De Ierse schrijfster en columniste Maeve Binchy werd geboren op 28 mei 1940 in Dalkey. Zie ook alle tags voor Maeve Binchy op dit blog.
Uit: A Week in Winter
“Everyone had their own job to do on the Ryans’ farm in Stoneybridge. The boys helped their father in the fields, mending fences, bringing the cows back to be milked, digging drills of potatoes; Mary fed the calves, Kathleen baked the bread, and Geraldine did the hens.
Nor that they ever called her Geraldine-she was “Chicky” as far back as anyone could remember. A serious little girl pouring out meal for the baby chickens or collecting the fresh eggs each day, always saying, “Chuck, chuck, chuck,” soothingly into the feathers as she worked. Chicky had names for all the hens, and no one could tell her when one had been taken to provide a Sunday lunch. They always pretended it was a shop chicken, but Chicky always knew.
Stoneybridge was a paradise for children during the summer, but summer in the west of Ireland was short, and most of the time it was wet and wild and lonely on the Atlantic coast. Still, there were caves to explore, cliffs to climb, birds’ nests to discover, and wild sheep with great curly horns to investigate. And then there was Stone House. Chicky loved to play in its huge overgrown garden. Sometimes the Miss Sheedys, three sisters who owned the house and were ancient, let her play at dressing up in their old clorhes.
Chicky watched as Kathleen went off to train to be a nurse in a big hospital in Wales, and then Mary got a job in an insurance office. Neither of those jobs appealed to Chicky at all, but she would have to do something. The land wouldn’t support the whole Ryan family. Two of the boys had gone to serve their time in business in big towns in the West. Only Brian would work with his father.“
Chicky’s mother was always tired and her father always worried. They were relieved when Chicky got a job in the knitting factory. Not as a machinist or home knitter but in the office. She was in charge of sending out the finished garments to customers and keeping the books. It wasn’t a great job but it did mean that she could stay at home, which was what she wanted. She had plenty of friends around the place. and each summer she fell in love with a different O’Hara boy but nothing ever came of it.”
Maeve Binchy (28 mei 1940 – 30 juli 2012)
De Ierse dichter en songwriter Thomas Moore werd geboren op 28 mei 1779 in Dublin. Zie ook alle tags voor Thomas Moore op dit blog.
The Meeting Of The Waters
There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet
As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet;
Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart,
Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart.
Yet it was not that nature had shed o’er the scene
Her purest of crystal and brightest of green;
‘Twas not her soft magic of streamlet or hill,
Oh! no, — it was something more exquisite still.
‘Twas that friends, the beloved of my bosom, were near,
Who made every dear scene of enchantment more dear,
And who felt how the best charms of nature improve,
When we see them reflected from looks that we love.
Sweet vale of Avoca! how calm could I rest
In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best,
Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease,
And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace.
Thomas Moore (28 mei 1779 – 25 februari 1852)
Cover biografie
De Britse schrijver Ian Fleming werd geboren op 28 mei 1908 in Londen. Zie ook alle tags voor Ian Fleming op dit blog.
Uit: Thunderball
“Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class. In general, Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was ready for the unpredictable. Four women in a car he regarded as the highest potential danger, and two women nearly as lethal. Women together cannot keep silent in a car, and when women talk they have to look into each other’s faces. An exchange of words is not enough. They have to see the other person’s expression, perhaps to read behind the others’ words or analyze the reaction to their own. So two women in the front seat of a car constantly distract each other’s attention from the road ahead and four women are more than doubly dangerous for the driver not only has to hear and see, what her companion is saying but also, for women are like that, what the two behind are talking about.”
(…)
“Anyway, I make up my own mind about men and women. What’s the good of other people’s opinions? Animals don’t consult each other about other animals. They look and sniff and feel. In love and hate, and everything in between, those are the only tests that matter. But people are unsure of their own instincts. They want reassurance. So they ask someone else whether they should like a particular person or not. And as the world loves bad news, they nearly always get a bad answer–or at least a qualified one.”
