I felt About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next Would be my final inch - This gave me that precarious Gait Some call Experience. 男女走路的方式有別，但除非是經過軍事操練，每個人的步態都不大一樣。狄金遜（EmilyDickinson）擅寫危顫不穩的壯麗，但是我們若對反諷無所感，便無法窺得其堂奧。她走在唯一能走的路上，走過「一段又一段的甲板」，說來諷刺，她的戒慎恐懼卻與豪放反叛並列，她覺得「星斗當空」，而雙足卻已浸在海水中。她不知道再走一步是否就「與死亡一寸之遙」，因而「腳步蹣跚」，她只說「有人」稱之為經驗。狄金遜讀過愛默生的散文〈經驗〉（Experience），這是一篇與蒙田（Montaigne）的〈論經驗〉（Of Experience）異曲同工的登峰之作，而她的反諷可說是回應了愛默生文章的開頭：「我們在哪裡找到了自己？在一連串我們並不知道極限何在、也不相信有極限的事物裡。」對狄金遜而言，極限就是不知道下一步是不是就到了底。「如果我們之中能有人知道自己在做什麼，或是在往何處去，甚至何時是在自以為是！」愛默生接下來的思緒在氣味上，或用狄金遜的話，在步態上，與她有所不同。在愛默生的經驗範疇裡，「萬物流動閃耀」，他那愉快的反諷不同狄金遜戒慎恐懼的反諷。但兩者都不是意識型態，而他們也仍然在其反諷的敵對力量中繼續存活著。」（郭強生譯） --- 小讀者 留言： Plank: 甲板? 走在甲板上怎會在海水裡? ===> 橋板 I felt About my Feet the Sea: 我感覺"海水中"我的雙足? ===> 頂上掛星, 足下臨海, 但頭未沾星, 足亦未浸海. 除非是海上"浮木", 河中跨板, 或足可沾水. precarious: 蹣跚? ===> 顫顫危危, 如臨深淵, 危哉殆哉... 感覺上很像走危危吊橋... ---- 小讀者 留言： Women and men can walk differently, but unless we are regimented we all tend to walk somewhat individually. Dickinson, master of the precarious Sublime, can hardly be apprehended if we are dead to her ironies. She is walking the only path available, "from Plank to Plank," but her slow caution ironically juxtaposes with a titanism in which she feels "The Stars about my Head," though her feet very nearly are in the sea. Not knowing whether the next step will be her "final inch" gives her "that precarious Gait" she will not name, except to tell us that "some call it Experience . She had read Emerson''''s essay "Experience," a culmination much in the way "Of Experience" was for his master Montaigne, and her irony is an amiable response to Emerson''''s opening: "Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none." The extreme, for Dickinson, is the not knowing whether the next step is the final inch...
----
but her slow caution ironically juxtaposes with a titanism in which she feels "The Stars about my Head," though her feet very nearly are in the sea.
Dickinson''s ironic juxtaposition of precarious and sublime:
- slow caution, the seas about my feet, uncertain/unknown last inch==> precarious 極低極險 (one extreme of the series)
vs
- titanism, the stars about my head==> sublime 極高極崇 (the other extreme of the series)
就是在這向天抗爭的不確定經驗中, 狄金遜 (人類) 達到雖險卻崇的境地...
Titanism: The spirit of revolt against an established order; rebelliousness.
Spiritual Titanism: an extreme form of humanism in which human beings take on divine attributes and prerogatives. ---- Emerson's "Experience":
WHERE do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight... -- Montaigne's "OF EXPERIENCE"
There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try all ways that can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employ experience, which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it. Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience has no fewer...
**** I stepped from Plank to Plank A Slow and cautious way The Stars about my Head I felt About my Feet the Sea. 赴黃泉 步履艱 海水濺 星斗懸
rl 留言（閒著也是閒著的rl）： : I knew not but the next Would be my final inch - This gave me that precarious Gait Some call Experience. 悟失足 成千古 步踟躕 飽世故
*****
Emily Dickinson died on May 15th 1886. Only 10 of her poems were published during her lifetime; hundreds more were discovered in a wooden chest after her death, and a legend grew up, sweet with pathos, of a woman too delicate for this world, disappointed in love.http://econ.st/1d2Nifd
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds. By Lyndall Gordon. Viking Press; 512 pages; $32.95. Virago; £20. Buy from Amazon.com,...
