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Sept. 25...Today is the birthday of William Faulkner, born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1950, and in his acceptance speech he said:
"It is the poet's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,
by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and
compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his
past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be
one of the props, the
pillars to help him endure and prevail."
William Faulkner Google VideosWilliam Faulkner was an American novelist and poet whose works feature
his native state of Mississippi. He is regarded as one of the most
influential writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the 1949
Nobel Prize for Literature. Faulkner's writing is often criticized as
being dense, meandering and difficult to understand due to his heavy
use of such literary techniques as symbolism, allegory, multiple narrators and points of view, non-linear narrative, and especially stream of consciousness.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~It's the birthday of the poet and translator C. K. (Charles Kenneth) Scott-Moncrieff, born in
Stirlingshire, Scotland (1889), the first person to translate the work of Marcel Proust into English.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~This week, we continue to celebrate the anniversary of the Norman invasion of 1066.
www.essentialnormanconquest.com
It was this week in 1066 that William the Conqueror of Normandy first
arrived on British soil. The French-speaking Normans eventually
defeated
Old English-speaking Saxons at the Battle of Hastings on October 14,
1066 — which had a larger and more pronounced effect on the development
of the English language than any other event in history. Within the
course of a few centuries, English went from being a strictly Germanic
language to
one infused with a large Latinate vocabulary, which came via French.
The English word literature comes down from the Old French lettre.
In the singular, the word in French refers to a member of the alphabet;
when it's plural, it's as broad as it is in our phrase "Arts and
Letters," encompassing literature and culture.
The pen with which we write may be mightier than
the sword, but it was still a sharp object, at least when it first came
into English from the Old French penne, "a feather with a sharpened quill." It was dipped in enque,
which surely was spilled sometimes. This
Old French word for ink came from a Latin word that described the
purple fluid meant for a very specific use: the Roman emperor's
official stamp of approval, his John Hancock.
Various genres of English literature derive their names from French roots, some of which ultimately derived from Greek. Poet, for example, we got from the Old French word poete, which entered French from Greek via Latin. In Greek, there's poiein, a verb meaning
"to create." And in Greek there is poetes, "maker, poet." In Middle English, "poetry" at first referred to creative literature as a whole.
Tragedy in English is from the Old French tragedie via Latin from Greek tragoidia. The reasoning behind the Greek roots (tragos, meaning "goat" and oide "ode, song") is not entirely clear. On that note, mystery, from Old French
mistere, was a word first used in English with the sense of "mystic presence" or "hidden religious" symbolism.
Comedy at first referred in English to a genre of
stories in which the ending was a happy one. It also came into Middle
English through Old French, via Latin from Greek, where it's a compound
of the words "revel" and "singer." Comedian first
referred to a person
who wrote comic plays, and then — in the late 1800s — developed the
sense of a person who stands in front of an audience and tells jokes.
Journal is from Old French jurnal, or
"belonging to a day." At first, it was a sort of reference book that
contained the times of daily prayers. In the 1600s, it acquired the
meaning of "diary" and later became associated with newspaper titles
and lent its root to
journalism.
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