Frans Coenen, Eric Bogosian, Robert Penn Warren, Carl Spitteler, Anthony Trollope, Michael Schaefer
De Nederlandse schrijver, essayist en criticus Frans Coenen werd in Amsterdam geboren op 24 april 1866. Zie ook alle tags voor Frans Coenen op dit blog.
Uit: Bleeke levens
“In den vroegen ochtend, met een treintje, dat aansloot aan een van die groote, stormende internationale treinen zouden wij gaan.
Den avond tevoren, na het souper, werd het eenigermate duidelijk in welke verhouding de oude heer en de jonge vrouw tot elkaar stonden, de twee menschen, waarin deze kleine maatschappij het meest belangstelde. Iemand had hun vier schoenen voor een kamerdeur zier staan en den volgenden dag, toen de kamer open stond ter schoonmaak, even naar binnen gekeken. En het was maar één kamer en er was maar één ledikant! Een ander had bij den hôtelhouder geinformeerd en er was nog iemand die hen zeide te kennen en uit hetgeen zij gezamenlijk er van wisten, moest het nu blijken dat de oude heer een ‘vieux farceur’ was en de jonge vrouw zijn maîtres.
Wij, alle logeergasten, hadden de hoofden bij elkaar gestoken en bespraken het geval met een aangename geheimzinnigheid. Nog altijd had de meneer niets in het boek geschreven, maar dat zou nu toch wel moeten, dacht men. En wat hij er dan van maken zou! En zij met haar mooi engelengezichtje en schuchtere manieren! Het was een curieus geval, een verzamelpunt voor de leege nieuwsgierigheid en het wekte alle gedachten, die zulk een verhouding van een ouden verliefden rijkaard en een arm, mooi meisje, dat zich prostitueert, pleegt te wekken bij de menschen, die de wereld meer uit boeken, dan uit eigen aanzien kennen.
Den volgenden ochtend, toen wij vroeg beneden kwamen in de nog druilige gang en doffe eetzaal, zat het paar daar al te ontbijten. Zij wilden blijkbaar met denzelfden trein als wij afreizen. Er was den vorigen avond niets van bekend geweest onder de andere gasten en het geleek wel iets naar een overhaaste vlucht. Terwijl, in de stille kamer, wij te ontbijten zaten, kwamen onze blikken telkens naar het zonderlinge paar terug. Zij zagen echter nooit naar ons, maar hielden hun oogen voor zich, alsof zij wel wisten, dat zij altijd bekeken werden.
Hij had een lichtbruinen slappen hoed op, te jeugdig voor zijn leeftijd, en was overigens in dezelfde sjofele kleeding der vorige dagen. Zij zat weer met hoed en voile en een vellerig-dun, grijs stofmanteltje omhing haar schouders. Geen woord spraken ze tot elkaar.”
Frans Coenen (24 april 1866 - 23 juni 1936)
Hier in het midden met zijn vader Frans Coenen Sr. (rechts) en een onbekende.
De Amerikaanse schrijver en acteur Eric Bogosian werd geboren op 24 april 1953 in Woburn, Massachusetts. Zie ook alle tags voor Eric Bogosian op dit blog.
Uit: Operation Nemesis
“When I was a little kid, there was nothing I loved better than hanging out at my grandparents’ house. In her sunny kitchen, my Grandma Lucy would fashion honey- drenched Armenian pastries, while out in the backyard Grampa Megerdich roasted lamb shish kebab under the apple trees. After dessert, Grampa might knock back a tiny glass of arak and tell me stories. I was held rapt by the horrific narratives he dredged up from his faraway past. In his sweetly accented English, Megerdich would describe burning churches and sadistic horsemen. The sto-ries would always end the same way. My grandfather would instruct me, “If you ever meet a Turk, kill him.”I was no more than four years old when I first heard those words.My grandfather had spent his boyhood in the troubled eastern frontier of the Ottoman Empire more than a century ago. He had plenty of reason to hate the Turks, who had killed his father and almost killed him. In 1915, when he was barely twenty- one years old, Megerdich escaped the genocide that would exterminate hun-dreds of thousands of his fellow Armenians. More than once he told me the story of how his village burned while he and his mother crouched down in the middle of a wheat field, hiding from the zapiteh.
