Fun_People Archive
11 Oct
LIT BITS V3 #285

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 100 17:45:47 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #285

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #285
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Thursday, 12 October 2000; on this day,

125 years ago (1875),

     British occultist Aleister Crowley born. Writer and occult figure,
     populary known as "the Great Beast" or, by the media, "The Wickedest
     Man in the World," because of his fascination with sex, magic,
     degradation, drug-taking and hedonism.

120 years ago (1880),

     French author of _Maria Chapdelaine_, the best-known novel of
     French-Canadian pioneer life, Louis Hemon, is born in Brest, France.
     After moving to Canada in 1911 and working as a farmhand, the realistic
     presentation of the struggle of men and women faced with the
     inhospitable soil and climate, he will complete the novel.

119 years ago (1881),

     Gerard Manley Hopkins writes to a friend: "Indeed I hold with the old
     fashioned criticism that Robert Browning is not really a poet, that
     he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the
     string."

104 years ago (1896),

     Italian poet, prose writer, editor, and translator, Eugenio Montale,
     is born in Genoa, Italy. He will win the Nobel Prize for Literature
     in 1975.

88 years ago (1912),

     African-American playwright, novelist, and actress, known for her
     realistic stories about the enduring optimism of black Americans,
     Alice Childress, is born in Charleston, South Carolina. She will
     perform on and off Broadway with the Negro Theatre from 1941 to 1952,
     where her work was met with hostility, resistance, and critical
     acclaim. She will also write an adolescent novel, _A Hero Ain't Nothing
     But a Sandwich_.

76 years ago (1924),

     Anatole France dies at 80 in La Bechellerie, near Tours, three years
     after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. His funeral is the
     first national one accorded a writer since that of Victor Hugo in
     1885.

Today's poem:

                Ripenso il tuo sorriso

     I recall your smile, and it is for me a lucid water
     Discovered by chance between the pebbles,
     a meager mirror in which to watch a reflection of the ivy,
     and with it all I embrace a quiet white sky.
     Such is my memory; I would not know how to describe,
     or distant from your face as it expresses the free, innocent
     spirit,
     Or are you a wanderer who challenges the evil of the world
     and who carriers his suffering with himself like a talisman.
     But this I can say to you, that the memory of your image
     engulfs the animosity in a big, calm wave,
     and which your image brings to my vivid memory
     Openhearted like the tip of a young palm

     Translated, into English, by Chris Dolezalek

                                             Eugenio Montale

© 2000 Peter Langston