Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...some enjoyment from this book," wrote Havelock Ellis about Casanova's Memoirs, "there must be something unwholesome and abnormal-something corrupt at the core." Writing in the Victorian era, Scientist Ellis (Psychology of Sex) idolized Casanova as a free spirit, a man who had the courage to live life fully, and as a shining example of "adjustment"-for Casanova adapted himself so easily to his own desires. Yet there may be more truth in Ellis' exaggerated view than in the more conventional notion expressed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which complains that "the recital of his love affairs...
...literature and humor of immigrant life no longer seem as real or timely as they once did, but a kind of folklore remains, and in it Hyman Kaplan has an unshakable place. The secret of his greatness is the relentless sweep of his untutorable mind. A brooding Kaplan caps a lecture on etymology with the thrust, "Aren't eny voids in English fromm England?" Here is the man to bandy homely inapposite proverbs with a Khrushchev: ''Som pipple can drown in a gless of vater." It is he who gives the principal parts...
...more than likely that he did not understand himself. Writing his Memoirs, near 70, he wryly discussed the illness "which the Italians call mal français." Wrote he, sounding puzzled: "The greatest part of my life was spent in trying to make myself ill, and when I had succeeded, in trying to recover my health. [Now] age, that cruel and unavoidable disease, compels me to be in good health in spite of myself...
...this faithfully wrought translation by Russian-born Eugene Kayden, professor emeritus of economics at the University of the South, more than a glint of Pasternak's poetic genius filters through; whole stanzas blaze with life and passion. But, since Pasternak frequently relies on a fusion of images and sounds, perhaps only an inspired fellow poet could devise sensuously idiomatic English equivalents. In Translator Kayden's rhymes, Pasternak's lyric song is sometimes reduced to schoolboy singsong...
...Doctor Zhivago has already shown, the sense of life in Pasternak is heightened by the flashing vigor of his imagery; sometimes he welds disparate images to startle the reader into a rebirth of wonder. At the first patter of a summer drizzle, "dust swallowed up the pills of raindrops." In an offshore storm, "skies crouch lower/ Flying downward/ Steep/ Sea slopes/ And finger the deep/ With wings of clamorous gulls...