art the forest & bare the trees. Make an efes. The Book of books may be a forest of woods, as the page is a clearing, the monster is a letter (for example, Y, who reads the leaves), a river is a mirror, the underworld is supernal, the portal is the shadow over the shades, efes are all about (as wings, as aisles, as the edge of the woods), ††† are trees,…
Every Silversea guest knows from personal experience that stories and travel are close companions. Yet the two have never been so deeply interwoven as they were for the Silversea Tale of Tales World Cruise 2019. This anthology celebrates all those who were part of that extraordinary voyage. Those who travelled further into the world to discover its beauty. Those who were fascinated, amazed and …
Riose looked after his host’s departing figure, and his studied urbanity grew a bit uncertain at the edges. His education had been purely military; his experience likewise. He had, as the cliché has it, faced death many times; but always death of a very familiar and tangible nature. Consequently, there is no inconsistency in the fact that the idolized lion of the Twentieth Fleet felt chilled…
Our intention has been to translate the poems into plain and unadorned prose, staying as close to the original as modern English idiom will allow, in order to reveal what may loosely be termed the ‘literal’ sense of the text. Readers approaching these poems from an acquaintance with Chaucer’s works will already be aware that one of the chief difficulties of Middle English for the modern r…
The preface to Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704) begins with a rather unconventional definition of a literary genre� Readers are informed that “Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body’s Face but their Own” (Tale 140)� The writer does not hesitate to add that it is probably this characteristic which is responsible for the genre’s c…
In the same year he published his first Dutch poetry in the influential magazine De nieuwe gids (The New Guide). The journal, founded in 1885, was dominated at this period by the poet Willem Kloos (1859–1938), who used its pages to proclaim a radical aestheticism and advocate literature that was both non-sectarian and non-utilitarian. Poetry, Kloos famously asserted, was ‘the supremely indi…
Once upon a time in midwinter, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers from heaven, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of black ebony wood. As she sewed she looked up at the snow and pricked her finger with her needle. Three drops of blood fell into the snow. The red on the white looked so beautiful that she thought to herself, “If only I had a child as white as snow, …
Once upon a time there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woman that ever was seen. She had two daughters of her own, who were, indeed, exactly like her in all things. The gentleman had also a young daughter, of rare goodness and sweetness of temper, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world. The wedding was scarcely over…
The founder of Hera the Light of Women, Mrs. Marianela Mirpuri told me about her idea to have a Poetry Anthology and challenged me to write and coordinate the first anthology for Hera the Light of Women. My first feelings where if I should be able to do it and thank her for trusting me. Then doubts came into my spirit, as I was not used, since long time to write in English (besides Hera’s hym…
Since the stories told by poets and other early writers represented the major evidence for the events for which the Greeks had no written records, historians could not escape considering the role of myth in history. One approach—represented here by Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ analyses of the Trojan, Persian, and Peloponnesian Wars—was to seek to distinguish where myth left off and histor…