ECON.ST
艾蜜莉．狄金生（Emily Dickinson,1830-1886）
山間行草／文】
這個世界，處處可以是作者的行蹤：屈原有他行吟的澤畔，蘇東坡有他一再謫放的天涯，傑克‧倫敦（Jack London, 1876-1916）有他的荒漠北極，費滋傑羅（F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896-1940）有他的燈紅酒綠，而海明威，有他的狩獵場和戰地……。其他人，即或沒這麼戲劇性，至少都有一定廣度的生活經驗，作為寫作素材的來源。像那樣，一輩子住在她出生的屋子裡，二十幾歲還是青春年華就開始足不出戶的，大概少有別的例子了。她在五十六歲時因腦膜炎過世，一生當中至少有三十年，過的是自我幽囚的日子。
她也不給自己的詩訂題目。後人替她出的詩集，只好都用第一行作題目酖酖倒彷彿我們古代的《詩經》。但是越到二十世紀，英詩的格律式微，連康明思（ee comings, 1894-1962）那樣在詩裡把一個個字拆得七零八落的都有，狄金生的劣勢反而變成優勢了。不管是愛情詩中的難解的隱喻，還是宗教想像中的神祕色調，或者歌頌自然時的細緻觀察，她的特立獨行和女性特質，都使二十世紀以來的讀者不僅接受，而且擁抱她。而狄金生自己，儘管孤僻自閉，刻意與外界隔絕，並沒有失去對自己作品的信心，她曾說，"If fame belonged to me, I can not escape her."「如果名聲該屬於我，我絕逃不掉。」歷史也證明她果然沒有「逃掉」！
Celebrate by reading E.L. Doctorow's essay on ‘As I Lay Dying’: “It is possible that the way writers live can find its equivalent in their sense of composition, as if the technical daring of Faulkner’s greatest work has behind it the overreaching desire to hold together in one place the multifarious energies of real, unstoried life.”
Talking to a class at the University of Mississippi one day late in his life, William Faulkner remarked that his cogenerationist Ernest Hemingway lacked courage as a writer, that he had always been too careful, never...
NYBOOKS.COM
EL Doctorow obituary
One of the most celebrated American novelists best known for his historical fiction whose books Ragtime and Billy Bathgate were turned into films
Anointed “our pre-eminent lefty” among contemporary American novelists, EL Doctorow, who has died aged 84, was praised as the “epic poet” of the forgotten American left. It was praise that he did not welcome. He proved elusive when dealing with the pigeonholes crafted by reviewers, and not a few readers. In a career spanning five decades, Doctorow feared that tidy labels were a distraction. He lived contentedly within the paradoxes of his career.
He did not want to be called a political novelist. “My premise is that the language of politics can’t accommodate the complexity of fiction, which as a mode of thought is intuitive, metaphysical, mythic.” Although he wrote lovingly of the lost world of the Jewish Bronx in the 1930s, where he grew up, he rejected the idea that he was an autobiographical writer. “Every book is an act of composition,” he remarked in 1989, “and if you happen to use memories or materials from your own mind, they are like any other resource; they have to be composed. And the act of composition has no regard where the material comes from. So when it’s all done it’s all autobiographical and none of it is.”
Doctorow wrote a handful of the most influential historical novels of the past half-century, but was determined not to be known simply as a historical novelist. Praised for having “done his homework” on the American Civil war for The March(2005), he claimed that he did little research, freely inventing when the historical record seemed somehow incomplete. There is a moving letter in The March sent by the Union generalissimo William Tecumseh Sherman to a Confederate general whose son was killed in battle. But no such letter was ever written.
A poster for the film Ragtime, 1981, based on EL Doctorow’s 1975 book. Photograph: Everett/Rex Shutterstock
The titillating scene in Ragtime, his international bestseller of 1975, between the anarchist Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White’s squeeze, was wildly out of character for Goldman, as her two-volume autobiography Living My Life made abundantly clear. Doctorow claimed that his portrait of the financier JP Morgan in Ragtime was largely based upon deep study of an Edward Steichen photograph of the formidable money man. (He may not have been fully serious on this point.) Doctorow was attracted by the idea of improving upon the historical record.
Gore Vidal received heavyweight attacks from the leading Abraham Lincoln scholars when he published Lincoln in 1984. Long lists were compiled of his scholarly misapprehensions. Vidal accepted no corrections from the professors. But at heart he sided with the professional historians against writers such as Doctorow, doubting the wisdom of playing fast and loose with the facts. “It is hardly wise, in what looks to be a factual account, to have Harry Houdini chat with Walt Whitman aboard the Titanic, or whatever. Fantasy, as such, must be clearly labelled, even for our few remaining voluntary readers.”
Austere scholars similarly deplored Simon Schama’s use of novelistic devices in Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), his playful 1991 exploration of the possibilities of “historical novellas”. In 1994 Schama wrote a notably sympathetic review of Doctorow’s The Waterworks. Doctorow felt that history was, in the end, literature. And that it was literature, “intuitive, metaphysical, mythic”, which takes us to the heart of the social reality of American life.
Doctorow grew up in New York city, the grandson of Jewish immigrants who arrived from present-day Belarus in the 1880s. His grandfather, a printer by trade, was a passionate reader of Tolstoy. Everyone in the family read, but they were poor, and books mainly came from the library. Doctorow told in many interviews the story that he was named after Edgar Allan Poe, supposedly his father’s favourite writer. Living in a flat on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx, north of Manhattan, and with a well-to-do uncle and aunt in the suburb of Pelham Manor in Westchester County, he had a glimpse of a benevolent, calm life, contrasting sharply with the family life of the Doctorows in the Depression, which seemed both quarrelsome and stressful.
