Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa, Cláudia Franco Souza, João Carlos Callixto
{"title":"Portuguese Readings of William Blake: Fernando Pessoa, a National Poet, and Três Tristes Tigres, a Pop-Rock Band","authors":"Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa, Cláudia Franco Souza, João Carlos Callixto","doi":"10.47761/biq.304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.304","url":null,"abstract":"In a post published 1 April 2020 on his personal blog, John McGowan declared that “[a] student learns how to ‘do’ close reading by immersion in various examples of the practice, not by learning a set of rules or ‘a’ method.” In the present case, we are indeed bringing to the fore two radically different, although both inspired and inspiring, examples of readings of William Blake’s poetry and poetic principles, one by Fernando Pessoa and the other by Três Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers). Pessoa (1888–1935) is the modernist writer now acclaimed, in both elite and popular cultural circles, as Portugal’s twentieth-century national poet; aware of Blake since at least 1903–04, he openly acknowledged his influence c. 1915: “In my intellectual ancestry I find Blake and Walt Whitman.” Três Tristes Tigres is a Portuguese pop-rock band from the 1990s, currently comprising the singer Ana Deus, the guitar player Alexandre Soares, and the poet Regina Guimarães; almost twenty years after their first albums (1993–98), the group released Mínima Luz (Minimum Light, 2020), which includes the track “Tigre,” the first musical adaptation of a poem by Blake to be sung in a Portuguese translation.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86185955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“I inhabited the Land of Ulro long before Blake taught me its proper name”: Czesław Miłosz’s Ziemia Ulro/The Land of Ulro","authors":"E. Borkowska","doi":"10.47761/biq.303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.303","url":null,"abstract":"Olga Tokarczuk, in her Nobel lecture of 7 December 2019, observed that the public nowadays prefers facts to fiction. This is an auspicious remark for my purposes, as my theme will be the autobiographical book of Czesław Miłosz, another Polish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who received his award in 1980, a year after Tokarczuk’s literary debut. The Blake of Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is part of a fictional world, a curious addition to the story: Agnieszka Holland’s film Spoor, adapted from the book and cowritten by the novelist, eliminates the Blake references without much (or perhaps any) loss to the plot. Conversely, the Blake of Miłosz’s Ziemia Ulro, initially published in 1977 (a round anniversary of Blake’s birth and death), is a vital part of life. I will first recall a few relevant details from Miłosz’s bi(bli)ography, then reflect on the character and quality of his tribute to William Blake. Unlike my chapter for The Reception of William Blake in Europe, whose profile dictated the method (that is, an overview) and the narrow focus on the role Miłosz’s book played in the history of the reception of Blake in Poland, I will engage here more intensively with Ziemia Ulro and, by doing so, postulate a much more extensive appeal of Miłosz’s work. In particular, I will be pointing to the importance and value of this book—translated into English by Louis Iribarne as The Land of Ulro—for international Blake circles.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80845029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Sick as a Rose”: William Blake in Leopoldo María Panero’s Poetry of Experience","authors":"Cristina Flores","doi":"10.47761/biq.302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.302","url":null,"abstract":"William Blake’s Songs of Experience found a powerful response in the Spanish author Leopoldo María Panero (1948–2014). In his work, which is crowded with echoes of the Blakean images of the sick rose and the tiger, he offers a reinterpretation of some of Blake’s most popular motifs.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"304 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77634291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading Revolutions: Corrado Costa’s William Blake in Beulah, a Visionary Cartoon Essay in 1977 Italy","authors":"Luisa Calé","doi":"10.47761/biq.300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.300","url":null,"abstract":"Under what conditions might Blake’s Beulah offer a script for a revolutionary present? This essay explores an episode in the visual reception of Blake as a letterpress poet from a time of civil unrest in Italy. Corrado Costa’s William Blake in Beulah: Saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti (William Blake in Beulah: A Visionary Essay on a Poet in Comic Strips, 1977) is an avant-garde experiment in visual adaptation inspired by lettrism, Dada, and neo-avant-garde critiques of typography. Their analysis of the loss of the visual elements of writing certainly applies to the textual transmission of Blake’s works, which separated the poet from the artist in order to publish his poetry in typographical layouts. Abstracted from the visual form of the illuminated book, Blake’s poetry offered an ideal testing ground for Costa’s “visionary essay” in the sense of a creative-critical attempt to turn poetry into comic-strip captions. In fragmenting, resegmenting, repeating, and distributing Blake’s words across comic-strip panels, Costa releases them from the constraints of language and genre, testing how Blake might fare as a comic-strip poet. In what follows, I will explore how Costa’s comic-strip Blake subverts the orders of language, genre, and the medium of the book. I will focus on the most experimental section of Blake in Beulah, in which Costa reinvents The French Revolution as a prophetic cue for the 1977 movement.