De Amerikaanse schrijver en journalist Mark Helprin werd geboren in New York op 28 juni 1947.

Uit: Winter’s Tale

“THERE WAS a white horse, on a quiet winter morning when snow covered the streets gently and was not deep, and the sky was swept with vibrant stars, except in the east, where dawn was beginning in a light blue flood. The air was motionless, but would soon start to move as the sun came up and winds from Canada came charging down the Hudson.
The horse had escaped from his master’s small clapboard stable in Brooklyn. He trotted alone over the carriage road of the Williamsburg Bridge, before the light, while the toll keeper was sleeping by his stove and many stars were still blazing above the city. Fresh snow on the bridge muffled his hoofbeats, and he sometimes turned his head and looked behind him to see if he was being followed. He was warm from his own effort and he breathed steadily, having loped four or five miles through the dead of Brooklyn past silent churches and shuttered stores. Far to the south, in the black, ice-choked waters of the Narrows, a sparkling light marked the ferry on its way to Manhattan, where only market men were up, waiting for the fishing boats to glide down through Hell Gate and the night.
The horse was crazy, but, still, he was able to worry about what he had done. He knew that shortly his master and mistress would arise and light the fire. Utterly humiliated, the cat would be tossed out the kitchen door, to fly backward into a snow-covered sawdust pile. The scent of blueberries and hot batter would mix with the sweet smell of a pine fire, and not too long afterward his master would stride across the yard to the stable to feed him and hitch him up to the milk wagon. But he would not be there.”

Mark Helprin (New York, 28 juni 1947)

 

De Italiaanse schrijver Luigi Pirandello werd op 28 juni 1867 geboren in de villa ‘Caos’ (chaos) in de buurt van Agrigento.

Uit: The Late Mattia Pascal (Translator’s Note door Arthur Livingston)

“Shall we say that the theatre of Pirandello is a higher and more perfect expression of his peculiar art than his tales or his novels? That has been said.  And a certain body  of fact is there to support such a contention. It is Pirandello’s drama that has won him world-wide recognition, whereas his prose work, though for thirty years it has held him in a high position in Italian letters, remained national in circulation and even in Italy  was the delight of an elect few. Many of his comedies, besides, are reworkings of his short stories; as though he himself regarded the latter as incomplete expressions of the vision they contained. In the third place, one might say that since the novelty of Pirandello’s art consists rather in his method of dissecting life than in his judgment of life, his geometrical, symmetrical, theorematic situations are more vivid in the clashing dialogue of people on a stage than in the less animated form of prose narrative. These considerations do not all apply, however, to “The Late Mattia Pascal.”

That we have a first class drama in this
novel is evident from the fact that Pirandello himself used the amusing situation in the first part of the story as the theme of one of his Sicilian comedies: “Liolà”; and in a more important sense the book as a whole is to be counted among the sources that have inspired the “new” theatre in Italy . Chiarelli’s “The Mask and the Face” was a play that “made a school”; and that school, the “grotesque,” may be thought of as an offspring of “The Late Mattia Pascal.” The novel, also, falls naturally into a special place in the repertory of Pirandello’s more characteristic themes. It is a variation of the situation in “Henry IV”–where the mask, the fiction, is first offered by circumstances, then deliberately assumed, to be violently torn off in the case of Mattia Pascal, to be retained and utilized in the case of “Henry IV.”

Luigi Pirandello (28 juni 1867 – 10 december 1936)

Buste in Palermo

 

Zie voor de twee bovenstaande schrijvers ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2007 en ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2008 en ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2009.

 

De Franse schrijver, filosoof en componist Jean Jacques Rousseau werd geboren in Genève op 28 juni 1712. Zie ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2006 en ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2007 en ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2008 en ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2009.

Uit: Les Confessions

“Je n’avais pas encore assez de raison pour sentir combien les apparences me condamnaient, et pour me mettre à la place des autres. Je me tenais à la mienne, et tout ce que je sentais, c’était la rigueur d’un châtiment effroyable pour un crime que je n’avais pas commis. La douleur du corps, quoique vive, m’était peu sensible; je ne sentais que l’indignation, la rage, le désespoir. Mon cousin, dans un cas à peu près semblable, et qu’on avait puni d’une faute involontaire comme d’un acte prémédité, se mettait en fureur à mon exemple, et se montait, pour ainsi dire, à mon unisson. Tous deux dans le même lit nous nous embrassions avec des transports convulsifs, nous étouffions et quand nos jeunes coeurs un peu soulagés pouvaient exhaler leur colère, nous nous levions sur notre séant, et nous nous mettions tous deux à crier cent fois de toute notre force: Carnifex, Carnifex, Carnifex.

 Je sens en écrivant ceci que mon pouls s’élève encore; ces moments me seront toujours présents quand je vivrais cent mille ans. Ce premier sentiment de la violence et de l’injustice est resté si profondément gravé dans mon âme, que toutes les idées qui s’y rapportent me rendent ma première émotion, et ce sentiment, relatif à moi dans son origine, a pris une telle consistance en lui-même, et s’est tellement détaché de tout intérêt personnel, que mon coeur s’enflamme au spectacle ou au récit de toute action injuste, quel qu’en soit l’objet et en quelque lieu qu’elle se commette, comme si l’effet en retombait sur
moi. Quand je lis les cruautés d’un tyran féroce, les subtiles noirceurs d’un fourbe de prêtre, je partirais volontiers pour aller poignarder ces misérables, dussé-je cent fois y périr. Je me suis souvent mis en nage à poursuivre à la course ou à coups de pierre un coq, une vache, un chien, un animal que j’en voyais tourmenter un autre, uniquement parce qu’il se sentait le plus fort. Ce mouvement peut m’être naturel, et je crois qu’il l’est; mais le souvenir profond de la première injustice que j’ai soufferte y fut trop longtemps et trop fortement lié pour ne l’avoir pas beaucoup renforcé.