Edgar attended the elite Bronx High School of Science, but much preferred reading Kafka to his assigned lab work. He published a short story in the school magazine, an enclave for the literary-minded. As a junior, he enrolled in a journalism class. The class’s first assignment was to conduct an interview. Doctorow turned in a gem, an interview with a German-Jewish refugee who worked as the stage doorman at Carnegie Hall. The teacher was impressed, thought it a terrific piece, and wanted to use a photograph of the doorman to accompany the interview when it was published. Running out of excuses why the doorman could not be photographed, Doctorow finally admitted he had made the whole piece up. A note to his parents and a trip to the principal’s office soon followed. He was unrepentant. An imagined interview was so much more rewarding, more transgressive.His father, David, owned a music shop in midtown Manhattan, only for it to go broke in 1940. Love of music was the glue that held the family together. An older brother played jazz piano. Edgar was allowed free access to his father’s extensive collection of 78 rpm albums. His mother, Rose, played Chopin with passion.
In Reporting the Universe, lectures delivered at Harvard in 2003, Doctorow reflected upon lessons learned. “I believe nothing of any beauty or truth comes of a piece of writing without the author’s thinking he has sinned against something – propriety, custom, faith, privacy, tradition, political orthodoxy, historical fact, literary convention, or indeed, all the prevailing standards together.”
He did his first degree at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he studied with the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, before switching his major to philosophy. In a production of King Lear, he played Edgar. After graduating in 1952, he studied English drama at Columbia University, New York, where he met Helen Setzer, whom he married in 1954. Before he could complete his dissertation at Columbia he was drafted, and spent two years in Europe as a corporal in the US Army signal corps.
Back in New York in 1959, he took a job with Columbia Pictures in their New York office as a script-reader, looking for something with potential. He urged Columbia to pick up their option on Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, which he read in typescript. The studio decided not to proceed with it. (When he read the published text several months later, he rather regretted that Bellow had “flattened the life out of it”.) The quality of the novels he read, mostly westerns, seemed notably awful.
Billy Bathgate, 1989.Taking revenge, Doctorow wrote a parody western, Welcome to Hard Times (1960). “As I got into it,” he recalled, “I became more interested in the genre. The idea of using disreputable materials for serious purposes appealed to me.”
For virtually the whole of the 60s, Doctorow worked in publishing, initially as an editor at New American Library, and from 1964 as editor-in-chief at the Dial Press. Publishing figures such asNorman Mailer and James Baldwin had its moments, but, he told Adam Begley in the New York Observer, “It turned out to be very useful to see how many really bad books were being published. It was very encouraging.”Welcome to Hard Times was filmed by Burt Kennedy in 1967, with Henry Fonda in a lead role. Doctorow regarded it as the second worst film ever made. It was followed by a sci-fi novel, Big As Life (1966), which Doctorow regarded with deep embarrassment. He subsequently refused to allow it to be republished.
While continuing his day job at the Dial Press, he wrote 150 pages of a straight chronological narrative in the third-person about the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the great cause célèbre of the American left. They were executed in 1953: their trial, the impassioned campaign against the treason verdict, and the subsequent wrangling over what, actually, the Rosenbergs had done, came through in Doctorow’s narrative. But, as a novel, it was dead. He wanted to throw the manuscript on a fire. Out of frustration he began to tell the story through the eyes of the Rosenberg’s son, Daniel. It was Daniel’s voice, his New Left anger, which brought the book to life. “Not I, but Daniel would write the book.” The Book of Daniel appeared in 1971.
“One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.” The use of Daniel’s voice changed the book, and gave it a new meaning. He was no longer writing about the Rosenbergs (and did not, in any event, draw any conclusions about whether or not they were traitors), but exploited the narrative possibilities of shifting freely between the early 50s, as the net began to close around the Rosenbergs, and the late 60s, with its radically altered voice and sensibility. It was not possible to treat the book as a fictional plea on behalf of the wronged and persecuted Rosenbergs, nor did it take sides.
Some readers were puzzled by where Doctorow stood on the greatest of the Cold War treason trials. It was a test-run for Doctorow, whether it was possible to write a novel that was at once a political novel, a historical novel and a something which used all of the narrative possibilities created by being able to shift voices and times. The Book of Daniel was a powerful and brilliant novel. Giving up the day job seemed a real possibility.
Four years later, with the publication of Ragtime in 1975, Doctorow became one of the great international superstars of literary fiction. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for it, topping the Publisher’s Weekly annual fiction bestseller chart with hardback sales over 250,000.
Ragtime broke with the literary convention of a consistent and identifiable narrative voice. There is no quoted dialogue, merely an author’s summary which floats confidently between characters. He assumed that readers would grasp who JP Morgan was, and the ensemble of historical characters, led by Goldman, Nesbit, Henry Ford, Booker T Washington and Houdini, flattered his readers. Doctorow did more research for Ragtime than he was prepared to let on, but claimed that he had made them all up, as every character in the novel was similarly made up. But the figure of Coalhouse Walker Jr, searching for justice in a society where a black man could not find justice, was a creation of a stronger and more moving kind.
Ragtime was filmed in 1981 by Miloš Forman, who promptly dropped many of the plot lines woven into the novel, so he could concentrate upon the figure of Coalhouse Walker, played by Howard E Rollins Jr. The author was very disappointed at the loss of so much of the political content of the book.
Doctorow did the screenplay for Daniel, directed by Sidney Lumet in 1983, but the novel, and his screenplay, were lost along the way. It was neither a commercial or a critical success. Doctorow’s opinion about it is unprintable.
