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Jorge Luis Borges solía decir de sus poemas que eran expresiones directas de su sentimiento y de su ser íntimo. También creía que si no hay emoción no puede haber poesía. Solo unos pocos temas (el sueño, el laberinto, el espejo, el tiempo, Buenos Aires...) alcanzaron a merecer la obsesiva pluma del poeta. Quienes frecuentaron sus versos no han dudado en señalar su idealismo, la tendencia a la abstracción y al prototipo, su visión estática del universo, el sentimiento -en fin- de la vanidad del mundo y de lo perecedero de los individuos. Luego vinieron los profesores de Literatura con sus análisis semióticos, concluyendo que la escritura de Borges es densa, sobrecodificada, polivalente, literarizada y textualizada.

Este lunes, 18 de septiembre, se publicó, de la mano de Catedral, el brillante debut de Tom Crewe. La nueva vida, ganadora del Premio Orwell de Ficción Política 2023, ha valido a Crewe un puesto entre los jóvenes novelistas británicos más prometedores del año, según la prestigiosa revista Granta.

Han sido muchos los autores que se han ocupado en Occidente de la denominada filosofía oriental entre ellos Jorge Luis Borges en colaboración con Alicia Jurado cuando escribieron su “¿Qué es el budismo?” cuando fueron los europeos los que sintieron un interés por llegar a esas latitudes un tanto desconocidas.

"...yo necesito a... alguien al otro lado de este chisme de mierda. A ser posible, con alma" [El futuro].

Necesito. "Alguien". Con alma.

If the King Philip II used the expression “that lady” to name Ana de Mendoza, the Princess of Eboli, in a derogatory and revengeful way, Kate O’Brien gave it a different meaning as the title of her seventh novel, published in 1947.

A literary personage is neither the psychological outcome of an eery aery fluke, which may be termed “fiction”, nor bread swelled by merely leavening dough with the sour sweat of our foreshadowing brows, which can be named “mimesis”. Writers of the world, we’ve a bunch of easy techniques to hoist plausible personages. In my sight, for instance, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies has been a top-notch well of aesthetic wisdom. Furthermore, it contains, in a buttonholing way, some well wrought literary tricks.

Amidst a rainy night I was reperusing some Encyclopedia Britannica’s articles, and since by hook or by crook, as the folkloric phrase runs, I always meet German mythologies and Greek stanzas of yore, I found a text written by Kathleen Kuiper (1) versed in the symbol styled “Rumpelstiltskin”, whose gast spends the tides of its life in the drudging work of turning straw into gold. I thought, then, our mind is like an alchemist who by the hair unites extremes without grokking how or why those brinks could be together.

En el penúltimo artículo (Four Modes of Translation Without Inspiration, Diario judío, 6 de agosto de 2021) que redacté dije que hay cuatro maneras de traducir textos, a saber: la orientada a transmitir información, la enderezada a transformar mentes, la meditada para imitar estilos y la enfocada en modernizar la lengua.

We have all heard on occasion that the American company Coca-Cola once produced a completely colorless version. The strategy was a total fiasco, because consumers around the world were used to the dark caramel color of this most typical American soft drink.

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):

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

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.

\"Amapola negra\" es un gran proyecto literario del escritor barcelonés Francisco Melero Maillo. Ahora llega la tercera entrega que se ocupa de la parte central, 1916-1917, el auténtico apogeo de la Primera Guerra Mundial.

¿Sabías que los parques también meriendan? Acompaña a Alberto en esta divertida aventura y descubre la maravillosa fauna que vive con nosotros, donde menos te lo esperas… Escrita por Pablo Albo e ilustrada por Cecilia Moreno para Narval.

"Inmersión" la novela del escritor británico J. M. Ledgard, que acaba de adaptar Win Wenders para su última producción, es una inteligente mezcal de thriller político y romance de alta calidad literaria. Un cruce entre le Carré, James Bond y Coetzee que ahora publica Ediciones Destino.

El 3 de junio de 2016, Pink Floyd Records comenzará a reeditar el catálogo de Pink Floyd en vinilo por primera vez en más de dos décadas. Los primeros cuatro álbumes serán ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’, la banda sonora de la película ‘More’ y el doble LP ‘Ummagumma’.

Romana Petri publica su última novela "Toda la vida" sobre las consecuencias de la Segunda Guerra Mundial

Por Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros

La última novela de la escritora italiana Romana Petri, Toda la vida, ha sido publicada por Ediciones Destino. Esta novela es una historia acerca de un amor que lo resistirá todo, lo que da lugar a un relato tan real como excepcional y que salta la barrera de los convencionalismos.

Érase una vez… una drag queen que se llamaba Luna y trabajaba en Tabú. Podría ser de porcelana, pero los sinsabores de su vida la han hecho hacerse férreamente de piedra y, quizás, de alabastro, porque su entorno le ha hecho mantenerse siempre a la defensiva.

"Formas de Comunicación en Mamíferos", de Lorenzo Roca Moreno, es una guía imprescindible y divertida para conocer los secretos de la comunicación de los seres vivos.

Este jueves, 14 de junio, a las 19:00 horas, tendrá lugar en la Asociación de la Prensa de Madrid (calle Claudio Coello, 98), la presentación de poemario "Selfis: cicatrices" de Luis Fermín Moreno Álvarez, editado por Libros del Aire.