Under darkness of night they fled, managed to find passage to France, and in 1916 Megerdich and my great- grandmother immigrated to the United States from Le Havre. My grandfather claimed that he had survived because he was smarter than the rest. That’s why I was such a smart little boy. But perhaps it was just luck.Megerdich’s own father was not so lucky. Ovygin Jamgochian, after successfully immigrating to the United States in the 1890s, had gained American citizenship. But he made the mistake of returning to “the old country” to find his wife and teenage son. The Young Turk government didn’t recognize his American citi-zenship, and he was swept up with hundreds of thousands of other able- bodied men and drafted into the army.“
Eric Bogosian (Woburn, 24 april 1953)
De Amerikaanse dichter en schrijver Robert Penn Warren werd geboren op 24 april 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky. Zie ook alle tags voor Robert Penn Warren op dit blog.
Revelation
Because he had spoken harshly to his mother,
The day became astonishingly bright,
The enormity of distance crept to him like a dog now,
And earth's own luminescence seemed to repel the night.
Roof was rent like loud paper tearing to admit
Sun-sulphurous splendor where had been before
But the submarine glimmer by kindly countenances lit.
As slow, phosphorescent dignities light the ocean floor.
By walls, by walks, chrysanthemum and aster,
All hairy, fat-petalled species, lean, confer,
And his ears, and heart, should burn at that insidious whisper
Which concerns him so, he knows; but he cannot make out the
words.
The peacock screamed, and his feathered fury made
Legend shake, all day, while the sky ran pale as milk;
That night, all night, the buck rabbit stamped in the moonlit glade,
And the owl's brain glowed like a coal in the grove's combustible
dark.
When Sulla smote and Rome was rent, Augustine
Recalled how Nature, shuddering, tore her gown,
And kind changed kind, and the blunt herbivorous tooth dripped
blood;
At Duncan's death, at Dunsinane, chimneys blew down.
But, oh! his mother was kinder than ever Rome,
Dearer than Duncan -- no wonder, then, Nature's frame
Thrilled in voluptuous hemispheres far off from his home;
But not in terror: only as the bride, as the bride.
In separateness only does love learn definition,
Though Brahma smiles beneath the dappled shade,
Though tears, that night, wet pillow where the boy's head was
laid
Dreamless of splendid antipodal agitation;
And though across what tide and tooth Time is,
He was to lean back toward that recalcitrant face,
He would think, than Sulla more fortunate, how once he had
learned
Something important about love, and about love's grace.
Robert Penn Warren (24 april 1905 – 15 september 1989)
De Zwitser dichter, schrijver, essayist en criticus Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler (eig. Carl Felix Tandem) werd geboren op 24 april 1845 in Liestal bij Basel. Zie ook alle tags voor Carl Spitteler op dit blog.
Hildebrand
Because he had spoken harshly to his mother,
The day became astonishingly bright,
The enormity of distance crept to him like a dog now,
And earth's own luminescence seemed to repel the night.
Roof was rent like loud paper tearing to admit
Sun-sulphurous splendor where had been before
But the submarine glimmer by kindly countenances lit.
As slow, phosphorescent dignities light the ocean floor.
By walls, by walks, chrysanthemum and aster,
All hairy, fat-petalled species, lean, confer,
And his ears, and heart, should burn at that insidious whisper
Which concerns him so, he knows; but he cannot make out the
words.
The peacock screamed, and his feathered fury made
Legend shake, all day, while the sky ran pale as milk;
That night, all night, the buck rabbit stamped in the moonlit glade,
And the owl's brain glowed like a coal in the grove's combustible
dark.
When Sulla smote and Rome was rent, Augustine
Recalled how Nature, shuddering, tore her gown,
And kind changed kind, and the blunt herbivorous tooth dripped
blood;
At Duncan's death, at Dunsinane, chimneys blew down.
But, oh! his mother was kinder than ever Rome,
Dearer than Duncan -- no wonder, then, Nature's frame
Thrilled in voluptuous hemispheres far off from his home;
But not in terror: only as the bride, as the bride.
