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Vicente
Blasco Ibanez
Luigi
Pirandello
V ÍCENTE Blasco Ibañez, born in Valencia, Spain, in 1867,
started writing' at the age of 12. At 14, he was already
completing, in Madrid, the works of a novelist who had engaged
him as his secretary. His youth was marked by incessant
pamphleteering and political protest, which forced him twice to
flee Spain and took him to jail about 30 times. He also was
elected six times to the Spanish Cortes. In 1909, tired of
politics, he went to Argentina, whose scene was to inspire
three of his most famous novels. One of them, "The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse," published in 1914 more as an
anticipation than an actual comment on the world conflict, was
the first international success among modern war novels,
opening to him the doors of the American literary market and
Hollywood fame. Blasco Ibañez died a millionaire. He wrote
no less than 30 novels which reveal his talent for creating
characters and his gift for conducting narrative action.
F OR nearly half a century, the name of Luigi Pirandello
dominated Italian Letters. When Pirandello was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934, two years before his death,
he had become a world-famous dramatist who had given the
theatre a new psychological dimension. Born in 1867 at
Agrigente in Sicily, he first taught Italian literature in Rome
and began publishing short stories and novels in 1893. Many
of these deal with the lower middle class milieu or the farming
communities in Sicily. Though Pirandello wrote some
300 stories and six novels, his work as a novelist has been
somewhat obscured by his fame as a playwright, though he
used the same themes in both media. Novels such as "The
Late Mattia Pascal" (1904) reveal the same irony, the same
compassion that inspired the author to create the contradictory
and vacillating characters found in many of his plays.
Pirandello's main themes are the necessity and vanity of
illusion, the multiform appearances, all of them unreal, of what
is presumed to be the truth; man is not what he thinks he is,
but he Is "one, no one and a hundred thousand" (the title of
a Pirandello novel) according as he appears to different
persons, and is always different from what he creates himself
in his own mind. Pirandello's plays have been translated into
many languages, and have taken their places among the
masterpieces of the modern theatre.
Charles
Baudelaire
T HE "case" of Baudelaire is unique in the history of literature
already rich In examples of misunderstanding and dramatic
reversals of opinion. Charles Baudelaire, one of the greatest
names in French poetry, gained the recognition refused him
in his lifetime long after his death in 1867. Born in 1821, he
began to write at an early age. Among the poems in Les
Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), a collection published In
1857, are some he wrote In 1842 and 1843. The book caused
a scandal and Baudelaire was prosecuted for offending against
public morals. Although such literary giants as Victor Hugo
and Théophile Gautier recognized in Baudelaire a writer of
startling originality, the poet's works were scorned by the
critics in vogue and he was wantonly vilified. It was perhapè
less his private life (somewhat wild and unrestrained for his
day) than the profound distress that imbued his poems and his
discovery of "modernity" (a word he coined) which earned
him the suspicion and hatred of contemporary society. That
society had no wish to question any of the established social
or literary norms nor to consider the possibility of the
metamorphosis of such values. Baudelaire created a new
poetical art that was to make its impact on French literature
and prepare the way for Rimbaud and Mallarmé. A brilliant
critic he drew attention to new aesthetic values in many fields.
In literature, for example, he revealed to his countrymen the
works of Edgar Allan Poe, in French versions that are
masterpieces of the translator's art. In music he analyzed
the revolutionary innovations of Richard Wagner. In painting,
his studies on Eugène Delacroix, Constantine Guys, Daumier
and Edouard Manet brought out the meaning of the new tones
and forms In colour and drawing. Baudelaire's personal
journals speak of his prolonged sufferings and his solitude
from which a serious illness delivered him in 1867.
A
60th anniversary of the use of
Arabic in Egyptian schools
RABIC is today a language fully adapted to the needs of .
the 20th century with an abundant vocabulary of technological
and scientific terms which, as it continues to expand, constantly
adds new, expressive terms to the language of the Koran.
Scientific works, technical manuals, books and reviews on
science are written in Arabic or translated Into it. The up-todate
vocabulary of the spoken word, with its mobility,
inventiveness and imagery is being grafted on to the traditional
written language, bringing with it the new ideas of the atomic
age and the era of space exploration. The swift renovation of
Arabic io all the more remarkable In view of the decline it
suffered for four centuries following the invasion of Egypt by
the Turks in 1517. Until the beginning of the 19th century
Turkish replaced Arabic which thus was in danger of becoming
a dead language. Since the first Arabic language university
was created in Egypt sixty years ago and the use of Arabic
was established for schools, the press and government
services, the language has recovered its vigour and powers
of adaptability. The Unesco General Conference in 1966
decided to add Arabic to English, French, Spanish and Russian
as a working language of Unesco.
Photo Unesco-G. Böhm