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RAINER MARIA RILKE
It seems an unlikely story. An unhappy, somewhat affected young man from turn-of-the-century Prague begins his career as a highly imitative versifier. By dint of hard work and ascetic discipline, he becomes a poet, indeed the foremost European poet of his generation. He dies in 1926, but for the next 60 years, poets from all over the world-from Boris Pasternak in Russia to Ranclall Jarrell in America-claim him as their inspira- tion and model. This man, Rainer Maria...
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AFTER MA0
American scholars analyzini contemporasy events in Commiinist China prior to its post-Ma0 "opening" to the West in 1777 had to rely largely on the official press. This did not deter some of them from hailing Mao's Cultural Revoliition during the 1760s and pooh- poohing refugees' grim accoiints. Indeed, the American Academy of Political Science held a 1772 meeting to consider (among other things) how the Cultural Revol~ition co~ild serve as a model for the West in...
sheep and English traditions. Then Prime Minister Da- vid Lange hit the headlines. He told Washington to keep the
U.S. Navy's nuclear-armed ships out of his country's ports. Sur- prised, the Reagan administration said that New Zealand's sud- den self-assertiveness threatened the 35-year-old ANZUS alli- ance. Nevertheless, New Zealand's parliament will soon vote on a bill formalizing Mr. Lange's anti-nuclear ban. Our contributors examine New Zealand's changing society and its new dilemmas as a South...
at all, they probably thought of it as an old ally, a faraway vacationland something like California, a pair of picturesque islands domi- nated by sheep and English traditions. Then Prime Minister Da- vid Lange hit the headlines. He told Washington to keep the
U.S. Navy's nuclear-armed ships out of his country's ports. Sur- prised, the Reagan administration said that New Zealand's sud- den self-assertiveness threatened the 35-year-old ANZUS alli- ance. Nevertheless, New Zealand's parliament will...
's North Island. Even today, facing the quiet waters of mile-wide Waitemata Harbour and flanked by a phalanx of 60 volcanoes, Auckland retains a certain South Pacific flavor.
In the shadows cast by Air New Zealand's glass and con- crete office tower, Polynesian greengrocers sell taro, yams, and coconuts to Maori housewives along Karangahape Road. Amid the hibiscus, frangipani, and banana trees in Albert Park, brief- case-toting bankers dressed in shorts, knee-socks, shirts, and ties discuss the...
many pilgrims," Guthrie-Smith testifies to New Zea- hinders' passionate, but ambivalent, love of their land.
Unlike Guthrie-Snlith, who cher- ished the countryside as it was, many British colonists were bent on domes- ticating both the wild bush and the na- tive Maori. In archivist Ray Grover's
Cork of War: An Historical Narra- tive (John Mclncioe, 1982), a fictional Scottish settler, moving through real history, watches as English and Austra- lian speculators in 1839 buy one-acre plots of...
in America's intellectuals and artists have long been known for their leftist, even Marxist, sympathies. Few today emulate the late Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who remained loyal to Moscow even after the horrors of the Stalin era. But Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Mhrquez, Argentina's Julio Cortazar, and others have ritu- ally clenounced Washington's imperzalismo while singing the praises of Fidel Castro. Mexico's Octavio Paz is one of the ex- ceptions. The widely read poet-essayist and former diplomat...
"Reading maketh a full man," Francis Bacon declared in 1597, "and writing an exact man." His aphorism, penned a century and a half after Gutenberg's creation of the printing press, expressed the West's revived faith in the awesome power of literacy—to elevate the human mind, to uplift the citizenry, to spur progress.
ot;Reading maketh a full man," Francis Bacon declared in 1597, "and writing an exact man." His aphorism, penned a century and a half after Gutenberg's creation of the printing press, ex- pressed the West's revived faith in the awesome power of liter- acy-to elevate the human mind, to uplift the citizenry, to spur progress. Today, many Americans, awash in memos and junk mail, take the written word for granted. Yet perhaps 27 million of their countrymen are "functionally illiterate."...
How is the West's attitude toward "reading" beginning to change?