LONG GOODBYES ~

Author Ursula Le Guin at home with her cat, Lorenzo, in 1996. The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”

Credit                                                                                                Jill Krementz, All Rights Reserved 

             

              1929 (Berkeley) ~ 2018

Nicanor Parra teaching in Santiago, Chile, in 1992. On the blackboard he had written: “Back to democracy for what? So the movie repeats itself? No.” 

   Credit

                                                                                                 Alvaro Hoppe/Associated Press

                                                                                          1914 (Chile) ~ 2018

                                                           

ADONIS ~

"Ali Ahmed Said was born in a small village in Syria in 1930. His choice
of pen name — Adonis — is an indicator of the audacity of both his poetry
and his writings on Arab culture and society. In 1961, this self-proclaimed
Arab Nietzsche published Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, a complex two-
hundred-page collection that many consider turning point in modern
Arabic poetry. Its impact on Arabic poetics has been no less substantial than 
the impact T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" had on English poetics."

— Kareem James Abu-Zeid

R E A D      M E

Yale

2017