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All the world as seen from the point of view of Oscar Wilde – reviews of books touching on Ireland

Dear readers of my blog,

retiring into the countryside, going off-line, albeit it for just a few days at a time or whenever you are on your way from A to B, all this allows for time to read and reflect what you have read.

Once you are free from the pressure you feel when sitting in your own study or surrounded by all you possess and cannot get rid of at short notice, reading becomes a pastime that links your present to the past in many ways. So I also felt when arriving in our customary flat for the one-week holiday we took in this year’s autumn recess. Reading the proofs of this year’s seventh edition of the Oscar Wilde Calendar...

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An Oscar Wilde Calendar 2022

Welcome to the Oscar Wilde Blog!

Dear readers,

       you may be aware of the online calendar on the Oscar Wilde Blog which is soon going to be replaced by a new one.

       As I have regularly been developing my website since it was first launched in late 2018, a new phase is in the offing now, for, as you may have noticed, I have started to post audios as well. Also, I intend to post the original calendar texts and their translations into German as audio files in the blog calendar.

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Oscar Wilde Birthday Blog: Poems and Letters.

Dear readers of my blog,

is it necessary to remind you of Oscar Wilde’s birthday? Most of you would know that he was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. So this was 157 years ago, and he was born only a few years after the Irish Famine, the event in Irish history that apart from the Catholic Church has had by far the greatest impact on Irish families since then.

Made aware of this even before I turned my hand...

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A Birthday Party without Guests

Dear readers of my blog,

it is quite different not to “write to the moment” in the sense that I need to wait for the impulse to be able to make my fingers move on the keyboard towards composing another blog post. It is simply that concentrating on compiling materials – text and image wise – without the need to think of how to arrange them in the last resort has liberated the machinations of my mind. At the very least, this process resembles the preparations of a lesson where looking at certain materials in details such as that I may not have seen for ages but which have somehow remained locked in my mind for as long makes me think at once of how to...

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Reflections on Translations of Wilde and other writers

Dear readers of my blog,

this is what I recently received via e-mail:

“Am reading Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections and came across this quote—which you will like!”

This was my friend Danny Morrison getting in touch while reading a book I have kept on my shelves for upwards of twenty years now, having dated its acquisition in Oldenburg and also the day when I found and copied out a quotation for the Preface to my edition of the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

“Translators are to be regarded as busy matchmakers who exalt the great loveliness of a half-veiled beauty: they kindle an irresistible longing for the original.”

In German, Goethe wrote in his maxim no. 299...

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Review articles on Wilde and others published on the Internet

Dear readers of my blog,

publishing in a foreign language means automatically that the market in your own country is limited and that your books are not necessarily considered worth reviewing – to say nothing about the status one does not have, nor has a chance to build in a foreign culture where at any moment – not only but even more so nowadays – you also need to be physically present. Unless you are part of a circle of academic or literary people, your work is not necessarily looked at – and the word about it is not spread, so that those interested might not be able to see and appreciate it. There would be quite a few stories – more or less...

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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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