Oscar Wilde Blog

by Jörg W. Rademacher

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Summer Blog Post Four

 

Summer Blog Post Four

Dear readers of my blog,

while it is gratifying to note that Internet activity in the past six months has resulted in finding this blog through the normal search machine, this view on Oscar Wilde is still perhaps only perceived by very few – the “happy few”, he might have quipped. Rightly so, since it needs some reflection to be able to think beyond the trodden paths and and to undeceive oneself about what is going on around us. Wilde was always able to point out undercurrents while apparently being someone who assimilated himself well in the English society of his day and age.

He was a conservative at heart, an Irish patriot, and someone who knew when he saw an injustice. This is one strand of his thought prominent in the essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, a new German edition of which Elsinor Verlag has just published in my translation. Here are the bibliographical details:

Oscar Wilde

Des Menschen Seele im Sozialismus

Aus dem Englischen neu übersetzt und mit Anmerkungen

sowie einem Vorwort versehen von Jörg W. Rademacher

Nachwort von Michael Szczekalla

Taschenbuch | 108 pp. | € 12,00 [D]

Elsinor Verlag, Coesfeld

ISBN 978-3-942788-42-7

 

 

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Summer Blog Post Three

while it would be worth our while conversing about football as Wilde's contemporaries might have talked the scandals about town in the interval of a comedy of manners performed at the Haymarket, for example, I still want to link both activities. So tonight I compared the published review of a novel that appeared on 31st May 2019 with what I had sent in some weeks before. As usual in recent months, the editor cut the text. Let's not speculate here.

I'd rather have you read in English what I actually wrote about Alexander Pechmann's novel “The Hooded Crow” (“Die Nebelkrähe”) and what I would have liked to write if there had been more space to do so

 

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Summer Blog Post Two

Dear readers of my blog,

watching the highlights of the Nations League semi-finals with Portugal beating Switzerland and the Netherlands coming back against England to win following two decisive defensive blunders in extra-time, I thought that the old truth still holds: no matter how good you are up front, it is always the back four and the goalkeeper who make you lose a match and a title. You can never control Cristiano Ronaldo absolutely, nor can you prevent the Dutch from attacking, but as in 2018 when both Bayern Munich and Liverpool lost to Real Madrid for lack of cynicism, the team beaten on Wednesday or Thursday last failed to control the ball when in their own third of the ground.

Friday, 7th June 2019


Before uploading this post, let me briefly say that watching women’s football matches live at the World Cup in Germany in 2011 has made me a fan of their more playful variant as well. So I tuned in the first half of the France v. South Korea tie yesterday evening and have just followed the highlights of Germany v. China. The Équipe tricolore seem to justify their status as favourites in their home tournament, while the young German side, who beat France some months ago, had to work very hard to clinch the match by one goal to nil, showing some frightening weaknesses – similar to those blunders made by the English defence on Thursday – which, however, the Chinese failed to profit from, someone only prevented by a ball hitting the post from taking the lead.

Saturday, 8th June 2019

 

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All the World’s a Football (Summer Blog Post One)

 

Dear readers of my blog,

before you start to wonder about what I am doing now, let me briefly explain that opening my drawer of unpublished texts on football matches I do not intend to leave the literary sphere at all. Having decided early on, way before I had come of age that watching football would be the activity I might stick to rather than trying in vain to imitate my peers, I was glad one day to discover that Oscar Wilde had been a strictly non-playing member of an Oxford University Cricket Club. At least he was a club member. I never joined a football club. At the same time, as a man of letters with many favourite writers I also like many different football teams and ways of playing the game. So writing about it allows me to combine two passions, and since the book market in that respect does not like to accommodate books like the one I wrote five years ago I try my luck by dividing the diary entries into blog posts. Some of them will certainly include references to events taking place this summer, while the gist recalls impressions from the Brazil World Cup in 2014.

 

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European Elections, Britain and Oscar Wilde

Dear readers of my blog,

on day one after the latest European Elections I cannot but reflect on this event that has had eleven editions since 1979 when, just turned seventeen, I only could take part by counting votes in Unna, Westphalia, where I grew up.