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89911474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"William Blake’s Black Bible as a Spectacle of Doom: A Recent Note to Blakean Reception in Romania","authors":"Cătălin Ghiță","doi":"10.47761/biq.301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.301","url":null,"abstract":"I intend in this paper to focus on a lesser-known, yet highly significant, aspect of Blake’s aesthetic reception in southeast Europe. The radio play William Blake’s Black Bible (Biblia neagră a lui William Blake) represents—as one learns at the end—a tribute to the victims of the Colectiv Club fire, which occurred in Bucharest on 30 October 2015. The site itself was a blast from the past: established as a private venture by a prominent bourgeois family, Prodanof, between the two world wars, it became a successful footwear factory during the communist era and was left derelict after the demise of the Ceaușescu regime in late 1989. It was subsequently rented by private businessmen and turned into a fashionable events club after 1990.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"171 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74377976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To See the Worlds of a Grain of Sand: Blake and Reception","authors":"S. Erle","doi":"10.47761/biq.298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.298","url":null,"abstract":"William Blake’s influence on modern culture is undeniable. Blake—in contrast, for example, to P. B. Shelley, Wordsworth, or Byron—has a huge presence in literature, art, and music. Striking parallels and historical evidence for connections between Blake and his modern audiences have been identified and discussed, determining why he matters. From the discussions of synergies in the intellectual and emotional climates of his time and our own arise two questions, which this special issue on Blake’s reception in Europe endeavors to address: One, what of Blake (person, poetry, and art) bridges the gulf of time, appears universal, or seems directly relevant? Two, what happens to Blake if works (texts and images) are separated and taken up by audiences that ostensibly have little in common, apart from a shared residual Christian position or other—esoteric or secular—values originating in Western culture? The latter, which is about ownership, leads to a further question: If there are too many idiosyncratic interpretations of Blake, does the real Blake get lost?","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81492457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Mental Travellers: On Blake’s Reception by Nikolai Gumilyov","authors":"Vera V. Serdechnaia","doi":"10.47761/biq.296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.296","url":null,"abstract":"William Blake drew the attention of the influential Russian poet and literary critic Nikolai Gumilyov (1886–1921). Gumilyov was the first to translate “The Mental Traveller” into another language, in the period from 1918 to 1921, and his late poetry contains many traces of Blakean influence.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87605506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blake in Europe, edited by Sibylle Erle: cover and table of contents","authors":"S. Jones","doi":"10.47761/biq.299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.299","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79962919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sheila A. Spector, The Evolution of Blake’s Myth","authors":"R. Yoder","doi":"10.47761/biq.292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.292","url":null,"abstract":"Spector has spent much of her career championing a “canon of rejected knowledge” that she describes in her book as having been “extirpated from the bibliographies of acceptable resources” (330). The Evolution of Blake’s Myth is her most ambitious and persuasive statement yet on the importance of esoteric or “hidden” traditions, largely Kabbalistic, to Blake’s work. Spector discusses almost all of Blake’s illuminated books and a good number of his paintings; she also develops a vocabulary for Blake’s composite art that allows for a consistently integrated discussion of text and design.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77270315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Susan Mitchell Sommers, The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England","authors":"Wayne C. Ripley","doi":"10.47761/biq.293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.293","url":null,"abstract":"Even though William and Catherine Blake are mentioned on only a handful of pages, Blakeans will be thoroughly intrigued by Susan Mitchell Sommers’s The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian London for its portrayal of groups and eclectic discourses close to, and sometimes touching, the Blakes. The Siblys were a family of booksellers who specialized in the occult, publishing on such topics as astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and prophecy. The book focuses largely on the two oldest brothers, Manoah (1757–1840), a Swedenborgian minister and Bank of England employee, whom the Blakes almost certainly met, and Ebenezer (1750–99), a bookseller, freemason, quack, astrologer, political operative, bigamist, and self-described male midwife and alchemist. As Sommers points out, when the Siblys have been considered at all, they have been examined from various disciplinary frames that often misconstrued their larger lives and work. Accordingly, one of the real strengths of the book is Sommers’s careful engagement with, and correction of, the existing scholarship, based on detailed, documented research.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72805477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}