Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

JD Salinger, the elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, was one of America’s most famous recluses and guarded his private life with fanatical dedication. Yet even he might have been impressed by the immense efforts being undertaken to keep details secret of a new documentary that has been made about his life and works.

Called simply Salinger, the film is the brainchild of Shane Salerno, who has spent nine years writing, producing and directing the project, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money. The move is a major shift in career for Salerno, best

known as a writer of mainstream blockbusters such as Alien vs Predator: Requiem andArmageddon.

But the promise of lifting the lid on the life of one of America’s most revered writers has proven a massive lure to Hollywood. Salinger has been bought up by independent film mogul Harvey Weinstein after he reportedly saw a private screening of it at 7.30 on the morning of the Oscars. Even though the screening did not apparently include all of the film’s most confidential revelations, he snapped it up immediately.

In fact, so impressed have its backers been with what Salerno and his team have uncovered they are also releasing a TV show based on the documentary and have struck a deal with publisher Simon and Schuster to bring out a book called The Private War of JD Salinger.

With Salerno not giving press interviews, there has been feverish speculation about details of new love affairs and rumours of unpublished manuscripts. One of the few hints is a statement Salerno made announcing the book deal. “The myth that people have read about and believed for 60 years about JD Salinger is one of someone too pure to publish, too sensitive to be touched. We replace the myth of Salinger with an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human being. Our book offers a complete revaluation and reinterpretation of the work and the life,” he said.

Continue reading in TheGuardian

Debo empezar reiterando lo más obvio: que el premio Cervantes me ha
deparado la mayor satisfacción recibida en mi ya dilatado trayecto humano y literario.
Se trata por supuesto de un motivo de orgullo muy especial y de un honor que va a
acompañarme cada día, como un estímulo inagotable, en este ya sobrepasado arrabal
de senectud. Tengo que hacerme merecedor de este reconocimiento magnánimo -me
he repetido muchas veces-, como convenciéndome de que debía esmerarme para
que mi trabajo literario alcanzara una suficiente validez. Sólo así iba a poder
equilibrarse lo mucho que recibo con lo poco que ofrezco.

Deseo que mi gratitud se reparta efusivamente entre cada uno de los miembros
del jurado y entre quienes han hecho posible que yo esté hoy aquí, conmovido y
abrumado, recibiendo el premio mayor de nuestras letras. Pienso en algunos poetas y
novelistas que me han precedido en este trance -Antonio Gamoneda, José Emilio
Pacheco, Juan Marsé, Ana María Matute, Juan Gelman-, que son también amigos
queridos y autores predilectos, y pienso en otros compañeros fraternales -José Ángel
Valente, Carlos Barral, Ángel González, Claudio Rodríguez, Jaime Gil de Biedma,
José Agustín Goytisolo- a quienes la muerte cercenó la posibilidad de recibir los
honores que yo recibo ahora. “Falta la vida, asiste lo vivido”, dijo Quevedo en un
soneto eminente. Y eso es lo que me repito mientras recurro a esta evocación
justiciera. Y mientras procuro sobrellevar la turbadora experiencia de hablar en una
cátedra de la que irradió el magisterio del humanismo español, y desde la que se
instruyó a algunos de los grandes ingenios de los siglos de oro.

El premio Cervantes viene a activar un vínculo siempre latente con nuestro
primer y universal novelista, a quien me tienta aplicar el mismo encomio que dedicó
Rubén Darío a Verlaine: “padre y maestro mágico”. No se me oculta que hablar de la
significación de este premio dispone de ciertos desvíos retóricos difícilmente evitables.
Pero prefiero, en este caso, la retórica a la mesura. He pensado mucho en las
palabras que debía utilizar a este respecto. Y me he preguntado una y otra vez qué es
lo que verdaderamente le debo a Cervantes, cuánto he aprendido de él para que, en
virtud de este premio, se hayan asociado su ejemplo y mi devoción. Y sólo he
encontrado respuestas deficientes.

Continuar leyendo en ElPaís

Kipling scholars are celebrating the publication of lost poems by the author whose exhortations in “If” to “keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you” are regularly voted the nation’s favourite poem. Discovered by the American scholar Thomas Pinney in an array of hiding places including family papers, the archive of a former head of the Cunard Line and during renovations at a Manhattan house, more than 50 previously unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling will be released for the first time next month.

The collection includes several poems dating from the first world war, which Kipling initially supported, helping his son John to gain a commission in the Irish Guards.

A short poem, “The Gambler”, finishes with the couplet: “Three times wounded; three times gassed / Three times wrecked – I lost at last”, while another fragment runs: “This was a Godlike soul before it was crazed / No matter. The grave makes whole.”

