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News February 2025

Dear readers of my blog,

dear visitors of the exhibition “Oscar Wilde. A Writer Trapped by His Own Words”,

dear readers of the “The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Uncensored Wording of the Lippincott’s Text”,

while you have chosen different approaches to reading the life and works of Oscar Wilde, there is one thing that these approaches have in common. They all relate to the publication of Wilde’s only novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” on 20 June 1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine on both sides of the Atlantic...

Weiterlesen … News February 2025

Neuester Blog Eintrag

Summer Blog Post Fourteen

2019-06-24 11:02

Summer Blog Post Fourteen

Dear readers of my blog,

summer time being football tournament time on several continents, I had reason to write my impressions both in 2010, 2014 and last year, in 2018, and this year I also recall what happened forty-five years ago, since the calendar is the same as in 1974, and suddenly the idea arose to think of the past in periods of five years.

In 1974, at age twelve,I watched my first World Cup taking place in Germany, and the day after the final in Munich we did a one-day-class trip to the Overseas Museum at Bremen when all the twelve-year-old children of 6e were packed in one carriage with four seats on each side of the narrow aisle, the boys all wearing shorts. While I fail to recall anything we may have said about the World Cup, I have always remembered the location of the museum just outside Bremen Main Station. Later in the summer, I would travel to Britain for the first time, taking the boat at Calais and becoming very seasick on the voyage out.

Weiterlesen … Summer Blog Post Fourteen

Summer Blog Post Thirteen

2019-06-23 19:11

Summer Blog Post Thirteen

Dear readers of my blog,

there was no procrastination on my part concerning no. 13, I can admit that without any remorse. On the contrary, for various reasons, unmentionable here, I rather like this number. My week since Tuesday has been so busy that I was simply unable to continue this blog.

Today, however, with the summer recess at school coming ever closer, and most of all duties now to be fulfilled when I am there rather than when staying at home, I again felt up to thinking of continuation. The poetic text I insert today before football takes over has been in the making for at least fifteen years, while I had the first idea when attending the 65th anniversary symposium held for Hans Walter Gabler at Innsbruck in late January 2003. At the time, though, I thought it might become a study. Now I am happy to see it has become a prose text consisting of short paragraphs rather than a poem which it was until early 2018 when one of the dedicatees had raised doubts about the justification I had for some texts to type them in the form of verse rather than prose.

Anglo-German relations:

An anthology of pen-portraits

Weiterlesen … Summer Blog Post Thirteen

Summer Blog Post Twelve

2019-06-18 20:54

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.

Weiterlesen … Summer Blog Post Twelve

Summer Blog Post Eleven

2019-06-17 16:34

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.

Weiterlesen … Summer Blog Post Eleven

Summer Blog Post Ten

2019-06-16 20:09

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.

Weiterlesen … Summer Blog Post Ten

Summer Blog Post Nine

2019-06-15 11:19

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.

Weiterlesen … Summer Blog Post Nine

Wildes Hauptwerk

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"Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray"

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Über mich

Jörg W. Rademacher, Jahrgang 1962, geboren und aufgewachsen in Westfalen. Studium an den Universitäten Münster, Dundee und Lille. Staatsexamen 1988. Promotion 1993. Wissenschaftler, Sprachlehrer sowie Autor und Übersetzer bis 2002 in Münster. Seit 2002 Gymnasiallehrer, Autor und Übersetzer in Ostfriesland. Beschäftigung mit Oscar Wilde seit 1988. Veröffentlichungen zu Wilde seit 2000 als Biograph und Herausgeber beziehungsweise Übersetzer, regelmäßig im Elsinor Verlag seit 2012, seit 2015 auch Herausgeber und Übersetzer von Oscar-Wilde-Kalendern.