Jean-Christophe, Volume I: Dawn, Morning, Youth, Revolt [Paperback] Review

This is the first in a 10 volume novel written by Romain Rolland who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in part for this effort.Nowadays, virtually no one has heard of Rolland.Here are the last paragraphs of volume 1:

"O, Paris!" he thought, "Paris! Come to my aid! Save me! Save my thoughts!"

The thick fog grew denser still. Behind Christophe, above the country he
was leaving, a little patch of sky, pale blue, large, like two eyes--like
the eyes of Sabine--smiled sorrowfully through the heavy veil of clouds and then was gone. The train departed. Rain fell. Night fell.

Clearly times and tastes have changed, but I think that Rollard's novel illustrates Oscar Wilde's infamous dictum (as modified by Professor Bloom) that "all bad art is sincere."It's painfully easy to imagine Rolland writing his fiction and crying through it all.

Another interesting thought:Romain Rollard figures in the opening paragraphs of Sigmund Freud's once famous work, "Civilization and Its Discontents."Freud quotes him as a then anonymous famous and admiring friend who corresponded with Freud about the illusion of religion.Both Rollard and Freud believed essentially (I libel each a bit with just that one adverb to describe their nuanced deep positions here) that God was dead, but for different reasons.Now, both Freud and Rollard are both not only dead, but usually forgotten and when remembered only with puzzlement.Maybe God is not dead.

Humanists of the world unite!

I mock, but seriously so.Rollard is today's equivalent of a New York Times marvel.He's doubtless despise George Bush and the "war" on "terror" and might even have organized a petition.And, yet he's forgotten in the hall of mirrors.


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"Jean-Christophe" is the history of the development of a musician of genius. Translated by Gilbert Cannan.

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Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours, a Bilingual Edition [Paperback] Review

This is a wonderful introduction to the great troubadour lyric and provides a useful series of commentaries of each troubadour included in the book. The editor who did translations to complement those of Pound and Snodgrass provides a passionate and valuable survey of the 200-plus years of this lyric tradition. Most importantly, the Occitan texts - side by side with the English - are a revelation, providing the lyric power and beauty of this world-changing literary movement. It is very difficult to not come back and read over the lyrics time and again.

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Although the troubadours flourished at the height of the Middle Ages in southern France, their songs of romantic love, with pleasing melodies and intricate stanzaic patterns, have inspired poets and song writers ever since, from Dante to Chaucer, from Renaissance sonneteers to the Romantics, and from Verlaine and Rimbaud to modern rock lyricists. Yet despite the incontrovertible influence of the troubadours on the development of both poetry and music in the West, there existed no comprehensive anthology of troubadour lyrics that respected the verse form of the originals until now.

Lark in the Morning honors the meter, word play, punning, and sound effects in the troubadours' works while celebrating the often playful, bawdy, and biting nature of the material. Here, Robert Kehew augments his own verse translations with those of two seminal twentieth-century poets-Ezra Pound and W. D. Snodgrass-to provide a collection that captures both the poetic pyrotechnics of the original verse and the astonishing variety of troubadour voices. This bilingual edition contains an introduction to the three major periods of the troubadours-their beginning, rise, and decline-as well as headnotes that briefly put each poet in context. Lark in the Morning will become an essential collection for those interested in learning about and teaching the origins of Western vernacular poetry.


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