Amber pages
Ettore Schmitz (a.k.a. Italo Svevo), novelist, born today in 1861. Svevo was one of James Joyce's first students, when he arrived as a would-be private English teacher in Trieste, and Svevo would later donate both his wife's name (Livia), and her magnificent "plura belle" hair to ALP, the female heroine of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake"; and Joyce in return would donate copy after copy of Svevo's "La coscienza di Zeno" (sometimes translated as "Confessions of Zeno", sometimes as "Zeno's Conscience") to anyone interested in great literature. More on their teacher-pupil, writer-writer friendship here. Read William Weaver's translation of the book without needing to tip (that's a Joyce-joke), here
Jean Genet, French dramatist, born today in 1910
Alois Alzheimer, German psychiatrist, died today in 1915, still compos mentis by all accounts; and if I have chosen to honour him at the time of his death, it is only because, in most cases, it is at that end of life that his name most frequently gets mentioned.
And today, not just GER but Gerrr, in 1984 - how could she? - Britain - no, not Britain, England, and not even all of England - agreed to "return" Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty by 1997. Return? The word, Your Non-Majesty, is "surrender", and the two that should follow are "you" and then "traitor"... No, don't get me started about Margaret Thatcher or I shall be doing GER day and thinking about that statue in the Guildhall...
You
can find David Prashker at:
Copyright
© 2018 David Prashker
All
rights reserved
The
Argaman Press
No comments:
Post a Comment