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Summer Blog Post Twelve

Summer Blog Post Twelve

Dear readers of my blog,

working in several languages is my bread-winning job. Mostly, I change between German and English, German and French. Recently, however, a fourth language has returned, Italian. Eighteen years ago, I was delighted to spend about a mid-winter week in Bologna where a Ford Madox Ford conference was held which I attended realizing that among the forty odd speakers I was the only one in my late thirties not to have a proper university job. Since the publication of an illustrated biography and the translation of the first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in an uncensored edition had not allowed me to breathe more freely owing to a sharp increase of royalties, this insight into my economic situation as a translator and writer kept me busy for another few months until I realized that it was time to change professions.

 

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Summer Blog Post Eleven

Summer Blog Post Eleven

Dear readers of my blog,

if father and son are both writers, the chances they see similar things similarly and at the same time, while not necessarily talking about their parallel activities, are high. This is what I found out two years ago when trying to find those papers that should be preserved by the Westphalian Writers’ Archives at Münster that had agreed to take my father’s literary estate. Mind, he is still alive and now again an active reader, something he had always been but mostly with a purpose in mind. In his present situation, he can do what he likes, and so I send him my current work once it is published.

 

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Summer Blog Post Ten

Summer Blog Post Ten

Dear readers of my blog,

today is “Bloomsday”, now universally celebrated by fans of James Joyce's novel Ulysses as the festival of a single day in the Dublin of 1904. Eighteen years ago, I was invited to speak to an audience at Nuremberg about the third chapter, entitled “Proteus”. Then, I still travelled from Münster in Westphalia to whatever haunts I was asked to share with readers of James Joyce. At the time, I had already realized that this period of my life was running out of steam for I earned hardly anything from the proceeds of my pen as translator and writer of biographies – the first one of which on Oscar Wilde had been published in September 2000. So the contact with Maria Eger at Nuremberg started by a phone call of hers some time earlier was rewarding in the sense that I felt my hobby-horse was going to remain one in the future and that I would not be obliged to toe the academic as well as the commercial line for much longer.

Exhilarated by the perspective of doing what I wanted to do, I also wrote a poem to introduce my talk. Here it is: To this day most of my occasional poems have not seen the light of day, while a blog provides me with a good opportunity to combine literary interests in Wilde and Joyce as well as others such as politics and football.

 

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Summer Blog Post Nine

Summer Blog Post Nine

Dear readers of my blog,

as you can see when typing in https://site.unibo.it/wetell-school, there is an interesting summer school about storytelling as an important impulse to create civic awareness which is going to take place at Bologna University in early July. As an active teacher of modern languages, I often revert to telling stories, most of them experienced myself, in order to catch students' attention, particularly when they are too young to understand abstract concepts such as civic responsibility, awareness and difficult lessons to be learned from history.

Both Oscar Wilde, the main subject of this blog, and Tanya Josefowitz as well as Anne Frank tell stories rather than spread their word in terms of theories. Even when addressing theoretical subjects Wilde more often than not uses the literary form of a dialogue with fictitious characters to tell the story he has in mind.

 

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Summer Blog Post Eight

Dear readers of my blog,

returning late on Wednesday evening after an extremely long day at Ulrichsgymnasium Norden, I had hoped to relax on day one after Anne Frank's 90th birthday. The opposite was the case, since a day filled with meetings including the odd one with some of my students who had just received their matriculation results made it difficult to stop thinking about the day and the last two years spent with about thirty-five of this year's graduates. And while one student said that Anne Frank was just one witness to her, others who had accompanied groups to see the travelling exhibition two years ago saw her as the symbol of resistance she still is today.

 

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Summer Blog Post Seven

Summer Blog Post Seven

Dear readers of my blog,

yesterday, I also discovered that for decades a friend of Anne Frank, Laureen Nussbaum, that is, had fought for the publication of the diary in the form Anne Frank had herself re-written it in, rather than in the collation prepared by Otto Frank. In a sense, he had censored his daughter's work by mixing the two versions. At the moment, I can only speculate about the new translation, while my own impression of the German used in the collated edition is that it is much too flowery. But I say this on the basis of having compared two or three pages of the German with the very terse English text I read the whole diary in.

 

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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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