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The Lays of Ancient Rome

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Poetry
Chapter: 4 | Listen: 5

The Lays of Ancient Rome comprise four narrative poems comprised by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay: recalling popular episodes from Roman historical-legends that were strongly moral in tone: exemplifying Roman virtue against Latine perfidy. The four poems are: – Horatius – Horatius and two companions seek to hold back a large invading Etruscan force at the far end of a bridge over the Tiber River. The trio are willing to lay down their lives so as to prevent the Etruscans crossing and sacking the otherwise ill-defended Rome: it is a desperate gamble to buy enough time for the Romans to destroy the bridge in advance of the hostile army. But will their efforts succeed? – The Battle of Lake Regillus – The Romans take arms against the powerful Latine league headed by the expelled Tarquin nobles. The fighting is desperate and bloody: the event is decided only after the arrival upon the battlefield of the twin gods Castor and Pollux. – Virginia – Virginia is the daughter of Virginius – a poor, honest Roman farmer-citizen. In former years Virginius enlisted as a legionary and shed his blood to fight Rome’s enemies: now Virginius – like other Romans of the humbler sort – suffer the usurious exactions of noblemen like the wicked Appius Claudius. Appius Claudius uses spurious legal means to take possession of Virginia as his “runaway slave”: action guaranteed to succeed given the incumbent corrupt magistracy. So what can Virginius do? To what extremes is the father forced to protect […]

Honour of the Gout

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Essays & Short Works, Humor, Medical
Chapter: 8 | Listen:

This droll and ‘enflammatory’ pamphelet doth be a grondebreaking worke of musing upon a great aflicktion of Man, upon the better nature of that aflicktion, and upon the vain and mischievous cheats who affeckt to cure it. The gauntlet here so-toss’d by Philander Misaurus was later pick’d up by surgeon John Marten in his rejoinder, titled by the name–”The Dishonour of the Gout”. Which seeketh to shew all minds swayed by Philander’s prettie words that—indubitably—Gout is misfortune. – Summary by Alasdair (Alister) [chương_files]

The Battle of Marathon

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Poetry
Chapter: 4 | Listen: 2

The Battle of Marathon is a rhymed, dramatic, narrative-poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Written in 1820, it retells powerfully The Battle of Marathon: during which the Athenian state defeated the much larger invading force during the first Persian invasion of Greece. When Darius the Great orders his immense army march west to annex additional territories; no-one in the Persian court predicted that some fractious, independent Greek city-states stood any chance against the Persian super-power. And yet at Marathon in 490BC, Darius’ plans received a decisive check in the brilliant Athenian offensive overseen by the aged but hardy Miltiades: who over-ran the Persian army just landed upon their coasts, cutting their opponents down to the last man. But some of the Greeks’ enemies are more than mortal: Aphrodite herself swears vengeance upon them for the actions of their forebears in destroying her beloved Troy generations ago. – Can Miltiades continue successfully guiding his fellow Athenians to future greatness; when rival factions lead by Themistocles and Aristides grow only stronger day by day? – Can even Jove himself protect the Athenians he loves from the whimsical – but fatal – wiles of his daughter, the goddess of love? [chương_files]

Poèmes et Poésies

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Poetry
Chapter: 31 | Listen: 3

Leconte de Lisle est né à l’Île de Bourbon. C’est là que ses yeux d’enfant se sont emplis des couleurs et des formes des paysages prestigieux de l’Orient. Une nature sans tendresse, à la lumière implacable, aux faces énormes et aveugles, éveilla dans son âme cette idée obsédante de la fatalité, qu’il devait retrouver au long de l’histoire. Tout ce que l’Orient dans sa lourde immobilité traîne depuis des siècles de renoncement à l’impossible bonheur et de goût de la mort s’ajouta par ailleurs en lui à son pessimisme natif. (Extrait de la notice de l’édition de 1920) Leconte de Lisle was born on the island of Réunion. His verse is clear, sonorous, dignified, deliberate in movement, classically correct in rhythm, full of exotic local colour, of savage names, of realistic rhetoric. Coldness cultivated as a kind of artistic distinction seems to turn all his poetry to marble, in spite of the fire at its heart. They have the lofty monotony of a single conception of life and of the universe. He sees the world as what Byron called it, “a glorious blunder,” and desires only to stand a little apart from the throng, meditating scornfully. He listens and watches, throughout the world, for echoes and glimpses of great tragic passions. The burning emptiness of the desert attracts him, the inexplicable melancholy of the dogs that bark at the moon; he would interpret the jaguar’s dreams, the sleep of the condor. He sees nature with the same wrathful impatience as […]

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (Whinfield Translation)

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Poetry
Chapter: 6 | Listen: 2

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) was a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. In the Western world he is most famous for his many rubáiyát (quatrains), a four line rhyming stanza, which were popularized in an extensively reworked collection in English by Edward Fitzgerald, the first edition of which appeared in 1859. However, Fitzgerald was neither the first nor the most scholarly of the translators of Omar Khayyam’s rubáiyát. As well as translating the poems of Hafez and Rumi, Edward Henry Whinfield (1836-1922) also produced a much more extensive English version of the rubáiyát. In 1883 he published a bilingual edition of 500 quatrains, in which the Persian original is presented side by side with the English translation. This is a bilingual recording. Each quatrain will be read first in Persian and then in English translation. While listeners unfamiliar with the Persian language will not able to appreciate the meaning of the quatrains in their original form, everyone can at least enjoy the musicality of Omar’s verse, which Whinfield often succeeds in capturing. [chương_files]

Ukraine

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Essays & Short Works, History, Political Science
Chapter: 10 | Listen: 7

“We are not the same nation with Russian people,” the statement which all Ukrainians wish to convey to the whole world for centuries. The striving for freedom and independence is what these people shed much of their blood on Ukrainian lands for. “The Ukraine” by Bedwin Sands (George Raffalovich) describes Ukrainian problem, which exacerbated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by looking back at the Ukrainian history, the development of Ukrainian literature and its influence, and by considering its relations with Austria and Russia. (Summary by Anastasiia Solokha) [chương_files]

Fringe of an Art: Appreciations in Music

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Essays & Short Works, Music
Chapter: 19 | Listen: 3

A collection of essays on things musical by Vernon Blackburn, including composers, music in different time periods, and modern music. (Summary by Mozartjr) [chương_files]

Representative Men (Version 2)

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Essays & Short Works
Chapter: 14 | Listen: 2

Seven Essays: his reasoning why and how great men have always been honored and necessary in our civilization, followed by six chapters dealing with, in order: Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakspeare (sic), Napoleon and Goethe. Emerson was an old fashioned “Man of Letters”. He was the head of the mid-19th century School of Transcendentalism. Poetry, essay and book on Philosophy, human rights and religious and social rights. – Summary by William Jones [chương_files]

Problems of the Playwright

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Essays & Short Works, Performing Arts
Chapter: 33 | Listen: 3

A third volume of essays by American critic Clayton Hamilton, published as a companion piece to The Theory of the Theatre & Studies in Stagecraft, and focusing (as one might expect) on the problems of the playwright. (Summary by Andrew Gaunce) [chương_files]

Die göttliche Komödie – Die Hölle

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Poetry
Chapter: 34 | Listen: 3

Inhalt: Die Hölle Das Fegefeuer Das Paradies Die Commedia, in späterer Zeit auch Divina Commedia (“Göttliche Komödie”) genannt, ist das Hauptwerk des italienischen Dichters Dante Alighieri. Sie gilt als bedeutendste Dichtung der italienischen Literatur und als eines der größten Werke der Weltliteratur. [chương_files]