Today, Monday, 27th May 2019, I did not wake up to see surprising banner headlines, as did Britons back in June 2016 who had gone to bed thinking that the Remainers would clinch the day only to wake up with the Leavers being the winners who have not, as it seems now, taken all.

 

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Opening of the Tanya Josefowitz exhibition at Norden

On Wednesday, 8th May 2019, the 74th anniversary of VE Day as well as the 70th anniversary of the vote taken by the "Parliamentary Council" that allowed the German Basic Law to be signed on 23rd May 1949, about 35 people attended the opening ceremony of the exhibition "Tanya Josefowitz and Anne Frank at 90. A Life of Resistance" in room F0 of the arts building of Ulrichsgymnasium Norden. The headmaster, Mr. Wolfgang Grätz, spoke briefly on the impossibility of finding words to sum up the horrors committed before and during World War Two. Then Frau Elke Scheiner read three passages chosen from "I Remember" in the translation originally made for the laying of stepping-stones in front of the house in Worms where the Kagan family had lived until February 1938.

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Wildes Hauptwerk

Alles über
"Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray"

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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.

Der neue Kalender

Interesse an einem Kalender?
Kontaktieren Sie mich.

A calendar in progress 2023

Composing these reflections when offering, selling, and sending out the current calendar is still only a matter of weeks away, I do feel that this project has made another step: at long last, a balance has been found between word and image, with Günter Plessow the author of the verse translations into German, while I translated two of Egon Günther’s poems into English besides choosing, arranging, and, sparsely this time, commenting the poems. If you like, you can see the history of the Oscar Wilde calendars represented by their respective covers on my website: oscar-wilde-blog.de
In fact, it is only owing to Günter Plessow’s industry in translating what he calls “Lyrical Notes” into German in the year 2021 that a substantial selection of Wilde poems ranging from the 1870s through the 1890s, including “The Sphinx” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, are now available for re-publication as part of this calendar project. This is also why, compared to previous calendars, this Oscar Wilde Calendar concentrates on poetry on the one hand and focuses on verse in English and German on the other hand. Taking the poems chosen this time in turn, I also include miniatures of the collage work, so that it is possible to survey the complete calendar here.

January

Oscar Wilde
Ravenna


A year ago I breathed the Italian air, –
And yet, methinks this northern Spring is fair, –
These fields made golden with the flower of March,
The throstle singing on the feathered larch,
The cawing rooks, the wood-doves fluttering by,
The little clouds that race across the sky;
And fair the violet’s gentle drooping head,
The primrose, pale for love uncomforted,
The rose that burgeons on the climbing briar,
The crocus-bed, (that seems a moon of fire
Round-girdled with a purple marriage-ring);
And all the flowers of our English Spring,
Fond snow-drops, and the bright-starred daffodil.

“Ravenna”, in: Oscar Wilde, Poems and Poems in Prose, edited by Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 46- 54; here: p. 46.

Only issued separately in 1878 and first anthologised with Wilde’s poetry since 1908, “Ravenna” is a prize poem, winning Wilde the Newdigate Prize, partly recited by the author himself in the Sheldonian Theate Oxford on 26th June 1878 and dedicated to a lady that he had met in Rome in the spring of 1877: Julia Constance Fletcher (1858-1938). The latter published novels pseudonymously, among others Mirage (1877) containing a portrait of Wilde as Mr. Davenant (Oscar Wilde, Poems and Poems in Prose, pp. 247/248).

February

Maria Eger in memoriam
First & lasting impressions

I don’t know exactly but think it was her guttural laugh preceding
the first words she ever said to me or the answering machine
that established some kind of mutual liking when she
said the Zurich Joyce Centre people had given her my number.

Living still at Münster Westphalia with a red dialling phone to boot
I had to be called for in my study facing the busy suburban street
to tell her that what she was looking for was the Joyce Book with
13 poems set to music from Pomes Penyeach and given to Joyce

for his 50th anniversary in 1932 and lying in the Zurich archives
which made her laugh again for Fritz Senn had said for music
she’d rather ask Rademacher Radmachrees as Finnegans Wake
has it not him being the unmusical sort so the first call sent her back

to where she had been before but she not only took it with good humour
she also remained in touch for the next twenty-one years even asking
me to speak in January 2021 on the 80th anniversary of Joyce’s death
a talk I never finished writing owing to the second nationwide lock-down.