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At four or five yearly intervals, Doctorow published Loon Lake (1980), World’s Fair (1985), Billy Bathgate (1989) and The Waterworks (1994). Short story collections and essays followed along the way, as did the awards: the National Book award for World’s Fair in 1986, the National Book Critics Circle award and the PEN/Faulkner award for Billy Bathgate in 1989. In 1998 he received the National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In novel after novel he explored the uses of complex narrative devices. City of God, his first novel set in contemporary New York, mixed jazz-like improvisations on song lyrics, biographical sketches, monologues, notebook entries, and stories which, as it turned out, were fabrications – but interesting fabrications, which paradoxically struck many readers as the most engaging part of a novel of heavyweight ideas which Doctorow described as “a big kitchen sink of a book, with a lot of surprises and riffs and all sorts of things”.
It was followed by The March, which received a second National Book Critics Circle Award in 2005, and a second PEN/Faulkner award the following year.Homer & Langley followed in 2009. Andrew’s Brain, with its sharply honed satire of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, appeared in 2014.
Doctorow was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2012, and in 2013 received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the Library of Congress Prize for AmericanFiction in 2014.
He held the Loretta and Lewis Glucksman chair of English and American Letters at New York University, and donated his papers to the Fales Library at the university.
Of the writers of his generation, Doctorow reshaped the boundaries of his craft, and with great coherent purpose.
He is survived by Helen, and by three children, Jenny, Caroline and Richard.
• Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, novelist, born 6 January 1931; died 21 July 2015
If there was a Great American Novel it would be Doctorow’s Ragtime, that melting pot of historical presences and common people
EL Doctorow in his office at Dial Press in 1966. Photograph: Martha Holmes/The LIFE Images Collection
Michael Schmidt
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s relation to the American novel was radical, contrary and corrective. He respected his readers, and was a literal-minded, unillusioned patriot at odds with those who exploit patriotism. If there was a Great American Novel it would be Ragtime (1975), that melting pot of historical presences and common people, from Emma Goldman to JP Morgan,Henry Ford to Theodore Dreiser, the jazz trumpeter to the disenfranchised worker, resurrected with all their bodily functions functioning, in a world so vividly imagined that it breathes something more than oxygen back into their lungs.
Doctorow writes as a grandson of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who understands the world of outsiders. All of his novels cross, back and forth, the border between history and fiction, and feed historical understanding – of the civil war, the birth of the American century, the Depression, the McCarthy era. They are alive to social inequality and racial injustice, exploring that moral innocence which issues in the cruel, creative, reductive self-interest of the political, business and criminal worlds. He evokes the full spectrum, from American dream to American nightmare. John Updike loved his “information-rich prose“ and how his “impertinent imagination holds fast to the reality of history even as he paints it in heightened colours“.
Doctorow’s novels grow out of earlier novels as well as history. Billy Bathgate(1989) is an urban Huckleberry Finn; the narrator’s voice one of unattenuated innocence witnessing a predatory world. It is a road novel, a picaresque adventure. Is it true? No, Billy’s voice is nuanced beyond his years and education. Is it credible? Yes, because Doctorow has trusted his narrative instincts and gone with them, because of Billy’s “puckish truculence”. Welcome to Hard Times (1960) is an anti-western, “playing against the music already in the reader’s head”. There is not, as with Mailer or Roth or Bellow, a sense of oeuvre. Each of his novels starts from scratch. This worked against the recognition of his stature and his legacy, a library of freestanding books that belong equally on the history and literature shelves, that engage and memorably inform. But literature, he wrote, “gives to the reader something more than information. Complex understandings – indirect, intuitive and nonverbal – arise from the words of the story”. The reader lives the book.
Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the Rocks, Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow Rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing Madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of Roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty Lambs we pull; Fair lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and Ivy buds, With Coral clasps and Amber studs: And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love.
The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May-morning: If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me, and be my love.
*
Here are poems that answer, argue with, update, elaborate on, mock, interrogate, or pay tribute to poems of the past. We hear Leda's view of the Swan; feel sympathy for La Belle Dame sans Merci, and find out how Marvell's coy mistress might have answered his appeal. Raleigh's famous reply to Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" sparked a centuries-long debate that John Donne, William Carlos Williams, C. Day Lewis, and Ogden Nash could not resist joining. In these pages we see Denise Levertov respond to Wordsworth, Randall Jarrell to Auden, Ogden Nash to Byron, Donald Justice to César Vallejo. We also see contemporary poets responding to their peers with the same intriguing mix of admiration and impatience. Whether they offer approbation or reproof, the pleasures of a jazz riff or a completely different perspective, these remarkable poems are not only engaging themselves but also capable of casting surprising new light on the poems that inspired them.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), a man of extreme passions and a playwright of immense talent, is the most important of Shakespeare's contemporaries. This edition offers his five major plays, which show the radicalism and vitality of his writing in the few years before his violent death. Tamburlaine Part One and Part Two deal with the rise to world prominence of the great Scythian shepherd-robber; The Jew of Malta is a drama of villainy and revenge; Edward II was to influence Shakespeare's Richard II. Doctor Faustus, perhaps the first drama taken from the medieval legend of a man who sells his soul to the devil, is here in both its A- and its B- text, showing the enormous and fascinating differences between the two. Under the General Editorship of Dr. Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation.
