Word: scholar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kazantzakis labored on and off over a period of twelve years to produce a book of singular power and beauty. Translator Kimon Friar, a poet and scholar of Greek descent, received from Kazantzakis himself the ultimate praise: that the translation was as good as the original. Whether or not that is so, as it now reads, The Odyssey is by all odds the most impressive literary achievement of many a year. It bears out the feeling Kazantzakis once expressed, in describing a form of spiritual conversion he underwent during a solitary retreat in the mountains: "Since then I have felt...
...mean critter when aroused, as he has been of late by contemporary prose (a "mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax"). Higher Learning (he could find only "an immense amount of Lower Learning" in the U.S.), and the Ph.D. racket (TIME, Nov. 25, 1957). In American Scholar Barzun castigates his latest victim: detective stories, which, he says, have fallen on evil days, turning increasingly into "novels of haze and daze...
...fall even further behind. A new theory now gaining acceptance is that the best elementary language teacher is a native of the country on which the course is focused. Such a man has a better insight into the language and will often do a better job than an American scholar twice...
Bicycling to the Baribas. Most Zee scholars go even farther to confront life. Last summer one scholar wangled a mechanic's job on a U.S.-bound Danish steamer, thumbed his way to Illinois and wrote a thesis on French influences there. Architecture Student François Calsat pedaled a creaky bicycle all over the jungles of French West Africa, won a top prize for his study of architecture and folkways among the Dahomey tribes. Highlight of his report: an account of a month spent as guest of 80-year-old Tunko Cessi, bangana of the warlike Bariba tribe...
...drink, hashish, poverty and TB. Two days later his mistress-and the mother of his daughter -killed herself; the child was raised by her paternal grandmother and aunt, who always spoke in reverent tones of "your poor father." Jeanne Modigliani grew up to be an art scholar, and now she has done a prim but thorough job of sorting out her father's miserable binge of a life...