tinvan

  Emperor of Nostalgia J.M. Coetzee February 28, 2002 issue Reviewed: The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth translated from the German and with an introduction by Michael Hofmann Norton, 281 pp., $27.95 1. At the apogee of a reign that commenced in 1848 and ran until 1916, Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, ruled over some fifty million subjects. Of these fewer than a quarter spoke German as a first language. Even within Austria itself every second person was a Slav of one kind or another—Czech, Slovak, Pole, Ukrainian, Serb, Croat, Slovene. Each of these ethnic groups had aspirations to become a nation in its own right, with all the appurtenances of nationhood, including a national language and a national literature. The mistake of the imperial government, we can see with hindsight, was to take these aspirations too lightly, to believe that the advantages of belonging to an enlightened, prosperous, peaceful, multiethnic state would always outweigh the pull of sep...

  Why Read the Classics? Italo Calvino A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. October 9, 1986 issue Let us begin with a few suggested definitions. 1) The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading….” This at least happens among those who consider themselves “very well read.” It does not hold good for young people at the age when they first encounter the world, and the classics as a part of that world. The reiterative prefix before the verb “read” may be a small hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book. To reassure them, we need only observe that, however vast any person’s basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read. Hands up, anyone who has read the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Thucydides! And Saint-Simon? And Cardinal de Retz? But even the great nineteenth-century cycles of novels are mo...

Trích Văn Hóa Magazine  của Lý Kiến Trúc Tuệ Sĩ, điệp khúc dương trần Đặng Tiến Cập nhật : 06/10/2009 23:12 ...Ngôn ngữ lấp lánh ánh sáng tâm cảm và ngoại gới, trầm tư và huyễn mộng. Hình ảnh chập chờn, ngôn từ lảo đảo, như những tiếng dương cầm đuổi bắt nhau, chưa kịp tương phùng đã muôn đời vĩnh quyết... Tuệ Sĩ, điệp khúc dương trần Đặng Tiến Trước đây, mạng Diễn Đàn có giới thiệu tập thơ song ngữ Những điệp khúc cho dương cầm – Refrains pour piano – của Tuệ Sĩ, do bà Dominique de Miscault dịch ra tiếng Pháp, và minh họa trang nhã. Lúc đó, tác phẩm vừa mới in xong. Hôm nay, tập thơ đã được phát hành và ra mắt dưới dạng một buổi tọa đàm tại Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh, khách sạn Legend, ngày 27-9-2009, với sự hiện diện của tác giả và dịch giả. Ngoài ra, chúng tôi được biết sách hiện có bày bán nhiều nơi tại Paris, giá 10 €uros. Vậy xin trở lại, giới thiệu thi phẩm căn cơ hơn : Tuệ Sĩ là bậc danh sĩ cao tăng, đã trọng nhiệm nhiều chức vụ trong hàng giáo phẩm Phật giáo Việt Nam. Trong ...

  The Spirit of Play Charles Simic November 3, 2005 issue Reviewed: Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera by Anne Carson Knopf, 245 pp., $24.95 Glass, Irony and God by Anne Carson New Directions, 142 pp., $14.00 (paper) Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson Dalkey Archive, 190 pp.,$12.95 (paper) See All Anne Carson; drawing by David Levine Buy Print 1. Decreation is Anne Carson’s ninth collection of writings. It includes poems, essays, a screenplay, and an opera libretto. In the last twenty years, she has published two books of essays, one of translations, and five other books that are not easy to classify, since they contain not only poetry but a great variety of prose. While she is perfectly capable of composing a straightforward essay or a poem, montage is her preferred technique, allowing all her multiple talents as an essayist, a literary critic, a classical scholar, a translator, and a philologist to come into play. “A fictional essay in 29 tangos” is how, for instance, she descr...