Paperback: 544 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 22, 1998)
I keep thinking of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) as if he had been his own ...... for me to appreciate the story, but it was far more readable than I expected.
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on ...
“My Great Fear Is That We Have Much Less Time at Our Disposal Than We Imagined”
Seventy-five years ago this week, after nearly a decade in exile, health failing, and facing internment and transfer to a concentration camp, Walter Benjamin ended his own life with a massive dose of morphine. Much of what we know of Benjamin’s final years comes from what remains of his long correspondence with Theodor Adorno and with Gershom Scholem, among others, a body of letters through which he relates his increasingly precarious position in Europe. The letter below, dated August 2nd, 1940, was Benjamin’s last message to Adorno, save a brief note penned the night of his death.
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I was delighted to receive your letter of 15 July for a number of reasons–for one, because you kindly remembered my birthday; and for another, because of the great understanding which spoke from your words. No, it really is not that easy for me to write letters. I spoke to Felizitas1 about the enormous uncertainty in which I find myself concerning my writings (although I fear rather less for the notes and papers connected with the Arcades project2 than I do for the other materials). But as you know, things currently look no better for me personally than they do for my works. The circumstances that suddenly befell me in September3 could easily be repeated at any time, but now with a wholly different prospect. In the last few months, I have seen a good number of people who have not so much simply drifted out of their steady bourgeois existence as plunged headlong from it almost overnight; thus every reassurance provides an inner succor that is less problematic than the external support. And in this sense I was profoundly grateful to receive the document4 addressed “à ceux qu’il apartment.” I can easily imagine that the letterhead5, which was a delightful surprise, could significantly reinforce the possible effect of the document.
The complete uncertainty about what the next day, even the next hour, may bring has dominated my life for weeks now. I am condemned to read every newspaper (they now come out on a single sheet here) as if it were a summons served on me in particular, to hear the voice of fateful tidings in every radio broadcast. My attempt to reach Marseilles, in order to put my case at the Consulate there, was a wasted effort. For some time now it has been impossible for foreign nationals to obtain a permit for a change of residence. Thus I remain dependent on what all of you are doing for me from abroad. In particular, the prospect of hearing something from the Consulate in Marseilles renewed my hopes somewhat. A letter from the Consulate there would probably get me permission to go down to Marseilles. (I am actually still unable to decide whether I should make contact with any Consulates in the occupied territories. A letter which I sent to Bordeaux before the German occupation, received a fairly cordial but noncommittal answer: the required documents were still in Paris.)
I have heard something about your negotiations with Havana and your efforts concerning San Domingo. I am quite sure you are doing everything humanly possible, and indeed “more than humanly possible” as Felizitas puts it, to help me. My great fear is that we have much less time at our disposal than we imagined. And although I would not have contemplated the possibility a fortnight ago, new information received has moved me to ask Mme Favez, with the intervention of Carl Burckhardt, if she could possibly obtain permission for me to visit Switzerland on a temporary basis. I realize there is much to be said against trying this escape route, but there is one very powerful argument in its favor: and that is time. If only this way out were possible! – I have written a letter to Burckhardt for help.
You will be getting my curriculum vitae via Geneva–which is also how I shall probably be sending these lines. I have incorporated the bibliography of my writings into the biographical information because I don’t have the resources here to organize the material more precisely. (All in all it comes to approximately 450 items.) If a bibliography in the narrower sense is still required, the Institute’s official prospectus contains one you could use. I cannot provide you with a better one at present.
It is a great comfort for me to know that you remain “reachable” in New York, and constantly watchful, in the deepest sense, for me. Mr. Merril Moore lives in Boston at 384 Commonwealth Avenue. Mrs. W. Bryher, the publisher of Life and Letters Today has often mentioned me to him. He probably has a good idea of my situation and the will to do something to help. I think it might be worthwhile for you to get in touch with him.
For the rest, you can be sure that I have learned to value the efforts which Mrs. Favez is making on my behalf and her general reliability very much indeed.
I am very sorry to hear that Felizitas’ condition remains so unstable and that she will be unable to profit from a relaxing holiday break this time. Please give her my heartfelt regards.
Could you also pass on my sincere thanks and kindest regards to Herr Pollock.
Lots of love from your
Walter Benjamin
PS Please forgive the painfully complete signature: it is officially required.
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Felizitas: Benjamin’s nickname for Adorno’s wife, Gretel
the notes and papers connected with the Arcades project: Benjamin had handed these over to Georges Bataille, who concealed them in the Bibliotheque Nationale.
The circumstances that suddenly befell me in September: Benjamin is referring here to his internment, first outside Paris and subsequently at Nevers.
the document: i.e. officially confirming Benjamin’s association with the Institute.
the letterhead: the document in question appeared on the official headed paper of The Institute of Social Research, on which the name Walter Benjamin was also printed. In response to Hannah Arendt’s attacks on Adorno and the Institute in her essay “Walter Benjamin,” Friedrich Pollock later wrote to Hans Paeschke, the editor of Merkur, as follows: “In view of the rather scholastic philological precision which informs the polemic against Adorno, I can certainly inform you that documentary confirmation of Benjamin’s position in the Institute is available. I possess some official headed letter-paper from the Institute in New York which lists, under the head of “Research Staff,” the two directors first, and then the names of the “members” of the Institute in alphabetical order. The list commences with the names: “Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin...”
