Word: deafness
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Though half blind and half deaf, Argentine Author Jorge Luis Borges, 71, is still pouring out prose and poetry while lecturing and serving as head of Argentina's National Library. Last week, as he became the first winner of the new $25,000 Inter-American Literature Prize, Borges was characteristically modest, though candid: "I am not worthy of this award, but I will, of course, accept it nonetheless." As for the Nobel Prize that it is rumored he will get, he said wryly: "I would accept it greedily -like a Viking...
WORDS FOR A DEAF DAUGHTER by Paul West. 188 pages. Harper...
...beauty of Words for a Deaf Daughter is the truth of its form. A British-born critic, teacher and novelist, Paul West writes directly and uncondescendingly to his almost totally deaf, eight-year-old daughter Mandy in the hope that she will one day be able to receive and understand his lavish trust of words. His hope is supported by the progress she has made in reading, writing and expanding her spoken vocabulary to nearly 200 words...
West's playfulness is of the highest order. Like Homo ludens, man the naturally playful animal, he exercises imagination to create something where there was nothing. In doing so, he puts pity to shame and makes empathy seem hermetic and inadequate. Words for a Deaf Daughter is an act of love, not merely its expression. It is also a work of art, the vision of the loved object widening beyond adoration into new ways of seeing the world...
...When you get old, you can't talk to people because people snap at you. When you get so old, people talk to you that way. That's why you become deaf, so you won't be able to hear people talking to you that way. And that's why you go and hide under the covers in the big soft bed, so you won't feel the house shaking from people talking to you that way. That's why old people die, eventually...