She did not lose hope encouraged literary & musical talents of all kinds
invited over to Nuremberg whoever had written sculpted composed &
painted drawn translated anything of importance organizing symposia
making friends meet across the cultural divide of East & West and

North & South digging deep into her own pocket to pay impolite actors
just as well as grateful young pianists frustrated journalists up-and-coming
teachers while teaching herself legions of enthusiastic readers of Joyce &
other difficult writers never tiring of finding yet another interesting project.

Until one day some time last summer or even before that it was the last time
she spoke on my answering machine or I no longer durst ring her to ask
would she like the new calendar the last edition of which I had sent off
to friends in her name then I only waited for the inevitable to happen

her Bavarian voice to join “all the dead voices” accumulating in my
ears’ memory chamber just as images of dear lost ones are kept in
one’s mind’s eye returning to life only when there is a trigger a dream
at night another wake at another person’s death bed.

JWR Leer, 4. März 2023

March

Maria Eger in memoriam
First & lasting impressions

I don’t know exactly but think it was her guttural laugh preceding
the first words she ever said to me or the answering machine
that established some kind of mutual liking when she
said the Zurich Joyce Centre people had given her my number.

Living still at Münster Westphalia with a red dialling phone to boot
I had to be called for in my study facing the busy suburban street
to tell her that what she was looking for was the Joyce Book with
13 poems set to music from Pomes Penyeach and given to Joyce

for his 50th anniversary in 1932 and lying in the Zurich archives
which made her laugh again for Fritz Senn had said for music
she’d rather ask Rademacher Radmachrees as Finnegans Wake
has it not him being the unmusical sort so the first call sent her back

to where she had been before but she not only took it with good humour
she also remained in touch for the next twenty-one years even asking
me to speak in January 2021 on the 80th anniversary of Joyce’s death
a talk I never finished writing owing to the second nationwide lock-down.

She did not lose hope encouraged literary & musical talents of all kinds
invited over to Nuremberg whoever had written sculpted composed &
painted drawn translated anything of importance organizing symposia
making friends meet across the cultural divide of East & West and

North & South digging deep into her own pocket to pay impolite actors
just as well as grateful young pianists frustrated journalists up-and-coming
teachers while teaching herself legions of enthusiastic readers of Joyce &
other difficult writers never tiring of finding yet another interesting project.

Until one day some time last summer or even before that it was the last time
she spoke on my answering machine or I no longer durst ring her to ask
would she like the new calendar the last edition of which I had sent off
to friends in her name then I only waited for the inevitable to happen

her Bavarian voice to join “all the dead voices” accumulating in my
ears’ memory chamber just as images of dear lost ones are kept in
one’s mind’s eye returning to life only when there is a trigger a dream
at night another wake at another person’s death bed.

JWR Leer, 4. März 2023

April

Lucky you Lucky Luke

Happy-go-lucky view of life
Lucky to have escaped the MCA
Lucky on Pozzo’s leash running on stage
in Waiting for Godot dog-like that is
another endgame of silences from which emerges
Jordan the rapper who can hardly read or write
suitable for waiting on stage walking around the bare tree
while being a lucky loser and unsuitable for the garrulous
Wilde talk of The Importance of Being Earnest
incapable of pulling off the lucky punch
you need to realise if you want to win
when facing someone from Ireland.

JWR

According to the title “Oscar Wilde & Friends”, it is here that a film version of Waiting for Godot based on a true story in Sweden when detainees produced the piece and ran off when the first night was looming and associations meet triggered by a life with Irish literature and theatre as played on stages in France. Last but not least an echo can still be heard of the amazement shown over the phone by a lady in the press office of a repertory theatre in Westphalia who inhaled and exhaled audibly on hearing that Samuel Beckett was Irish. She had simply never thought of where he had been born and bred.