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I am supposed to attend a performance of Princess Ivona (the English title) by Witold Gombrowicz this weekend and I wanted to write about the play in advance. For the record, there will be lots of spoilers in this post. Gombrowicz wrote Ivona, Princess of Burgundia from 1933 to 1935 and it was first published […]
Rustic Baroque by Jiří Hájíček, translation from the Czech by Gale A. Kirking (Brno: Real World Press, 2012) As I mentioned in the post on Rustic Baroque there were also four stories from Hájíček’s collection The Wooden Knife included in the book. Memories of a Village Dance in 1986 The Wooden Knife Horses are Supposed […]
Posting will resume soon…I’ve been assisting my wife lately with her website. For anyone with kids check out her site “kids + love + acupuncture: tips from A – Z to keep your kids healthy” and follow her on pinterest. Thanks to the last article I know more about kids’ constipation than I ever wanted […]
10th century CE Greek copy of Aristachus Samos’s 2nd century BCE calculations of the relative sizes of the Sun, Moon and the Earth Picutre source Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) So stupendous is the work of the Greeks in art, literature, and philosophy that there […]
Marginalia on Casanova by Miklós Szentkuthy St. Orpheus Breviary, Vol. 1 Translation by Tim Wilkinson Introduction by Zéno Bianu (Translation by Rainer J. Hanshe) Afterword by Mária Tompa (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012) ISBN 9780983697244This is one of the strangest and most enjoyable books I’ve read in quite a while. I have hesitated to […]
The Shadow Benito Pérez Galdós Translated by Karen O. Austin (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980) My inadvertent “Galdós in English translation” project continues with his first novel… The Shadow (La sombra) was written by Galdós in 1866 or 1867 but wasn’t published until 1870 in serial form. It was his first novel and, although […]
Codex Heidelbergensis 398 The single surviving manuscript of Hanno’s Periplus Locate din the Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg Picture sourceOff the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) For the most part the student must lament that ‘the iniquity of oblivion’ has overtaken work of the utmost value, but sometimes a precious […]
A few links I wanted to pass on… An interview with Margaret Jull Costa at The White Review What is one to make of ‘a solidão de esparguete da girafa’ on page one? Should I have translated that as ‘the spaghetti solitude of the giraffe’ rather than ‘the lofty, long-drawn-out solitude of the giraffe’, which […]
Rustic Baroque by Jiří Hájíček Translation from the Czech by Gale A. Kirking (Brno: Real World Press, 2012)Links: Opening the wounds of collectivization: Rustic Baroque in English Czech literature portal’s new book notice A pdf of the first few pages in the book (There are more links at Real World Press but not all the […]
Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) Kaeppel begins his book with an essay on “Gais Iulius Solinus, a Teller of Wonder-Tales”. Solinus’ work, the Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium (Gallery of Wonderful Things), was written somewhere between 230 and 280 A.D. by Kaeppel’s reckoning. Different editions of it […]