I never felt so much
Since I have felt at all
The tingling smell and touch
Of dogrose and sweet briar,
Nettles against the wall,
All sours and sweets that grow
Together or apart
In hedge or marsh or ditch…
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck…
“Edwin Muir (1887–1959) is a mysteriously neglected, gorgeous, and emotionally penetrating poet. Of all the many pieces of writing spurred by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear apocalypse, and of the other kinds of 20th century apocalyptic writing, his poem ‘The Horses’ may be the most effective, perhaps because it is the most calm and gentle.”
—Robert Pinsky
Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,
You should have fled our ever-dying song…
One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world’s great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate…
“Muir’s contact with Europe is significant, however, not only in a personal and literary sense, but also in a wider political context which resonates with our own early twenty-first century times. His travels in the 1920s immediately after the end of World War One, and again at the end of World War Two, tell a story of Europe itself at critical points in its history.”
RINO LEVI AND THE EVOLUTION OF BRAZILIAN MODERNISM
Author(s): Jitomir Theodoro da Silva
Source: AA Files , Spring 1989, No. 17 (Spring 1989), pp. 24-30
Published by: Architectural Association School of Architecture
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29543634#Architecture#Modernism#SãoPaulo
Hugh MacDiarmid at 100
Studies in Scottish Literature 49/1, 2024
Open Access
This special issue celebrates & interrogates the first appearance in print of ‘Hugh M‘Diarmid’, in 1922, & examines the long-lasting influence within Scottish literary studies of the Scottish Renaissance group Christopher Murray Grieve initiated & of the reshaping he proposed in how Scottish literary history should be viewed.
“Had a fit of the scunners: heart withered up.”
—Willa Muir (1890–1970) was born #OTD, 13 March. Her translations of #Kafka solidified his reputation in English, & then internationally
In this article, Prof Michelle Woods looks at Willa Muir—a #Shetland translator in #Prague
@litstudies
“Willa Muir […] is one of these ‘dangerous women’ whose courage, intelligence and imagination helped redefine women’s place in a changing society”
—Margery Palmer McCulloch on Willa Muir, for the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities’ “Dangerous Women” project
@litstudies
“Most of the translation, especially Kafka, has been done by ME. Edwin only helped. And every time Edwin was referred to as THE translator, I was too proud to say anything; […] I am left without a shred of literary reputation”
—Willa Muir
Listen to the Dead Ladies Show podcast on Willa Muir
@litstudies
“By the time [Willa Muir] met Edwin at a mutual friend’s house in Glasgow, she was a lecturer in English, psychology and education and vice-principal of Gipsy Hill Teacher Training College in London…”
Robert Crawford Robert Crawford reviews Margery Palmer McCulloch’s Edwin & Willa Muir: A Literary Marriage, & Willa Muir’s The Usurpers, in the London Review of Books
Lots of great pieces. My personal favorites probably are the paintings by Abram Manewytsch. The phone pics don't do them justice. That goat 🐐 made me smile 😂
Was on my way home on Monday and decided to stop in the Loop to go to a stationary shop. As I was exiting the Monroe Blue Line, I saw a sign with an arrow that said "Chicago Chagall." I went upstairs and found this beautiful Chagall in front of the Chase building. One of the special things about Chicago is the presence of a lot of public art from very famous artists.
James Leslie Mitchell (1901–1935), better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, was born #OTD, 13 Feb. Author of SUNSET SONG – & many other titles from #HistoricalFiction to #ScienceFiction – he is one of the most important #Scottish writers of the #20thcentury
“The ambiguity of authority & reliability in narration, in Scots or English, is central to Hogg, Galt, Stevenson, many others, but in Gibbon’s trilogy it is utterly deconstructed”
“Not only did he invent a sentence structure that works like breath through the body of the reader, and a kind of Scottish English that’s simultaneously rich and spare, but [A Scots Quair is] a formally stunning and cunning work of art”
—Ali Smith, on James Leslie Mitchell / Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Regina Erich compares the original #German#translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A SCOTS QUAIR trilogy published in the #GDR between 1970 & 1986, with its more recent republication in a unified Germany
Currently on the BBC iPlayer: a trilogy of loosely linked stories by Lewis Grassic Gibbon set in a Scottish east-coast farming community in the interwar years. Dramatised for television by Bill Craig.
The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon – ed. Scott Lyall
The best contemporary guide to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s/James Leslie Mitchell’s literature, politics, life, & work – available in print or online via Project MUSE