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Calendar Prefaces in French and Italian and other topical matters

17.03.2020 20:44

A Calendar in Progress –

Blog post 17 March 2020: Prefaces in French and Italian

Dear readers of my blog,

this at long last the ultimate installment of this year’s calendar project with its prefaces translated into French and Italian. I would have liked to upload them much sooner but at the beginning of this year one thing after another kept my attention away from the Internet, while it is now with almost a curfew for most activities in Germany – even playgrounds have been banned because of possible infections – that the Internet alongside the telephone and snail mail are the most important interactive means of communication for many if not most computer literate people. All the others could easily

Read more … Calendar Prefaces in French and Italian and other topical matters

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Wildes Hauptwerk

Alles über
"Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray"

Über mich

Jörg W. Rademacher (*1962), born and bred in Westphalia. Attended university at Münster, Dundee and Lille. State exam in 1988. Ph.D. In 1993. Scholar, language teacher as well as writer and translator at Münster until 2002. Since 2002 secondary school teacher, writer and translator in East Frisia. Working on Wilde since 1988. Publishing on Wilde since 2000 as biographer and editor and translator, on a regular basis with Elsinor Verlag since 2012, since 2015 also editor and translator of Oscar Wilde calendars.

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January

October 2002: As a boy of fifteen at the end of the 1950s, I remember finding in a cupboard what was clearly intended to be a secret file of press cuttings. My father, Vyvyan, had written on it in Cyrillic characters […]. My curiosity aroused, I went through the contents and discovered that the clippings all had a common theme – homosexuality. […] inevitably, poor Oscar got dragged into the discussion amidst all the moralising.

‒ Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, London: 4^th Estate, 2003, S. xv.

February

Saturday, 2nd March 1895: Charles Humphreys [speaking in court]: On the previous Thursday night, the 28th February, between five and six o’clock, Mr Wilde went to [the Albemarle] Club, and the hall porter presented him with a card enclosed in an envelope addressed to ‘Oscar Wilde Esq.’.

‒ Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, London: 4^th Estate, 2003, S. 3.

March

Saturday, 9th March 1895: Queensberry: I have simply to say this, your worship, that I wrote that card simply with the intention of bringing matters to a head, having been unable to meet Mr Wilde otherwise, and to save my son, and I abide by what I wrote.

‒ Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, London: 4^th Estate, 2003, S. 22.

April

Wednesday Morning, 3rd April 1895: Wilde: […] I then said to him, ‘Lord Queensberry do you seriously accuse your son and me of sodomy?’ He said, ‘I don’t say you are it, but you look it’ (laughter).

‒ Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, London: 4^th Estate, 2003, S. 58.

May

Wednesday Morning, 3rd April 1895: Wilde: It is impossible for a man of letters to judge of a piece of writing otherwise than from its fault in literature. […] I think the choice was wrong, the subject wrong, the writing perfectly wrong, the whole treatment wrong – wrong!

‒ Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, London: 4^th Estate, 2003, S. 68.

June

Wednesday Morning, 3rd April 1895: Carson: […] what I wanted to get at was, what you disapproved of. / Wilde: What I disapproved of was the tone, treatment, subject, everything; the whole thing from beginning to end.

‒ Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, London: 4^th Estate, 2003, S. 71.

July

Wednesday Morning, 3rd April 1895: Carson: ‘Pose’ is a favourite word of yours, I think? / Wilde: Is it? I have no ‘pose’ in the matter. I do my own work in writing a plot, a book, anything. I am concerned entirely with literature, that is with Art. The aim is not to do good or to do evil, but to try and make a thing that will have some quality of beauty that is to be attained or in the form of beauty and of wit and of emotion.

‒ Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, London: 4th Estate, 2003, S. 74.

August

Wednesday Morning, 3rd April 1895: Wilde: It had been pointed out to me […] by the only critic of this century I set high, Mr Walter Pater, he had pointed out to me that a certain passage was liable to misconstruction. / Carson: In what respect? / Wilde: In every respect. / Carson: In what respect? / Wilde: In the respect that it would convey the impression that the sin of Dorian Gray is sodomy. / Carson: You altered it? / Wilde: I made one addition.

‒ Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, London: 4th Estate, 2003, S. 78/79.

September

Wednesday Afternoon, 3rd April 1895: Carson: I will suggest to you Dorian Gray. Is that open to the interpretation of being a sodomitical book? / Wilde: Only to brutes – only to the illiterate; perhaps I should say brutes and the illiterate.

‒ Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, London: 4th Estate, 2003, S. 81.