To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is the world we share with others. Someone […]
One of the many surprises at the recent extraordinary exhibition, Goya: Order & Disorder, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were his still-life paintings. They are remarkable for their departure from traditional still lifes of memento mori sentiments that usually include only a trace of the reminder of death. In Goya’s still lifes, […]
Childhood as a Modern Invention The Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition of Goya’s four portraits of members of the Altamira family. In walking through the exhibition’s small room last Friday, Goya’s paintings of the children and their accompanying labels reminded me of a book I read last year. In The Erosion of Childhood, Valerie Polakow examines the evolving meaning of […]
Childhood as a Modern Invention The Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition of Goya’s four portraits of members of the Altamira family. In walking through the exhibition’s small room last Friday, Goya’s paintings of the children and their accompanying labels reminded me of a book I read last year. In The Erosion of Childhood, Valerie Polakow examines the evolving meaning of […]
Childhood as a Modern Invention The Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition of Goya’s four portraits of members of the Altamira family. In walking through the exhibition’s small room last Friday, Goya’s paintings of the children and their accompanying labels reminded me of a book I read last year. In The Erosion of Childhood, Valerie Polakow examines the evolving meaning of […]
July 26, 2018
Thanks so much for this translation and excellent analysis.
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Childhood as a Modern Invention The Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring an exhibition of Goya’s four portraits of members of the Altamira family. In walking through the exhibition’s small room last Friday, Goya’s paintings of the children and their accompanying labels reminded me of a book I read last year. In The Erosion of Childhood, Valerie Polakow examines the evolving meaning of […]
July 16, 2018
Thanks a lot, Steve. And, continuing the segue-ing, here's an old (and traditional) Gary Snyder poem I just came across yesterday: Seaman’s Ditty I’m wondering where you are now Married, or mad, or free: Wherever you are you’re likely glad, But memory troubles me. We could’ve had us children, We could’ve had a home— But you thought not, and I thought not, And these nine years we roam. Today I worked in the deep dark tanks, And climbed out to watch the sea: Gulls and salty waves pass by, And mountains of Araby. I’ve travelled the lonely oceans And wandered the...
read more... join the conversation >We may retain a vague notion that slogans are about solidarity, about large groups of people uniting around a single idea.
How worthwhile is the unexpected
July 26, 2018
Robin
A point of information... This book was translated as "A Fortnight in the Wilderness" and included as Appendix 2 in "Democracy In America: Historical-Critical Edition", edited by Eduardo Nolla. There this amazing text can be read in full. It is worth comparing the translation by James Schleifer to your own. In particular, the rendering of "désert" to "wilderness" is most intriguing.
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