LITERATURA > INTERNACIONAL

Londres volverá a ser la capital del libro y del fanzine en español entre los próximos días 11 y 19 de octubre con la celebración de la tercera edición del London Spanish Book & Zine Fair 2021 (LSBF).

The “logical thinker”, as Borges affirms (1), can find “patterns” in poetic metaphors. I will try to indicate some logical patterns in eight books.

Spain-Ireland Awards

The María Zambrano Center for Transatlantic Studies at the University of Malaga (AMZET) advocates for the continuous promotion of research regarding the relations between Spain and Ireland. For this purpose, it has announced the Spain-Ireland Awards that include three categories in different areas: The George Campbell Award, the Kate O’Brien Award, and the Robert Boyd Award.

Moby Dick

The Encyclopaedia Britannica poorly affirms that Melville's Moby Dick (1) admits “numerous, if not seemingly infinite, readings” (2), and that the keys to understand it are the biblical verses and names. This suggestion is based in the old hermeneutics, whose three mainstays are: “mystice”, “allegorice”, “symbolice”.

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is useful to knit literary readings. With some Kantian principles and without ancient erudition we have attained hermeneutic conclusions on Homer, conclusions which coincide with the Homeric opinions of masters like Matthew Arnold and Alexander Pope. Homer says (The Iliad, book three, translated by George Chapman):

Cuirfear deireadh ag meánoíche anocht (31 Nollaig 2021) leis an maolú a bhí i bhfeidhm ar stádas na Gaeilge sna hInstitiúidí Eorpacha agus beidh sí anois ar chomhchéim le teangacha oifigiúla eile an AE. Is ar an 1 Eanáir 2007 a tugadh stádas oifigiúil agus oibre don Ghaeilge ach bhí socrú maolaithe i bhfeidhm ó shin i leith, mar gheall ar ghanntanas foirne aistriúcháin, a chuir srian ar an méid ábhair a aistríodh go Gaeilge.

La Semana Cervantina se traslada este año a México, país al que viajará Luis García Montero del 21 al 24 de abril para recoger el legado de la última poeta viva del exilio republicano, Carmen Castellote y participar en varias actividades culturales organizadas por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) con motivo del Día Internacional del Libro. García Montero mantendrá, además, varias reunionse con representantes del Gobierno mexicano.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

With a simple reasoning we could explain the theory that sustains the great book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, hoisted by Edward Gibbon. That reasoning is: a society unavoidably subjected to material conditions can be described in terms of tragedy; a society ruled by reason, that is, one that is free, can be described in terms of epic; but a society compounded by rational beings that is deceived by material accidents and psychological illusions deserves to be described in terms of satire. The said book is a methodic, philosophical, elegant and perdurable jeer against irrational beings, whose pretext was Rome. The famous sentence of Gibbon, quoted here and there as a slogan of the said work, thus gets a meaning, and it says: history is “the register of the crimes and follies and misfortunes of mankind” (1).

Henry Louis Mencken was a penetrating writer, who represented the crux of the journalism of America. Then, a philosophical analysis of his work will be useful to understand that journalism. To do this, I have perused A Gang of Pecksniffs^[1], which is a compendium of texts engaged against the hypocrisy of mediocre newspapermen. Our point d’appui could be this simple Kantian sentence: we can not know things in an objective manner. Our necessary representations a priori, like geometry and arithmetic, give a form and an order to the various data coming from the exterior world.

^[1] Mencken, Henry Louis, A Gang of Pecksniffs. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House-Publishers, 1955.