現為美國紐約大學比較文學系和東亞研究系教授。1986年北京大學中文系畢業。美國杜克大學文學博士。曾任教於美國新澤西州立羅格斯大學東亞系。著有Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-garde Fiction, and New Chinese Cinema, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: The Last Decade of China's Twentieth Century，《幻想的秩序：批評理論與現代中國文學話語》、 《批評的蹤跡︰文化理論與文化批評》、《全球化時代的文化認同︰西方普通主義話語的歷史批判》等。譯有《發達資本主義時代的抒情詩人：論波特萊爾》等。
王斑
美國斯坦福大學東亞系William Haas講座教授。加州大學洛杉磯分校比較文學博士，先後任教於紐約州立大學、新澤西羅格斯大學。學術寫作涉及文學、美學、歷史、國際政治、電影及大眾文化。主要著作有The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China, Narrative Perspective and Irony in Chinese and American Fiction, Illuminations from the Past，《歷史與記憶——全球現代性的質疑》(香港：牛津) 。1997與2001年兩次獲美國人文基金學術研究獎勵。
“I've long suspected dogs of being much smarter than people; I was even certain they could speak, but there was only some kind of stubbornness in them. They're extraordinary politicians: they notice every human step.” --from "The Diary of a Madman" included in "The Collected Tales" ByNikolai Gogol
Collected here are Gogol’s finest tales—stories that combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller—allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. All of Gogol’s most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. The wholly unique blend of the mundane and the supernatural that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time. From the acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov, a brilliant translation of Nikolai Gogol’s short fiction. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/61119/the-collected-tales/
"The Overcoat" (Russian: Шинель, translit. Shinel; sometimes translated as "The Cloak") is a short story by Ukrainian-born Russian author Nikolai Gogol, published in 1842. The story and its author have had great influence on Russian literature thus spawning Melchior de Vogüé's famous quote: "We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'." The story has been adapted into a variety of stage and film interpretations.
The story centers on the life and death of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin (Акакий Акакиевич Башмачкин), an impoverished government clerk and copyist in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg. Akaky is dedicated to his job as a titular councillor, taking special relish in the hand-copying of documents, though little recognized in his department for his hard work. Instead, the younger clerks tease him and attempt to distract him whenever they can. His threadbare overcoat is often the butt of their jokes. Akaky decides it is necessary to have the coat repaired, so he takes it to his tailor, Petrovich, who declares the coat irreparable, telling Akaky he must buy a new overcoat. The cost of a new overcoat is beyond Akaky's meagre salary, so he forces himself to live within a strict budget to save sufficient money to buy the new overcoat. Meanwhile, he and Petrovich frequently meet to discuss the style of the new coat. During that time, Akaky's zeal for copying is replaced with excitement about his new overcoat, to the point that he thinks of little else. Finally, with the addition of an unexpectedly large holiday salary bonus, Akaky has saved enough money to buy a new overcoat. Akaky and Petrovich go to the shops in St. Petersburg and pick the finest materials they can afford (marten fur is unaffordable, but they buy the best cat fur available for the collar). The new coat is of impressively good quality and appearance and is the talk of Akaky's office on the day he arrives wearing it. His clerk superior decides to host a party honoring the new overcoat, at which the habitually solitary Akaky is out of place; after the event, Akaky goes home from the party, far later than he normally would. En route home, two ruffians confront him, take his coat, kick him down, and leave him in the snow. Akaky finds no help from the authorities in recovering his lost overcoat. Finally, on the advice of another clerk in his department, he asks for help from a "Very Important Person" (sometimes translated the prominent person, the person of consequence), a high-ranking general. The narrator notes that the general habitually belittles subordinates in attempting to appear more important than he truly is. After keeping Akaky waiting an unnecessarily long time, the general demands of him exactly why he has brought so trivial a matter to him, personally, and not presented it to his secretary (the procedure for separating the VIP from the lesser clerks). Socially inept, Akaky makes an unflattering remark concerning departmental secretaries, provoking so powerful a scolding from the general that he nearly faints and must be led from the general's office. Soon afterward, Akaky falls deathly ill with fever. In his last hours, he is delirious, imagining himself again sitting before the VIP, who is again scolding him. At first, Akaky pleads forgiveness, but as his death nears, he curses the general. Soon, Akaky's ghost (Gogol uses "corpse" to describe the ghost of Akaky) is reportedly haunting areas of St. Petersburg, taking overcoats from people; the police are finding it difficult to capture him. Finally, Akaky's ghost catches up with the VIP — who, since Akaky's death, had begun to feel guilt over having mistreated him — and takes his overcoat, frightening him terribly; satisfied, Akaky is not seen again. The narrator ends his narration with the account of another ghost seen in another part of the city, but that one was taller and had a moustache, bearing a resemblance to the criminals who had robbed Akaky earlier.
