Word: booked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Unimpaired Spirit. Henderson's book not only introduces haiku in the clear accompanying text, but is the first really successful attempt at haiku translation. Through it, haiku may well become a fad on U.S. campuses. A professor of Japanese at Columbia University before his retirement four years ago, Henderson inherited from his father a love of Japanese art and literature, nourished by several long visits to the country. Existing haiku translations dismayed him. Most of his 375 translations rhyme, on the very reasonable premise that Japanese haiku might rhyme too but for the limitations of a language in which...
Oranges & Oatmeal. The scene, recalling the world of Oscar Wilde, The Yellow Book and Gissing's New Grub Street, is set in London's "grey and grisly filth and fog," where the lamps seem fueled by sewer gas, and Nicholas Crabbe alone shines by the unflickering integrity of his own malice. Crabbe, "as still and alert as his eponym," making his sidelong way through the bitter brine and marine fauna of a demented imagination, is a memorable creature...
...beer." Oldcastle commissions Crabbe to write a history of the Medici family for ?1 a week and ?10 on publication. Young writers today, who may count on being filled with gin and lobster if they so much as admit to a publisher that they are sickening for a book, may wonder at those unenlightened times when publishers left Crabbe to his oranges and oatmeal...
Occasionally, Crabbe frequents the literary salon of Sidney Thorah, editor of The Blue Volume, "a lank round-shouldered bony unhealthy personage" (in real life Henry Harland, literary editor of John Lane's Yellow Book, made famous by Beardsley and Beerbohm). In his cast-off dinner jacket, Crabbe does not flourish amid the strangely innocent Ninetyish wickedness of this salon...
Grace Notes. Betjeman both likes and deplores the sad, cramped lives of city suburbs. His own life is cramped by book reviewing (London Daily Telegraph), a trade he detests, but he has managed some grace notes. His Berkshire country home is an old rectory in Wantage, birthplace of Alfred the Great. There his busy wife Penelope (daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode) hunts and fishes with Pam-like energy, keeps an eye on their son and daughter and runs a thriving tea shop called King Alfred's Kitchen. She puts up jam; he musingly produces about one poem every...