Tranströmer receiving the Neustadt Prize at the University of Oklahoma in 1990
A Review of Tomas Tranströmer’s Tolkningar (Bonniers, 1999)“When Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015), one of Sweden…
Look Back
A review of Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Samuel Putnam (Viking, 1949) Don Quixote is the most frequently translated book in the history of literature [but], claims Mr. Putnam, has remained for En…
“Back to the Essay” “In this same spirit of valuing possibility and innovation, the current editors are now equipping WLT to engage with this century much as Roy House equipped it for the last. . . .…
Cardenal reading in Pablo Neruda’s La Chascona, 2009 / Photo by Roman Bonnefoy / Wikipedia A review of Ernesto Cardenal’s Homage to the American Indians, trans. Monique Altschul & Car…
Photo courtesy of Sholeh Wolpé “Much of the most interesting postrevolutionary fiction being written in Persian is by women, and Shahrnush Parsipur is one of the bright lights among them. First is…
Photo courtesy of Victor Adewale / OlongoAfrica “This distinguished Nigerian playwright’s account [Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died] of his prolonged season in hell as a detainee of the Federal Governm…
“This article began with a zombie. Had it not been for the zombie, I wouldn’t have opened the way I did, nor said what I am about to say, nor compared what I am about to compare. I would have written…
“Between the political mentality and the pure intellect there are inevitable differences. The political mind seeks to dominate the relative or the accidental, as the navigator, expert in winds and the…
Arpino, Cicero’s birthplace, is about 100 kilometers southeast of Rome. These studies [of literature] are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comf…
“The French critic Albert Thibaudet proposed in one of his books on the novel a distinction between two kinds of reader: the liseur and the lecteur. I do not know whether a similar differentiating nua…
Photo by Leiada Krozjhen / Unsplash “People who love books find it difficult to get along without them, but millions in the war-devastated areas today are forced to live, work, and study with prac…
A Sufi in Ecstasy in a Landscape, Iran, Isfahan, circa 1650–1660. The Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collection, gift of Joan Palevsky, LA County Museum of Art “Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980) has pres…
Photo by Erin Doering on Unsplash “After extensive renovations and the repair of bomb damage incurred during World War II, the famous Reading Room of the British Museum, London, has been reop…
Paz receiving the 1982 Neustadt Prize from University of Oklahoma president William Banowsky “I wonder—once more, now, when everything seems about to go up in flame again—if there is a place…
Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaid’s Tale (2017) / Courtesy of IMDB “When Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale appeared in 1986, readers regarded it as interesting scienc…
Leonid Pasternak, Boris beside the Baltic at Mereküla (1910), oil on canvas In August 2021 University of Oklahoma alumnus Ron K. Jones donated a letter that he had received in 19…
December 19, 2024
December 02, 2024