Gogol makes much of Akaky's name in the opening passages, saying, "Perhaps it may strike the reader as a rather strange and farfetched name, but I can assure him that it was not farfetched at all, that the circumstances were such that it was quite out of the question to give him any other name..." In one way, the name Akaky Akakievich is similar to "John Johnson" and has similar comedic value; it also communicates Akaky's role as an everyman. Moreover, the name sounds strikingly similar to the word "obkakat'" in Russian, a word which means "to smear with excrement,"[1] or kaka, which means "poop", thereby rendering his name "Poop Poopson". In addition to the scatological pun, the literal meaning of the name, derived from the Greek, is "harmless" or "lacking evil", showcasing the humiliation it must have taken to drive his ghost to violence. His surname Bashmachkin, meanwhile, comes from the word 'bashmak' which is a type of shoe. It is used in an expression "быть под башмаком" which means to be "under someone's thumb" or to "be henpecked". Akaky progresses from an introverted, hopeless but functioning non-entity with no expectations of social or material success to one whose self-esteem and thereby expectations are raised by the overcoat. Co-workers start noticing him and complimenting him on his coat and he ventures out into the social world. His hopes are quickly dashed by the theft of the coat. He attempts to enlist the police in recovery of the coat and employs some inept rank jumping by going to a very important and high ranking individual but his lack of status (perhaps lack of the coat) is obvious and he is treated with disdain. He is plunged into illness (fever) and cannot function. He dies quickly and without putting up much of a fight. The Overcoat is a philosophical tale in the tradition of a stoic philosopher or Schopenhauer. Akaky's low position in the bureaucratic hierarchy is evident, and the extent to which he looks up the hierarchical ladder is well documented;[2] sometimes forgotten, according to Harold McFarlin, is that he is not the lowest-ranked in the hierarchy and thus in society. He has mastered the bureaucratic language ("bureaucratese") and has internalized it to the extent that he describes and treats the non-civil servants ("only two 'civilians,' the landlady and tailor, play more than incidental roles") as if they are part of the same world—the tailor is described as sitting "like a Turkish Pasha", that is, a government official, and Akaky "treats the self-effacing old landlady just like his bosses treat him at the office ('somehow coldly and despotically')".[3] The story's ending has sparked great debate amongst literary scholars, who disagree about the existence, purpose, and disappearance of Akaky's ghost. Edward Proffitt theorized that the ghost did not, in fact, exist at all and that Gogol used the ghost as a means of parodying literary convention. Proponents of the view that the story is a form of social protest prefer to see the ghost's attack on the Very Important Person as a reversal of power from the oppressor to the oppressed. Yet another view states that Akaky's return from the grave is symbolic of society's collective remorse, experienced as a result of failing to treat Akaky with compassion. The appearance of the second ghost is similarly unexplained. A logical inference, considering the time of its publication, would be that the second ghost represents Russian society and the fact that all criminals were mere responders to the mistreatment and malnourishment suffered at the hands of their leaders. Others disagree. Was it the mustachioed robbers who stole Akaky's coat originally? Does this mean that Akaky was, himself, robbed by ghosts? Was he, perhaps, not robbed at all, or possibly never had the new overcoat at all? Akaky's deteriorating mental state, brought about by fever and malnourishment, may have been responsible for many of his sufferings, including the existence of an overcoat far superior to his own. Another interpretation is that the story is a parable. Akaky's job, as a copier, can be compared to that of a monk, whose main job is to copy the Word, as Akaky does. He is taunted much by his fellow worker, much as Jesus was, and also like Jesus tempted by the devil, or the drunk, smoky, and harsh coat maker, marked as the devil by his habit of drinking on the sabbath. However, unlike Jesus, Akaky accepts the coat and becomes popular, until he has the coat stolen. One scene that shows what the coat has done to Akaky can be seen as he leaves the party, returning to his plain district before he has his coat stolen. As he returns to this area, he looks around and very much dislikes his living area. Before he had the coat, he was completely fine with his living area and completely fine with his life. With the overcoat, he finds he wants more. And after he loses his overcoat, he cannot function and simply dies.
Vladimir Nabokov, writing in his Lectures on Russian Literature, gave the following appraisal of Gogol and his most famous story: "Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent. When, as in the immortal The Overcoat, he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced."[4]
The Bespoke Overcoat (1955) - a British film directed by Jack Clayton based on Wolf Mankowitz's 1953 play of the same name. Here the story is transposed to the East End of London and the protagonists are poor Jews working in the clothing trade.
The Overcoat (2001) - a Canadian made-for-TV film produced by the CBC
The Overcoat (2011) - a theatre play at the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre by Howard Colyer
One film is currently in the process of being made: animation directorYuriy Norshteyn has been slowly and laboriously working on a (presumably) full-length animated film version of 'The Overcoat' since 1981. A couple of short, low-resolution clips from the project have been made available:.[5]
The Russian composer German Okunev was working on a ballet version of 'The Overcoat' at the time of his death in 1973: it was completed and orchestrated by V. Sapozhnikov. A recent adaptation by Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling, set to various music by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, was performed by actors using dance and mime.[6] A film version was produced by the CBC. The Danish choreographer Flemming Flindt created a version for Dennis Nahat and the Clevelend-San Jose Ballet. The principal role was performed by Rudolph Nureyev at the world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1990.