In separateness only does love learn definition,
Though Brahma smiles beneath the dappled shade,
Though tears, that night, wet pillow where the boy's head was
laid
Dreamless of splendid antipodal agitation;
And though across what tide and tooth Time is,
He was to lean back toward that recalcitrant face,
He would think, than Sulla more fortunate, how once he had
learned
Something important about love, and about love's grace.
Carl Spitteler (24 april 1845 – 29 december 1924)
De Engelse schrijver Anthony Trollope werd geboren in Londen op 24 april 1815. Zie ook alle tags voor Anthony Trollope op dit blog.
Uit: The Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Even with the broad humor of Bret Harte, even with the broader humor of Artemus Ward and Mark Twain, there is generally present an undercurrent of melancholy, in which pathos and satire are intermingled. There was a touch of it even with the simple-going Cooper and the kindly Washington Irving. Melancholy and pathos, without the humor, are the springs on which all Longfellow's lines are set moving. But in no American writer is to be found the same predominance of weird imagination as in Hawthorne. There was something of it in M. G. Lewis--our Monk Lewis as he came to be called, from the name of a tale which he wrote; but with him, as with many others, we feel that they have been weird because they have desired to be so. They have struggled to achieve the tone with which their works are pervaded. With Hawthorne we are made to think that he could not have been anything else if he would. It is as though he could certainly have been nothing else in his own inner life. We know that such was not actually the case. Though a man singularly reticent,--what we generally call shy,--he could, when things went well with him, be argumentative, social, and cheery. I have seen him very happy over canvas-back ducks, and have heard him discuss, almost with violence, the superiority of American vegetables. Indeed, he once withered me with a scorn which was anything but mystic or melancholy because I expressed a patriotic preference for English peas. And yet his imagination was such that the creations of his brain could not have been other than such as I have described. Oliver Wendell Holmes has written a well-known story, weird and witch-like also, and has displayed much genius in the picture which he has given us of Elsie Venner. But the reader is at once aware that Holmes compelled himself to the construction of Elsie Venner, and feels equally sure that Hawthorne wrote The Marble Faun because he could not help himself.“
Anthony Trollope (24 april 1815 - 6 december 1882)
De Duitse schrijver Michael Schaefer werd geboren op 24 april 1976 in Bielefeld. Zie ook alle tags voor Michael Schaefer op dit blog.
Uit: Liebe auf Raten
„Steve war völlig überrascht, dass sein Freund Tom so offen über dieses „verbotene“ Thema sprach. Seine Eltern hatten dieses Thema nie angesprochen und auch in der Schule wurde es eher vermieden und nur ganz schnell auf biologischer Ebene mit einem Xebensatz darauf eingegangen. Steve hatte bisher noch nicht darüber nachgedacht, er würde ohnehin joumalist und in der großen Stadt eine Frau finden. Auch wenn er es nicht wahrhaben wollte, die Eintnchterungen seiner Eltern trugen ihre Früchte. Deshalb lehnte er zunächst einmal ab. Es war unnatürlich und ein Schimpfwort in der Schule. Er war aber kein oberflächlicher Mensch, schon damals nicht.
Deshalb beließ er es bei der Ablehnung und zog ’l'om damit nicht auch im nachhinein auf, wie es vermutlich 80% seiner Kollegen gemacht hatten. Tom und Steve hatten schon als kleine Kinder ein gutes Verhältnis und Steve wollte das nicht aufs Spiel setzen. Und es kam nicht von irgendwoher, dass ’l'om gerade ihn danach fragte. Für Tom war dieses Thema aber dadurch nicht beendet. Wenn er sich mal was in den Kopf gesetzt hatte, dium zog er das durch, auch wenn es jahre dauern würde. Tom war duldsam. Wenn er Steve immer wieder ab und an diesbezüglich ansprach oder kleine Seitenhiebe verteilte, würde auch Steve irgendwann mal weich werden. Denn wenn er das ausprobieren will, dann nur mit Steve, alle anderen kamen für ihn nicht in Betracht. Seine Strategie klappte bisher immer bei Steve Glowing. Und auch diesmal sollte Tom recht behalten und das schneller als erwartet.“
Michael Schaefer (Bielefeld, 24 april 1976)
Cover
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 24e april ook mijn blog van 24 april 2012 deel 2 en ook deel 3.
