LITERATURA > INTERNACIONAL

Verso e Pessoa

Poderá servir esta breve antologia, organizada pelo autor dos poemas que a constituem, para apresentar aos leitores portugueses boa parte da produção poética de Ricardo Martinez-Conde que se exprime ora em castelhano – a sua língua de formação, assim como ferramenta para o seu trabalho de docente universitário -, ora no seu próprio idioma, o galego, que ele nasceu, em 1951, em Aldariz, no termo da estação turística de Sanxenxo.

Londres volverá a ser la capital del libro y del fanzine en español entre los próximos días 11 y 19 de octubre con la celebración de la tercera edición del London Spanish Book & Zine Fair 2021 (LSBF).

The “logical thinker”, as Borges affirms (1), can find “patterns” in poetic metaphors. I will try to indicate some logical patterns in eight books.

Moby Dick

The Encyclopaedia Britannica poorly affirms that Melville's Moby Dick (1) admits “numerous, if not seemingly infinite, readings” (2), and that the keys to understand it are the biblical verses and names. This suggestion is based in the old hermeneutics, whose three mainstays are: “mystice”, “allegorice”, “symbolice”.

If the King Philip II used the expression “that lady” to name Ana de Mendoza, the Princess of Eboli, in a derogatory and revengeful way, Kate O’Brien gave it a different meaning as the title of her seventh novel, published in 1947.

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is useful to knit literary readings. With some Kantian principles and without ancient erudition we have attained hermeneutic conclusions on Homer, conclusions which coincide with the Homeric opinions of masters like Matthew Arnold and Alexander Pope. Homer says (The Iliad, book three, translated by George Chapman):

Spain-Ireland Awards

The María Zambrano Center for Transatlantic Studies at the University of Malaga (AMZET) advocates for the continuous promotion of research regarding the relations between Spain and Ireland. For this purpose, it has announced the Spain-Ireland Awards that include three categories in different areas: The George Campbell Award, the Kate O’Brien Award, and the Robert Boyd Award.

Cuirfear deireadh ag meánoíche anocht (31 Nollaig 2021) leis an maolú a bhí i bhfeidhm ar stádas na Gaeilge sna hInstitiúidí Eorpacha agus beidh sí anois ar chomhchéim le teangacha oifigiúla eile an AE. Is ar an 1 Eanáir 2007 a tugadh stádas oifigiúil agus oibre don Ghaeilge ach bhí socrú maolaithe i bhfeidhm ó shin i leith, mar gheall ar ghanntanas foirne aistriúcháin, a chuir srian ar an méid ábhair a aistríodh go Gaeilge.

La Semana Cervantina se traslada este año a México, país al que viajará Luis García Montero del 21 al 24 de abril para recoger el legado de la última poeta viva del exilio republicano, Carmen Castellote y participar en varias actividades culturales organizadas por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) con motivo del Día Internacional del Libro. García Montero mantendrá, además, varias reunionse con representantes del Gobierno mexicano.

We have all heard on occasion that the American company Coca-Cola once produced a completely colorless version. The strategy was a total fiasco, because consumers around the world were used to the dark caramel color of this most typical American soft drink.

I pretend to teach how I perused public opinion and caused social conflicts when I was a political propagandist. I will not do this anymore. I am repented. Our mind displays three fundamental operations, which could be called, for the sake of simplicity, “unions”, “separations” and “comparisons”. These mental movements carry two paradigms, namely: monism and atomism.

They were two exceptional women. One was born in Ávila, Spain, in the sixteenth century, and another in Limerick Ireland, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Tierra inestable

Viví en Winchester una temporada. Yo era bastante más joven de lo que soy, y aquel pueblo me parecía un mundo. Ahora, que la edad me bendice con el don de la perspectiva (a veces), he podido aprender dos cosas: en primer lugar, que aquel pueblo liliputiense no era tan grande cómo me parecía entonces. En segundo lugar, que es mi gran punto de unión con la literatura: comienza por la historia del Rey Arturo, su espada y su mesa redonda, y termina (de momento) en Claire Fuller.

A literary personage is neither the psychological outcome of an eery aery fluke, which may be termed “fiction”, nor bread swelled by merely leavening dough with the sour sweat of our foreshadowing brows, which can be named “mimesis”. Writers of the world, we’ve a bunch of easy techniques to hoist plausible personages. In my sight, for instance, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies has been a top-notch well of aesthetic wisdom. Furthermore, it contains, in a buttonholing way, some well wrought literary tricks.