Marcel Marceau adapted "The Overcoat" as a Mime Play in 1951. He revived his play in 1954 and 1959. His last version of "The Overcoat" toured the United States in 1960.[citation needed]
The protagonist in the 2003 novel The Namesake is named for Gogol because of the importance that "The Overcoat" had on his father as a young man in Calcutta. The book's Gogol finds meaning in the story, after struggling with the name given to him by his father. In the novel, Gogol's father justifies his choice for his son's name by saying "We all came out of Gogol's Overcoat......One day you will understand..."[citation needed]
^Chizhevsky, Dimitry (1974). "About Gogol's Overcoat". In Robert Maguire. Gogol From the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP. pp. 295–322.
Gogol, Nicolai V. The Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965
Graffy, Julian Gogol's The Overcoat: Critical Studies in Russian Literature London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000.
Karlinsky, Simon. The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago,1992. Print.
Proffitt, Edward Gogol's `Perfectly True' Tale: `The Overcoat' and Its Mode of Closure, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter, 1977, pp. 35–40
2015.9.26夜， 讀《五十自述》，竟然引用Søren Kierkegaard的話：契爾克加德："沒有一個世代的人能從前一代學知真正的人生，由這方面來看，每一世代都是原始的。它所負的工作並無與前一代的有什麼不同！它亦不能勝過前一代而更進步。例如沒有一個世代能從前一代學知如何去愛，除從頭做起之外，也沒有一個世代能有任何其他開始點。同樣，信仰亦是如此。......" 現在網路可找到： “Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing...Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.”
《明理論》牟宗三譯，台北學生書局，1987Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung by Ludwig Wittgenstein維根斯坦
泰戈爾的詩──我們在夢裡是不相識的；醒來以後，卻知道我們原是相親相愛的。
中國文化的省察作者：牟宗三出版社：聯經出版公司 ：1983年
距這些演講已約30年 中國仍將文化文化當成 matter 而不是 FORM 仍然無法談魏京生的第五現代化 在宗教和道德等質的層面上 仍然乏善可陳
The History of the Peloponnesian War is a historical account of the Peloponnesian War, which was fought between the Peloponnesian League and the Delian League. Wikipedia
Professor Graham Allison of the Harvard Kennedy School has popularized the phrase “Thucydides' trap,” to explain the likelihood of conflict between a rising power and a currently dominant one.May 6, 2015
“It takes a great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.” --from "An Ideal Husband" included in "Plays, Prose Writings and Poems" By Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde has been acknowledged as the wittiest writer in the English language. This collection proves that he was also one of the most versatile. Effortlessly achieved, each revealing a different aspect of his brilliance, all of the plays, prose writings, and poems gathered here support Wilde’s belief that entertainment provides the best kind of edification. The works gathered here include Wilde’s once-controversial and now classic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the rioutously (sic) comic plays “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” and the famous poem he wrote after being released from prison, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” This expanded new edition now includes the complete version of Wilde’s moving letter from prison, De Profundis, and his teasing parable about Shakespeare, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Other notable included writings are the semi-comic mystery story “Lord Arthur’s Savile’s Crime” 這篇譯文很多種，譬如說馮亦代的"亞瑟薩維爾勳爵的罪行" and the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.
"Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motives." --Lord Henry from THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
"I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty." --Dorian from THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
"To lie finely is an art, to tell the truth is to act according to nature." -- Oscar Wilde
"Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable." --from "The Critic as Artist"
"Chances are you’ll never have a conversation as scintillating as the one Oscar Wilde was overheard conducting at a gathering in San Francisco in 1882. At the time, the 27-year-old Irish upstart had yet to write any of the works that would earn his fame. Undercredentialed as Wilde then was, his verbal verve and outlandish dress (satin breeches, velvet jackets, black cape) had made him a sought-after dinner guest in London and prompted a 10-month American tour, where his brio met with an ecstatic reception. “It was a superb performance, a masterpiece of sparkling wit and gaiety,” wrote one audience member in an account of the event. “Never before, or since, have I heard anything that compared to it.” Who was Wilde’s lucky interlocutor? It was a dressmaker’s dummy: The man was, in essence, talking with himself..."
A cultural historian argues that Oscar Wilde was among the first to realize that celebrity could come before accomplishment.
NYTIMES.COM|由 LIESL SCHILLINGER 上傳
“Everyone quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince
The British Library Oscar Wilde died #onthisday in 1900. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was widely criticised upon publication and it was many years after his death that the book was finally recognised as a classic. Want to surprise someone who loves Oscar Wilde? Adopt this book for them. http://bit.ly/1AYI90y Oscar Wilde died #onthisday in 1900. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was widely criticised upon publication and it was many years after his death that the book was finally recognised as a classic. Want to surprise someone who loves Oscar Wilde? Adopt this book for them. http://bit.ly/1AYI90y
Happy Birthday to Oscar Wilde, born on this day in 1854. When this photograph was taken in January 1882, Oscar Wilde had not yet written "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and the plays that would make him famous in the next decade.
Featured Artwork of the Day: Napoleon Sarony (American (born Canada), 1821–1896) | Oscar Wilde | 1882 http://met.org/1ukuIDR
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek - Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland, has discovered in its holdings five books from the private library of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Five seems a small number, however, up to now, only 42 books from Wilde's library were known to have survived in public collections.
【本書目錄】
