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Wilde and the General Election

Dear readers of my blog,

back only a day after my last post, you might think I am not pressed for time in this pre-Xmas period. In fact, I am, like everyone else. Anyhow, it is necessary to comment on current events in the light of Oscar Wilde. Let me first correct an error I made today – not for the first time, I am afraid to say, and certainly not for the last, since Wilde himself was prone to make himself younger than he actually was. I wrote that in 1894 when my grandfathers were born in December he was thirty, he was forty, in fact. So please accept my apologies for this error.

Second, I must come back to the General Election result and its repercussions in the UK on Thursday last. In his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891), Wilde once wrote: “All modes of government are failures. 

 

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'Tis 125 years since

 

Dear readers of my blog,

while it is no surprise to see that “Get Brexit done – vote true Blue” has prevailed in the General Election yesterday, it does hurt though that the same party that eventually took the UK to Europe took the risk to dismantle the whole country to take it out again forty-six years later. Of course, I did not realise in the summer of 1974 what historic period I had first entered England and Wales but I distinctly recall the sugar and toilet-paper crisis that made people queue up outside the local shops in Aberdovey to get hold of what they needed for the usual provisions from the former colonies did not seem to have been supplanted in sufficient quantities by European or home-based providers. What with hindsight made for many a good laugh may become the order of the day very soon, and everybody will have to bear the brunt for this. This is perhaps the only saving grace for those who did not hesitate to risk the future of the country's youth, for, unfortunately, in a country where “the rest is history” is a common phrase to relegate all uncomfortable truths to the archives only looked at by bookish fellows, people may all too easily forget who got them in the scrapes that can still not been fathomed at the moment.

I do a have personal reason to write like this, as you can imagine, for today was a very special day for me, given that it is the 125th anniversary of my paternal grandfather. He was born when Oscar Wilde was thirty and a father of two sons. Like my maternal grandfather, three days his elder, Wilhelm Rademacher fought in the First World War, and like him, he was the exact coeval of Aldous Huxley in whose centenary year, which was also theirs, thought no-one in the two families ever spoke about that fact then, I took a most passionate part in the organising of the Centenary Symposium dedicated to the life and works of Huxley held at Münster University. It is only now that I realise to the full why I was so passionate, risking very much, not least an academic career, to make it succeed. It was something I did by proxy – though unwittingly so. Only when in the process of clearing the family home and the literary papers of my father did I grasp what kind of activity I had been involved in since I chose to study modern languages and literature and to stick to writing and translating while teaching at a school some time later. So I was driven to write a poem about my paternal grandfather, my father and myself as grandson. Here it is:

Father Son & Grandson

 

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News about Wilde; Relais de la Mémoire at Norden

Dear readers of my blog,

again it is after a period of prolonged silence in these digitized columns that I resume my communications, while October and November have been extremely eventful months both in terms of Oscar Wilde and my other favourite subject, the study of the Shoah.

On 11th October 2019, the Italian translation of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was presented by Sara Pini, a Ph. D. student at Bologna University in the most prestigious hall of that well-renowned alma mater. Though the book entitled Il ritratto di Dorian Gray. Stesura del 1890 and published by Elsinor Verlag, followed my edition, I was unable to attend this occasion. Unfortunately, life makes you very often take hard decisions. In most cases, it is impossible to please everyone, including all facets of one's own personality. So I was extremely relieved when learning two days before the event that the books had arrived safe and sound in Italy.

 

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A Birthday Party without Guests

 

Dear readers of my blog,

perhaps you all know the saying that who defends him- or herself accuses him- or herself. So I am not going to explain away my silence in these parts. Soon the Wildean reasons will be given in terms of a report on what is going on at Bologna University at the moment. Since I regret not to be able to be there on the occasion of the foundation of the new Italian Society of Oscar Wilde and all that that entails, including the presentation of a new translation of The Picture of Dorian Gray by the translator, Sara Pini, I limit myself to introducing a piece of prose to you that I needed to write following the great non-event in Germany last Monday.



A Birthday Party without Guests

Reading Harold Pinters play The Birthday Party when a young man of twenty-two, I noticed an acerbity of tone and bitterness of language as a whole that rang familiar, while I felt unable to say why it had such a family touch or even sting.

 

 

 

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Blog Artikel deutsch (1)

Liebe Leser meines Blogs,

erstmals schreibe ich nun auch einmal in deutscher Sprache, nicht ganz uneigennützig, denn Übersetzungen  von Oscar Wilde, noch dazu ihre Rezeption auf Englisch anzuzeigen, scheint mir müßig. Es ist vielleicht nicht unwichtig zu zeigen, daß die Übersetzungsgeschichte des berühmten Sozialismus-Essays keineswegs lang ist. Deshalb nutze ich die Gelegenheit der Veröffentlichung meiner eigenen deutschen Version zur Präsentation der jüngeren deutschen Texte in Form einer Bibliographie, wie sie auch im Internet zu finden ist.

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Current Brexit Crisis - the Irish Question revisited

Dear readers of my blog,

while all sorts of personal and professional obligations have kept me from having my say in the current crisis evolving around Brexit, it is clear that there was another reason for silence: like most Europeans with friends and acquaintances in Britain, I do not want to interfere in what seems a monumental conflict both within the Tory Party and across all sections of society in the United Kingdom. What has changed, however, since the arrival of the present resident at 10 Downing Street is that both the opposition parties in Westminster, prominently led by the SNP and the Liberal Democrats and the Tory rebels have had occasion to meet regularly to start “grown-up” talks “across the house”, so that another sign of the dilapidation of the current government was its loss of the majority of one seat on Tuesday when a former Government minister changed sides.

 

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Wildes Hauptwerk

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"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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