El director del Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, viaja a Malabo, capital de Guinea Ecuatorial, del 20 al 22 de julio para inaugurar la Tribuna del Hispanismo Ecuatoguineano, un foro de encuentro con hispanistas del país africano, y se reunirá con el presidente de la Academia Ecuatoguineana de la Lengua Española (AEGLE), Agustín Nze Nfumu, así como con varios escritores.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

With a simple reasoning we could explain the theory that sustains the great book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, hoisted by Edward Gibbon. That reasoning is: a society unavoidably subjected to material conditions can be described in terms of tragedy; a society ruled by reason, that is, one that is free, can be described in terms of epic; but a society compounded by rational beings that is deceived by material accidents and psychological illusions deserves to be described in terms of satire. The said book is a methodic, philosophical, elegant and perdurable jeer against irrational beings, whose pretext was Rome. The famous sentence of Gibbon, quoted here and there as a slogan of the said work, thus gets a meaning, and it says: history is “the register of the crimes and follies and misfortunes of mankind” (1).

The following topics constitute the structure of the digital reputation of a public figure, and are either solid props to ameliorate or sustain it or accursed arms to destroy it. The young technocratic masses of our age feel they do not have some place in our modern economical and political structure, and that they are foredoomed to material poverty and invisibility, and by reason of this they eagerly applaud social media personages who appear before them relishing lyrical pleasures, e.g., a costly goblet of wine, a pied dash, a Cuban cigarette, or a bottle of whiskey with more peripeteias than them.

The ensuing anthropological depictions of moral corruption, I hope, will be useful for those propagandists who are working on behalf of justice. This brief text is the result of my observations in the spheres of politics and my multifarious readings. Our mind, when we suffer an accident here, a misfortune there, a disgrace today, and the bitter fruits of our improvident facts dropping like a rain of pain upon us, tends to frame a metaphysical scene in which tragedy is the main protagonist. Tragedy is a system too, which sometimes presents a light in order to alleviate the painful life of humanity. This light is called, in accordance with the analyses of Machiavelli, “occasione” (1).

This piebald comparative inquiry is the kernel of two experiences with two wenches. As I was gallivanting across a rut of kennels of a street of New York, I saw a hairlanked black woman, and I wooed her by using my most poetical and knightly resources and polite letters. Amid that hectic cityscape she accepted my words, which at that moment were only an echo of a line of a poem written by Lord Byron: “She walks in beauty, like the night” (1). She smiled, and we are good records of love now. I did the same thing in Mexico with another coloured lass. Decorum does not permit me to describe her barbarian reaction.

Portada de "Hotel Splendid" de Marie Redonnet

De hoteles y ruinas varias habló Juan Diego Madueño en El Mundo con su reportaje sobre el Hotel Joma en Jerez de la Frontera. Sin embargo, y a pesar de que la historia del “Hotel Splendid” de Marie Redonnet trate sobre un hotel al borde de la ruina, esta obra publicada en 1986, y ahora en español por la Editorial Malas Tierras, juega en su propia liga y presenta un escenario espléndido.

Instituto Cultural en Dublín

Ireland had for centuries looked to Spain for military and spiritual aid against the common enemy, England, and many poems exist to verify that plea for help. Roisin Dubh (Little Black Rose), a folk poem possible from the 1600s, is one of Ireland’s most famous political songs. It is based on an older love-lyric in which the title referred to the poet’s beloved rather than, as here, being a pseudonym for Ireland: Roisin, have no sorrow for all that has happened to you/the friars are out on the brine, they are travelling the sea,/your pardon from the Pope will come, from Rome in the East,/and we won’t spare the Spanish wine for my Roisin Dubh.

I’ve been weening the time-honored distinction between ancient and modern art. Time, I guess, isn’t a keen concept to split art. I’m going to talk a bit about this. Will we be “modern brethren” within ten thousand years? This discussion could endlessly be enlarged. I would like to hie the piebald literary connoisseurs to regard the microscope, or rather the microscopical worldview, which was well imprinted on the curious minds of the Greek pointy-heads (the phrase “οφθαλμος σου απλους” in Matthew 6: 22, and the word “καρδια” in Matthew 6: 21, evoke microscopical images) and on the minds of a Leibniz, of a Newton, as the hallmark of the said artsy rivers.

The very first line of Aristotle’s Rhetoric runs thus: “ἡ ῥητορική ἐστιν ἀντίστροφος τῇ διαλεκτικῇ” (1). The quite wise ancient Greeks weened that every law-abiding democratic free citizen should be a dialectician and grasp the subtleties of that antistrophe, rhetoric, to shun being fooled by politicians, who are wont to stare at public opinion so as to learn from it which kind of enthymeme is the most persuasive in the agora (2). Public opinion has four faces, videlicet: orientation, degree, causality, and expectation. According to this, there must be four sorts of rhetoricians, and each one must’ve a specific class of audience. Such a couple gives rise to the question concerning the syllogisms, styles, moods, and proofs that an orator may handle to be a cajoling tongue. And, in our age, an age in which telecommunications are the main outlets of politicians, it’s unavoidable to deem the traits of the media they’ve at hand.