Ian Fleming (28 mei 1908 – 12 augustus 1964)
Scene uit de Bondfilm uit 1965 met Sean Connery en Claudine Auger
De Amerikaanse schrijver Walker Percy werd geboren op 28 mei 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama. Zie ook alle tags voor Walker Percy op dit blog.
Uit: The Moviegoer
“He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who don’t care about anything but the problem in their heads. . . . Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in.
So, just as the malaise threatens to make Binx a ghost who is divorced from the material world, the vertical search rendered him, like Harry, no more than a scientific Anyone Anywhere (“outside the universe,” without “time and place”). And just as Binx resolves to vanquish the malaise —“ I vow: I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll be defeated by the everydayness” — he abandoned his vertical search long ago. He discovered that, in the end, that search was insufficient, failing to put him in touch with ambient “mystery” and leading to the “difficulty” that, “though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next”.
Binx’s experience of the failure of the vertical search, which rendered him “left over,” is suggestive of an idea that, for Percy, was not confined to his first novel. In his essays, Percy often commented on the existential inadequacy of science: “the more science progressed, and even as it benefitted man, the less it said about what it is like to be a man living in the world. every advance in science seemed to take us further from the concrete here-and-now in which we live.”
Walker Percy (28 mei 1916 – 10 mei 1990)
De Oostenrijkse schrijver Fritz Hochwälder werd geboren op 28 mei 1911 in Wenen. Zie ook alle tags voor Fritz Hochwälder op dit blog.
Uit: Das heilige Experiment
„Da es erwiesen ist, daß die Jesuiten in Paraguay Unserer Krone abtrünnig geworden; da es erwiesen ist, daß sie unter dem Vorwand der Religion Sklaverei und Bedrückung unter Meinem indianischen Volk aufgerichtet, da es erwiesen ist, daß sie sich durch Verheimlichung von Bergwerken
bereichert; da es erwiesen ist … befehle ich kraft Meiner höchster Gewalt, die der Allmächtige in Meine Hände niedergelegt hat, daß alle Ordens personen der Gesellschaft Jesu die paraguayanischen Provinz zu räumen haben und daß ihre Güter eingezogen werden. Gegeben zu Buen Retiro, am 27. Februar 1767. ICH, KÖNIG.“
(…)
„Eure Weigerung wäre der Untergang Eures Ordens im ganzen spanischen Weltreich! Überlegt: in Frankreich und Portugal ist die Gesellschaft Jesu verboten. Wir lassen Euch im ganzen spanischen Reich bestehen — wenn ihr Euch aus Paraguay freiwillig zurückzieht.“
(…)
„Und wir, die wir genau wissen, daß wir im Grund machtlos sind, wir haben uns um äußeren Erfolges willen selbst in die Netze der Macht verstrickt — wir, die wir frei von Parteinahme in allen Ländern der verzweifelnden, unterdrückten, leidenden Menschheit den Weg zu ebnen haben in jenes Reich, in das uns alle erst der Tod entläßt.“
Fritz Hochwälder (28 mei 1911 – 20 oktober 1986)
De Franse schrijver, journalist en verzamelaar Henri-Pierre Roché werd op 28 mei 1879 geboren te Parijs. Zie ook alle tags voor Henri-Pierre Roché op dit blog.
Uit: Jules et Jim
“C’était vers 1907.
Le petit et rond Jules, étranger à Paris, avait demandé au grand et mince Jim, qu’il connaissait à peine, de le faire entrer au bal des Quat-z’Arts, et Jim lui avait procuré une carte et l’avait emmené chez le costumier. C’est pendant que Jules fouillait doucement parmi les étoffes et choisissait un simple costume d’esclave que naquit l’amitié de Jim pour Jules. Elle crût pendant le bal, où Jules fut tranquille, avec des yeux comme des boules, pleins d’humour et de tendresse.
