Today, however, is a different sort of day:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806), and Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475)
I never knew this and it is only thanks to The Writer's Almanac that I know it now. But ignorance doesn't negate the fact that they are 3 of my favorite artists!
One Hundred Years of Solitude has stayed at the top of my desert island booklist since high school and I nearly flunked out of first semester freshman year in college because I could not put down Love in the Time of Cholera. I don't think I had ever read another piece of magical realism before Garcia Marquez, but I instantly took to it - it is my kind of world, where reality is a sideways glance from extraordinary and people move between the two like moving between the kitchen and living room. Would I have enjoyed Faulkner as much or even tried to read Master and Margarita if it had not been for Sr Garcia Marquez?
I was given an early copy of EBB's love poems as a wedding gift, but I confess I don't really care for her meter or rhyme or word-sense. That said, I love her spirit. She and Robert Browning had a mysterious and love-filled romance and marriage and she trod a path for others to follow. She disobeyed her father, trusted in the love of Robert, traveled to and lived in Florence, had a child at 43 (!!) and continued to publish in her own voice. One of my favorite poems is from Sonnets from the Portugeuse (his nickname for her, not an actual translation), where she describes his kisses, first on her hand and then the near misses on her hair, forehead, cheeks...it's rather flip for a poem written in the mid-19th century! (It's poem 38)
And finally Michelangelo. What can I say that hasn't already been said? I am not sure I'd want to meet him or have him for dinner or tea or whatever it is the teachers now have their students imagine of their heroes. However, I am in awe of his work and the Pieta in St Peter's is high on my list of must-sees. (Next week! Next week!)
John Updike, who died a few weeks ago, wrote a series of children's poems, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman called A Child's Calendar. The poem for November contains this line:
Tall God
Must see our souls
This way, and nod.
Must see our souls
This way, and nod.
Perfect eloquence, in meter, magic and stone.
1 comment:
I haven't read One Hundred Years of Solitude since college, but elements of it still regularly pop into my head...like the rain that goes on for five years. It's the kind of book that marks you for life.
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