Posts

Showing posts from September, 2023

Seamus Heaney Tribute

Image
Remembering Seamus Heaney SH interview What is your own apology for poetry? What is poetry good for? To quote my friend Derek Ma­hon, they keep the colors new. They rinse things [Mi làm phiền ta quá. Kiếp trước mi đúng là con đỉa. Mi có lời xin lỗi như thế nào, đối với ta? Ta đẹp ở chỗ nào? Tôi xin trích dẫn bạn tôi: Thơ làm sắc màu luôn tươi rói. Thơ kỳ cọ đời... ] . Remembering Seamus Heaney SH interview What is your own apology for poetry? What is poetry good for? To quote my friend Derek Ma­hon, they keep the colors new. They rinse things [Mi làm phiền ta quá. Kiếp trước mi đúng là con đỉa. Mi có lời xin lỗi như thế nào, đối với ta? Ta đẹp ở chỗ nào? Tôi xin trích dẫn bạn tôi: Thơ làm sắc màu luôn tươi rói. Thơ kỳ cọ đời...

Kundera Tribute

Image
  L'EUROPE RÊVÉE DE KUNDERA   L'écrivain tchèque entre ce mois-ci dans la Pléiade. Installé en France depuis 1975, Milan Kundera est partout célébré pour avoir ressuscité une Europe centrale dont l'identité avait été annihilée par la logique bipolaire. Mais sa vision de l'histoire est idéalisée. VACLAV BELOHRADSKY. Literarni Noviny. L’idée d'Europe centrale aura été le premier grand thème lancé par Milan Kundera, avec un succès surprenant. Avant que l'écrivain tchèque ne s'en mêle, les éditeurs de l'Ouest traitaient les œuvres issues de la région comme de simples témoignages sur le communisme, pas nécessairement d'une grande importance littéraire, mais que le « monde libre » se faisait un devoir moral de publier. À cette époque, il est vrai, chaque intellectuel exilé de l'Europe communiste avait la possibilité de vivre de l'industrie politico-culturelle qui s'était créée autour de la fr

A Burnt-Out Case

Image
  Introduction In some ways this was a perfect book for me - even though its themes and concerns are very much in the realm of imperfection. I first read it as a young Catholic growing up in Africa, at a time when leper colonies were still common. I can remember visiting one with my mother. It was run by nuns at Ntakataka on Lake Malawi. 1 was horrified by the sheer smoothness of the attenuated limbs that the former lepers proffered, just as happens in the novel: 'Deo Gratias was knocking on the door. Querry heard the scrape of his stump as it attempted to raise the latch. A pail of water hung on his wrist like a coat on a cloakroom knob.' For me the book's power was amplified by the fact that five or six years before I read A Burnt-out Case my father had lost most of one of his arms in a car accident in the bush. It left him with a rounded stump like those of the men and women I had seen in the leprosarium. He had an artificial arm