Le lendemain ils eurent leur première vraie conversation. Jules n’avait pas de femme dans sa vie parisienne et il en souhaitait une. Jim en avait plusieurs. Il lui fit rencontrer une jeune musicienne. Le début sembla favorable. Jules fut un peu amoureux une semaine, et elle aussi. Puis Jules la trouva trop cérébrale, et elle le trouva ironique et placide.
Jules et Jim se virent tous les jours. Chacun enseignait à l’autre, jusque tard dans la nuit, sa langue et sa littérature. Ils se montraient leurs poèmes, et ils les traduisaient ensemble. Ils causaient, sans hâte, et aucun des deux n’avait jamais trouvé un auditeur si attentif. Les habitués du bar leur prêtèrent bientôt, à leur insu, des moeurs spéciales.
Jim introduisit Jules dans des cafés littéraires où fréquentaient des célébrités. Jules y fut apprécié et
Jim en fut content. Jim avait une camarade, dans un de ces cafés, une jolie petite femme désinvolte, qui tenait le coup aux Halles mieux que les poètes, jusqu’à six heures du matin. Elle distribuait, de haut, ses faveurs brèves. Elle conservait, à travers tout, une liberté hors la loi et un esprit rapide qui frappait juste. Ils eurent des sorties à trois. Elle déconcertait Jules, qu’elle trouvait gentil, mais ballot. Il la jugeait remarquable, mais terrible. Elle amena pour Jules une amie bonasse, mais Jules la trouva bonasse.
Jim ne put donc rien pour Jules. Il l’engagea à chercher seul. Jules, peut-être gêné par son français
encore imparfait, échouait toujours. Jim dit à Jules « Ce n’est pas qu’une question de langue. » Et il lui exposa des principes.
Autant me prêter vos souliers, ou vos gants de boxe, dit Jules, tout cela est trop grand pour moi.
Jules, malgré l’avis de Jim, prit contact avec des professionnelles, sans y trouver satisfaction.
Ils se rabattirent sur leurs traductions et sur leurs entretiens.”
Henri-Pierre Roché (28 mei 1879 – 9 april 1959)
Scene uit de film “Jules et Jim” van François Truffaut uit 1962
De Russische dichter, schrijver en schilder Maximilian Voloshin werd geboren op 28 mei 1877 in Kiev. Zie ook alle tags voor Maximilian Voloshin op dit blog.
From Lunaria
1.
The pearl bejeweling the quiet of night,
The gem of the lagoon’s star-studded base!
Your light makes young and pallid every face,
Thorn-apple longs for You in love-lorn plight.
Love’s anguish echoes in the hearts the tunes
That, string-like strummed, Your rays set loose.
Uneasy dreams revive and reproduce
In haunting hues the once disquieting moons.
Your humid glow and faded shadows, falling
Upon the walls, the stairway, and the flooring,
Throw tints of turquoise onto stones, finesse
The leaf of plane toward greater yet indention,
Endowing strands of vine with greater fineness.
Dreams’ luminary! Mistress of conception!
Vertaald door Constantine Rusanov
Cimmerian Twilight I
The evening light has soaked with ancient gold
And gall the yellow hills. Like tawny fur
Grass rises shaggy in a ruddy blur;
Past fiery bushes metal waves unfold;
And enigmatic cliffs and boulders hold
Worn troughs that are the sea’s chronologer.
In the winged twilight figures seem to stir:
A heavy paw, a jowl grins stark and bold,
Like swelling ribs the dubious hillocks show;
On what bent back, like wool, does savory grow?
What brute, what titan, to this region cleaves?
The dark is strange . . . and yonder, space is clean.
And there the tired ocean, panting, heaves,
And rotting grasses breathe of iodine.
Maximilian Voloshin (28 mei 1877 – 11 augustus 1932)
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 28e mei ook mijn vorige blog van vandaag.