26623 - ams - commemoration digest - Aimé Césaire Remembered

 

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

 

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

 

 

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".

 

19623 - ams - commemoration # 1 - The World of Salman Rushdie

 

Just nine days after the publication of his novel 'Satanic Verses', a fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie. The Japanese translator of the work, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in 1991. Italian translator Ettore Capriolo and Norwegian publisher William Nygard were also targeted, surviving the attacks with severe injuries. Rushdie's father was a successful business man and the family could afford to send their son to a British boarding school at the age of 14. In 1964, Rushdie became a British citizen and took up English as his preferred language to write in. He studied history at King’s College in Cambridge and took courses in theatre before graduating in 1968. He has written 12 novels and many collection of essays and non-fiction. His second book, 'Midnight’s Children' won him a Man Booker Prize and became a bestseller in the US. Rushdie, in 2021 said that he will set his next novel in India. He is planning to return to India after many years. The author last came to India for the promotion of Deepa Mehta's 2013 film "Midnight's Children". Rushdie has worked with artist Ai Weiwei and writers Margaret Atwood and Isabel Allende on a worldwide campaign by the PEN International writers association to support writers in exile. In 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted the award-winning author and freedom of expression warrior. Recently, Rushdie was honoured on the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II awarded the Order of the Companions for his services in the field of literature. 

17623 - ams - commemorations - The life and times of Dorothy M Richardson

 

Almost a hundred a years ago, a publishing company brought out a little book about a student teacher in Germany. The name of the book was 'Pointed Roofs' and the author's name was Dorothy M Richardson. The story was narrated through the consciousness of the heroine. This new style made the readers perplexed. Critics found it difficult to convey the charm of the book. It was the first book to be labelled stream of consciousness, even though Richardson hated that phrase. But the stream of consciousness became a literary genre which was later found in the novels of Virginia Woolf especially Mrs Dalloway. Today, four authors are interlinked because of this literary genre - James Joyce, Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Dorothy M. Richardson. 'Pointed Roofs' was the first of a series called Pilgrimage, a gigantic 13- volume semi-autobiographical narrative. Her novels can also be treated as a slice of history. She always portrayed the struggles and the joys of a lonely female worker in London. H.G Wells was her friend, and it is presumed that they had an affair. Today we can witness a blue plaque at Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, where she lived, opposite Yeats, in 1905 and 1906. She has mentioned that across the alley from her flat, she could see W. B. Yeats writing by the light of "two immensely tall, thick white candles." She died on June 17, 1957, alone, greatly forgotten and in poverty.

15623 - ams - commemoration # 1 - Issa and the Healing Power of Art

 

Kobayashi Issa reminds us that the realm of sympathy and concern is limitless. He is a Japanese haiku poet from the late 1700s. 'Issa' in Japanese means 'Cup-of-Tea’. He is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashōō, Busonand Shiki — "the Great Four. His catalogue of poems is vast – some 20,000 haikus. Issa wrote 54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on the firefly, more than 150 on the mosquito, 90 on flies, over 100 on fleas and nearly90 on the cicada, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures. Issa was a lay priest in the True Pure Land Buddhism school. Issa’s mother died when he was young. He was perpetually impoverished and sick, occasionally homeless. He was a widower and the father of three children who perished in infancy. Issa lost his house and was forced to live in a windowless storehouse. This building was designated a National Historic Site of Japan in 1933. Just before his death, his disciples asked him to give them a last verse, he opened his eyes and murmured 'A bath when you're born, a bath when you die, how stupid.

14623 - ams - commemoration #1 - The book that launched a civil war - 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' remembered

 

Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with these words: "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’ touched the hearts of northerners and forced them to fight against the Southerners and slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe is recognized as a writer who played an important role in changing history with her book. She published the book in two volumes in 1852. Within the first year of publication, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ sold 300,000 copies. ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’ has now been published in over 75 languages and is still an important text used in schools all over the world. This book was written at a time when women did not have a right to vote, have legal rights, or the right to speak in public meetings. One year after the publication of the book, she wrote another one titled ‘A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. This was done to defend her novel against her critics, who accused her of falsifying and exaggerating the novel’s representation of slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe House is a project aimed at preserving the legacy of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Beecher family home in Cincinnati, Ohio.

100 Years of Chauri Chaura