Là fut le terme de la sérénité de ma vie enfantine. Dès ce moment je cessai de jouir d’un bonheur pur, et je sens aujourd’hui même que le souvenir des charmes de mon enfance s’arrête là.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 juni 1712 – 2 juli 1778)

Standbeeld in Chambéry

 

De Duitse dichter en schrijver Otto Julius Bierbaum werd geboren op 28 juni 1865 in Grünberg. Zie ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2007 en ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2009.

Meine Frau unterm Ölbaum

Der Ölbaum: ein zarter Strauß, …
Wie aus grauen Seidenspitzen, …
Wie Silberschmiedarbeit sieht er aus,
Auf der schwarzblaue Edelsteine blitzen.

Stehst du darunter in dem Blumenkleide
Aus Indiens buddhabunter Seide,
Dann ist der ganze Garten ein Geschmeide.
Und, träume ich denn, was ich da seh?
Wen seh ich dort in Signor Bardis Haus
Vor seiner Staffelei im Türgevierte sitzen? –
Frate Giovanni da Fiesole!

Der weißen Kutte weite Ärmel sind
Den mageren Arm hinaufgeschlagen,
Und seine frommen braunen Augen fragen
Just seine Farbentiegel, ob für dich, mein Kind,
Sie auch genug der reinen Farben tragen.

Steh still, steh still! Und blicke klar und froh,
Gradaus, mich an! Aus deinen Augen lesen
Soll ferne Zeit noch, wie du gut und klar,
Wie schön und lauter du, wie treu und wahr
Dein starkes, liebevolles Herz gewesen!

Drum malt dich Fra Angelico.

Otto Julius Bierbaum (28 juni 1865 – 1 februari 1910)

 

De Amerikaanse schrijver, en biograaf Aaron Edward Hotchner werd geboren op 28 juni 1920 in St. Louis. . Zie ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2007 en ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2009.

Uit: Paul and Me: Fifty-three Years of Adventures and Misadventures with My Pal, Paul Newman

„Paul Newman and I first met in 1955 in a funeral parlor on La Cienega Boulevard in Hollywood. There were sample coffins in the anteroom, but the large viewing room beyond had been stripped of its funereal paraphernalia and instead outfitted for the rehearsal of The Battler, a television drama I had written based on a Hemingway short story. It was my first television play and, as it turned out, it became a fortuitous launching pad for Paul’s career as well as my own. We were in this mortuary because NBC had run out of rehearsal space, and this bizarre spot was the best they could do.
 Both Paul and I were at the start of our respective careers and each of us had come to a halt. Paul had been brought up in Shaker Heights, an affluent suburb of Cleveland. He had been in a dozen or so plays at Kenyon College, and after graduation he had performed in summer stock—once playing the gentleman caller in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. He later enrolled in Yale University School of Drama, where in Shaw’s Saint Joan he was required to weep onstage. As Paul told me years later, “The muscles contracted in my stomach, and immediately I tried to figure out some way to play the whole thing facing upstage. And then I thought, What an ass. I drag my family—I had married an actress I had met when I was in Woodstock summer theater and had a son with her—with only nine hundred dollars in the bank, all the way to Connecticut, and then think of all the ways I can cop out. At the time I was living in a boardinghouse, and I took that script downstairs to the boiler room and I said, Okay buddy, you are going to sit here until you find out where it is going to come from or you get out of this business right now. I did the part and my tears arrived on cue.”

A.      E. Hotchner (St. Louis, 28 juni 1920)

 

De Engelse schrijver Eric Ambler werd geboren op 28 juni 1909 in Londen. Zie ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2009.

Uit: Judgment on Deltchev

“ Where treason to the state is defined simply as opposition to the government in power, the political leader convicted of it will not necessarily lose credit with the people. Indeed, if he is respected or loved by them, his death at the hands of a tyrannical government may serve to give his life a dignity it did not before possess. In that event his enemies may in the end be faced not by the memory of a fallible human being but by a myth, more formidable than the real man could ever have been, and much less vulnerable. His trial, therefore, is no formality, but a ceremony of preparation and precaution. He must be discredited and destroyed as a man so that he may safely be dealt with as a criminal. Sometimes he is induced to confess abjectly to the crimes of which he is accused; but unless he has himself been a member of the party that now seeks to destroy him, such confessions are not always believed by the people; and when, for example, he is the leader of an unliquidated opposition party, it is better to observe outwardly the old legal forms, to bring witnesses, produce evidence, and let him try to defend himself.
So it was with Nikolai Petkov in Bulgaria, with Julius Maniu and Ion Mihalache in Rumania, and with many other liberals in Eastern Europe. Petkov they hanged. Maniu and Mihalache were condemned to solitary confinement for life. When Yordan Deltchev’s trial took place, the pattern for such occasions had been already set.
The charges against him were of ’treason and the preparation of a terrorist plot to assassinate the head of the state’. The trial began before a People’s Court on the 11th of June. He was described in the indictment as ‘president of the Agrarian Socialist Party and formerly a member of the Provisional Government of National Unity’. In fact, he had been head of that government and also its Foreign Minister. He was still the leader of the only effective opposition to the People’s Party regime that remained.

Eric Ambler (28 juni 1909 – 22 oktober 1998)

 

Zie voor onderstaande schrijvers ook mijn blog van 28 juni 2007.

De Zwitserse dichter en schrijver Jürg Federspiel werd geboren op 28 juni 1931 in Kemptthal.