After his son’s death at the Battle of Loos in 1915, Kipling regretted his earlier enthusiasm for the conflict, writing in his “Epitaphs of the War”: “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied”.

Another poem discovered by Pinney, “The Press”, prefigures contemporary worries over media intrusion: “Have you any morals? / Does your genius burn? / Was your wife a what’s its name? / How much did she earn?” wrote the poet in a fit of anger at the questions he was asked by journalists. “Why don’t you write a play – / Why don’t you cut your hair? / Do you trim your toe-nails round / Or do you trim them square?” (The complete poem is reproduced at the foot of this article.)

Continue reading in The Guardian

Winston Churchill was a journalist, essayist, author and novelist; a historian, biographer and renowned speaker. But now, the man praised by John F Kennedy for having “mobilised the English language and sent it into battle” has been revealed to be that most sensitive of all plants: a young poet.

Around 115 years after it was written, the only known poem written by an adult Churchill has been discovered by Roy Davids, a retired manuscript dealer from Great Haseley in Oxfordshire.

Our Modern Watchwords, which was apparently inspired by Tennyson and Kipling, will go on sale at Bonham’s auction house in London in the spring. Written in 1899 or 1900, when Churchill was a cornet – equivalent to today’s second lieutenant – in the 4th Hussars, the 10-verse poem is a tribute to the Empire.

The author peppers the poem with the names of remote outposts defending Britain’s interests around the world – many of which he would have visited as a young officer and even fought at – including Weihaiwei in China, Karochaw in Japan and Sokoto, in north-west Nigeria.

The paean to Britain’s might, however, does not scale the heights of the literary efforts that marked Churchill’s later life – including his Nobel Prize-winning History of the English Speaking Peoples.

Davids, who says the poem “is by far the most exciting Churchill discovery I have seen”, admits it is merely “passable”. Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, goes further, calling it “heavy-footed”.

“I didn’t know he wrote poems, though somehow I’m not surprised: oils, walls, why not poems as well?” said Motion. “This is pretty much what would expect: reliable, heavy-footed rhythm; stirring, old-fashioned sentiments. Except for the lines ‘The tables of the evening meal/Are spread amid the great machines’, where the shadow of Auden passes over the page, and makes everything briefly more surprising.”

Despite its lack of literary virtues, however, the poem – written in blue crayon on two sheets of 4th Hussars-headed notepaper – is expected to raise between £12,000 to £15,000 when it goes on sale on 10 April. Its price reflects its rarity: the only other poem known to be penned by Churchill is the 12-verse The Influenza, which won a House Prize in a competition at Harrow school in 1890 when he was 15.

Continue reading in TheGuardian

Jane Austen lovers around the world have begun busting out their bonnets for a yearlong celebration of the 200th anniversary of the publication of “Pride and Prejudice,” which loosed its famous first line on the world on Jan. 28, 1813.

It’s too late to secure an invitation to the BBC’s meticulous reconstruction of the Netherfield Ball, site of a pivotal encounter between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. (It was filmed last week at Chawton House, the Hampshire manor that once belonged to Austen’s brother Edward, and will be broadcast in May.) But there are plenty of public festivities on the calendar.

On Monday, the Jane Austen Center in Bath, England, will hold a 12-hour read-a-thon, to be broadcast live online. The Free Library of Philadelphia is hosting an all-day celebration including lectures, film screenings and “pop-up” theatrical performances of scenes from the novel. Goucher College in Baltimore, home to what it calls the largest Austen collection in North America, will open “Pride and Prejudice: A 200 Year Affair,” an exhibition of rare editions and other items documenting the novel’s reception over the past two centuries.

Those who can’t make it out of the house can enter a bicentennial essay contest sponsored by the Jane Austen Society of North America. If that’s too taxing, Penguin Classics has been encouraging readers to post favorite lines from the book on Twitter. (Sample: “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”)

Juliette Wells, an associate professor of English at Goucher and the author of the book “Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination,” said in an e-mail that she did not know if the centennial of the book, on the eve of World War I, was much noted, though the bicentennial of Austen’s birth in December 1975 was celebrated with commemorative stamps in Britain and many pronouncements on both sides of the Atlantic. That year also saw the publication of one of the first scholarly studies of Austen adaptations, Andrew Wright’s article “Jane Austen Adapted,” which concluded that no modern version could come close to the original — a finding that Colin Firth fanatics, to say nothing of the zombie hordes, may ardently dispute.

Continue reading in TheNewYorkTimes