Literary Quiz 30-9-26

ams commemorations - May 8 - 15

 

ams - commemorations - May 1 - 7

 

ams - commemoration July 17- July 23, 2023

 

02723 - ams - commemoration digest # 1

 

30623 - ams - commemoration digest - Life and Times of Czelaw Miloz

 

26623 - ams - commemoration digest # 2 - Who is Laurie Lee?

 

25623 - Commemorative Digests - Yann Martel, George Orwell, Ana María Matute

 

24623 - ams - commemoration digests - Three Writers - Julia Kristeva, Anita Desai and Ernesto Sábato

 

ams - commemoration - The People's Poet - Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova begins Rekviem with these lines: “No, not under a foreign sky/ Nor in the shelter of a foreign wing,/ With my people, there stood I / With them, in their suffering.” Akhmatova spent 17 months waiting in long queues outside a jail in Leningrad to find out what had happened to her son, picked up during a purge. The lines above are based on that experience. Her son’s arrest may have led Akhmatova to write Rekviem, but by doing so she was also giving voice to countless mothers whose irreparable losses must be remembered forever. It is said that Akhmatova composed Rekviem, in her mind. The ideas are based on the thousands of people rounded up and sent to the Gulag, it survived only in the memory of a few close friends she narrated it to. It was first published in 1963 by the Society of Russian Émigré Writers. It never saw the light of day in the Soviet Union till it's dissolution. Anna Akhmatova is one of the best known and most loved Russian poets. In addition to poetry, she wrote prose including memoirs, autobiographical pieces, and literary scholarship on Russian writers such as Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. She also translated Italian, French, Armenian, and Korean poetry.

 

22623 - ams - commemoration - Feel inspired by Octavia E Butler's life

Butler was raised by her mother who worked as a maid and her grandmother. Butler remembered accompanying her mother to work at wealthy homes in Pasadena and having to enter through the back door. Her mother, who only had three years of formal schooling, worked incredibly hard to make sure Butler had more opportunities and a better education than she had.  At school, she was a shy and  lonely student who struggled with dyslexia. The school library was her second home. She had an endless hunger for stories and frequently made up her own while sitting on her grandmother’s porch. By the age of ten she could be found carrying around a large notebook, writing down stories whenever she got a free moment. When she was 13 years, she submitted her first story for publication. She used to get up at two A.M. every morning to write and went on to do a series of odd jobs for livelihood. She once told PBS that her life motto was, “Do the thing that you love, and do it as well as you possibly can and be persistent about it.” Since 2008, Butler’s annotations, notes, research materials, and drafts of novels have been housed at the Huntington Library in California.  You may visit this link explore the world of Octavia Estelle Butler 

 

https://huntington.org/exhibition/octavia-e-butler-telling-my-stories

 

 

21623 - ams - Creativity and Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a lover of classical literature and her translations of classical writers such as Sappho and Euripides are popular. A high-school encounter with a Latin instructor, who agreed to teach her ancient Greek over the lunch hour, led to her passionate embrace of classical and Hellenic literature. Carson is a private person. She prefers to be alone. When her husband is traveling, Carson will call and tell him, “I miss you, but I’m having a great time.” Carson’s most popular book is the “Autobiography of Red,” which takes its cue from the legend of Hercules. The story is retold as a modern times and Carson makes some significant choices. In 2001, Carson published 'The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos' , a verse novel which was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize. Carson continues to be an important and exciting translator of classical writers. Carson considers herself as a visual, not a verbal, artist. It is interesting to note that a new comic-book version of Euripides’s classic 'The Trojan Women', is published which us collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson. It is a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare.

 

20623 – ams – commemoration – Vikram Seth’s Chinese Connections

Vikram Seth likes to do different things. He developed an interest in Mandarin which drew him closer to China. During that time, he read Chinese literature and explored the art of calligraphy. 'Three Chinese Poets' is a book of poetry translated into English from Chinese by Vikram Seth. The three poets in the title are, Wang Wei (699–761 AD), Li Bai (701–762 AD) and Du Fu (712–770 AD). They are regarded as the greatest literary figures not only of China, but also the world. Wang Wei with his quiet love of nature and Buddhist philosophy; Li Bai, the Taoist spirit, with his wild, flamboyant paeans to wine and the moon; and Du Fu, with his Confucian sense of sympathy with the suffering of others in a time of civil war and collapse. They all belonged to the T’ang dynasty. The originals were written in the Northern Chinese, a language that is lost today. In the introduction to the book, Seth talks about the collection of Chinese poetry translated by Ezra Pound labelled as 'Cathay' which was noted for its errors. "The famous translations of Ezra Pound, compounded as they are of ignorance of Chinese and valiant self-indulgence, have remained before me as a warning of what to shun". Vikram Seth also mentions how difficult the process of translation was. "I have tried not to compromise the meaning of the actual words of the poems, though I have often failed".

 

20623 - ams - commemoration - Lillian Hellman - The Socially Conscious Dramatist

 

Lillian Hellman was the first woman to be admitted to the club of American dramatists, writing a hit play when she was 29. She was a playwright, a screenwriter and a memoirist and a political activist. Her popularity is based on the two enormously successful plays from the 1930s: 'The Children's Hour' (1934) and 'The Little Foxes' (1939). 'The Children's Hour', was Hellman's first play. It is the story of two women running a school for girls whose lives are ruined by a malicious student spreading the lie that they are lovers. The play was banned in London, Chicago, and Boston. 'The Children's Hour' was considered too scandalous for the Pulitzer prize. It was an immense hit in Paris and New York running on Broadway for almost two years. Like many writers of her generation, Hellman was an outspoken leftist in the 1930s whose political convictions often landed her in trouble. Towards the end of the career, she began writing the four volumes of legendarily unreliable memoirs, 'An Unfinished Woman', 'Pentimento', 'Scoundrel Time' and 'Maybe'. All four were critical and commercial successes, 'An Unfinished Woman' winning the National Book award in 1969. Hellman's plays are still frequently staged around the world.