Ireland had for centuries looked to Spain for military and spiritual aid against the common enemy, England, and many poems exist to verify that plea for help. Roisin Dubh (Little Black Rose), a folk poem possible from the 1600s, is one of Ireland’s most famous political songs. It is based on an older love-lyric in which the title referred to the poet’s beloved rather than, as here, being a pseudonym for Ireland: Roisin, have no sorrow for all that has happened to you/the friars are out on the brine, they are travelling the sea,/your pardon from the Pope will come, from Rome in the East,/and we won’t spare the Spanish wine for my Roisin Dubh.

As an Irish poet who has been living and writing in Madrid for the last four decades, I felt dutybound to compile a book of poems that would reflect my relationship with the diversity of Spain, its landscape and its people. The result of this endeavour is Spanish Points, a collection of my Spain-related poems chosen by me from nine books published between 1990 and 2020, together with a selection of recent unpublished poems.

I’ve been weening the time-honored distinction between ancient and modern art. Time, I guess, isn’t a keen concept to split art. I’m going to talk a bit about this. Will we be “modern brethren” within ten thousand years? This discussion could endlessly be enlarged. I would like to hie the piebald literary connoisseurs to regard the microscope, or rather the microscopical worldview, which was well imprinted on the curious minds of the Greek pointy-heads (the phrase “οφθαλμος σου απλους” in Matthew 6: 22, and the word “καρδια” in Matthew 6: 21, evoke microscopical images) and on the minds of a Leibniz, of a Newton, as the hallmark of the said artsy rivers.

A different flavor of summer holidays is gaining popularity as the choice for an increasing number of animal lovers – and people with a wish to meet different folks and cultures – who want to make great memories, and make a difference: saving hundreds of lives every year, finding the perfect pet for any family anywhere in the world, and offering food, medicine, shelter and love for animals in one of Europe’s most beautiful islands and holiday destinations: the Greek island of Crete.

This piebald comparative inquiry is the kernel of two experiences with two wenches. As I was gallivanting across a rut of kennels of a street of New York, I saw a hairlanked black woman, and I wooed her by using my most poetical and knightly resources and polite letters. Amid that hectic cityscape she accepted my words, which at that moment were only an echo of a line of a poem written by Lord Byron: “She walks in beauty, like the night” (1). She smiled, and we are good records of love now. I did the same thing in Mexico with another coloured lass. Decorum does not permit me to describe her barbarian reaction.

The following topics constitute the structure of the digital reputation of a public figure, and are either solid props to ameliorate or sustain it or accursed arms to destroy it. The young technocratic masses of our age feel they do not have some place in our modern economical and political structure, and that they are foredoomed to material poverty and invisibility, and by reason of this they eagerly applaud social media personages who appear before them relishing lyrical pleasures, e.g., a costly goblet of wine, a pied dash, a Cuban cigarette, or a bottle of whiskey with more peripeteias than them.

I pretend to teach how I perused public opinion and caused social conflicts when I was a political propagandist. I will not do this anymore. I am repented. Our mind displays three fundamental operations, which could be called, for the sake of simplicity, “unions”, “separations” and “comparisons”. These mental movements carry two paradigms, namely: monism and atomism.

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).

Technique is the main concern of an artistic writer, and subject-matter is the general anguish of a propagandistic writer, says G. Orwell^[1] (1). Art is possible in quiet moral ages, he says. Propaganda, therefore, is the fruit of unquiet moral ages, in which the “whole scheme of values is constantly menaced”. Such constant moral fear transforms the literary criticism, which is “judicious, scrupulous, fair-minded”, into something impossible. Objectivity, that is, “intellectual detachment”, is the origin of the universal masterpiece. Is the Defoe's Robinson Crusoe a technical and objective book or is it mere English propaganda? Four thesis extracted from our propagandistic experience will test the famous book of Defoe.

^[1] See The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda, published in the Listener, April 30, 1941. I offer Spanish translation in Don Palafox: donpalafox.blogspot.com/2018/12/fronteras-del-arte-y-la-propaganda.html

Jorge Luis Borges asseverates in scarce, arid lines, that F. S. Fitzgerald, whose vital mission was “to be brave”, represents, more than other authors of the American Jazz Age, the World War I´s post-days^[1]. The Great Gatsby^[2], ergo, is a historic document. H. L. Mencken declares that the Gatsby´s plot is just a “glorified anecdote” developed in “bawdy house parties”, in colorful fallacies that are inhabited by “marionettes”. Such an anecdote is valuable, he affirms, due to “the charm and beauty of the writing”, due to the sentences, which “roll along smoothly, sparklingly, variously”^[3]. We will test these three adjectives.

Tim Harford, reputado periodista de la BBC y del Financial Times, reúne en su nueva obra las cincuenta innovaciones que han dado forma a la economía de hoy, desde la maquinilla de afeitar Gillette al código de barras, pasando por la inteligencia artificial o la estantería Billy de Ikea.

Víctor Martín está considerado una de las personas más influyentes en social media a nivel nacional y su marca personal es una de las más sólidas y reconocidas. Su libro “Desata tu éxito” se ha convertido el mismo día de su lanzamiento en nº 1 en ventas de Amazon, tanto en la versión digital como en papel, desbancando en el ranking a escritores como Ken Follet.

¿Cómo consigue Mago More ser socio de cinco empresas, guionista del programa de José Mota, cómico, impartir conferencias, dar cursos de formación, tener un espacio habitual en radio, colaborar asiduamente en prensa, asistir a actos sociales y benéficos y ahora escribir un libro? Parece cosa de magia, pero tiene truco: con unos objetivos claros y un sencillo método puedes conseguir muchas más cosas de las que piensas. Y para muestra, él mismo.