The Dirty War was a campaign by the government of Argentina to suppress left-wing political opponents. It is estimated that during the period from 1976 to 1983, 10,000 to 30,000 citizens were killed or taken by the government and never heard from again. It was against this backdrop of violence
The following is an excerpt from Alberto Manguel’s latest book, Curiosity. The word itself has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. Here, Manguel explains the origins of the word as he sets the scene
The very first Mother’s Day was celebrated in 1908 in Grafton, West Virginia when Anna Jarvis’s held a memorial for her late mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, who had died in 1905. Her campaign to make Mother’s Day a recognized holiday in the United States found success years later when Woodrow Wilson signed a
The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization will be a ten-volume collection of 3,000 years of Jewish literature, artwork, and artifacts. We sat down with Felix Posen, who conceived the project, to ask about his hopes for the anthology, his perspective on secularism, and his thoughts on technology and preservation.
In Why Poetry Matters, the gifted poet, novelist and biographer Jay Parini gives us a deeply felt meditation on poetry. He explores its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. Parini ponders Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus, and moves on through Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Eliot,
What drives us to learn? How do books help us understand the world? How does language fail us? We sat down with reader and writer Alberto Manguel to satisfy our, well, curiosity. Yale University Press: How much do your personal experiences affect what you write about? Alberto Manguel: I’m not a scholar,
Mary Ann Caws— Happy birthday, Stéphane! Everything about Symbolism’s great poet makes him ours too. His strangeness, for example, while writing about the latest fashion using all those pseudonyms in La Dernière Mode: Madame de Ponty, Mademoiselle Satin, Olympia la négresse, le Chef de Bouche de chez Brabant, and IX
Kevin Madigan— Tradition holds that on February 23, 1455, the Gutenberg Bible, the first complete book published in the West, was published in Mainz, Germany. The Bible Gutenberg produced was the Vulgate Latin version, translated beginning in the fourth century by the church father Jerome (c. 347-420), and by Gutenberg’s
Happy National Readathon Day! The National Book Foundation has organized the holiday to promote a love of reading and to make sure that the book worm doesn’t become an endangered species. You can find out how to support the foundation’s efforts here, but the most important thing is to set aside
Fady Joudah, Palestinian-American, physician, celebrated poet and translator of poetry, and winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for his collection Earth in the Attic, discusses the inherent linguistic and subjective difficulties that each translator must face when presented with a work to be translated in his