Literary Critics

"Contemporary readers want to fall in love with African writing. They want to enjoy it the way they enjoy African pop music and Nollywood. They want to be inspired by their favorite authors and gain access to their lives so that they can become fans. That’s precisely what we offer at Brittle Paper—the chance to consume African literature differently."

"Brittle Paper is the place where you can enjoy African literary stuff without anyone breathing down your neck, preaching to you, policing how and what and why you read. When you visit your favorite fashion or music blog, you expect to be entertained. It’s the same at Brittle Paper. We just want you to have a good time with African writing."

"There is nothing as rewarding as being inspired by my students and their work, which happens on a daily basis."

"I see African literature taking the lead in reinventing conventional forms of storytelling. Europeans may have invented the novel, for example, but they are currently as confused as everybody else about what digital and social media technology means for literature."

"I publish Brittle Paper so I can tell anyone who cares to listen what I find remarkable about African writing."

"The excitement you read in my style is a genuine expression of a reader’s love. African literature is beautiful stuff. As a blogger, I enjoy thinking up innovative ways of getting my readers to put aside all the assumptions and expectations they might have of African writing and simply encounter it from a place of love."

"A whole new world of philosophical and literary texts were opened up to me. The more I immersed myself and delved deeper into these texts, I realized that I could not keep this utterly captivating universe of ideas to myself. It wasn’t enough to talk about these things in class with colleagues and Profs. I wanted more."

"...when Brittle Paper first started, it was a general interest literary and philosophical blog. It was not centered on African literature."

"The life of a professor is exciting. There is never a dull moment. When I’m not teaching, I’m doing research, writing an article, or managing the administrative responsibilities that come with running a class. I find teaching literature intellectually fulfilling."

"There is an unprecedented global interest in African writing. As a result, my readership is growing in leaps and bounds."

"The Internet has created both possibilities and problems. There is now much more archival material online and an astonishing array of digital books. In my generation, part of one’s training was in how to locate material in obscure archives. That now seems a bit comical, given the easy access one can have to troves and troves of material. These developments do however mean that the materiality of the objects is often obscured. One can’t see the actual document so some of the key methods of book history can’t be deployed."

"My early research focused on questions of orality and literacy, an area that inevitably lead to scholarship on the early modern world and from there to the field of book history and print culture. I then began teaching a course on South African book history, edited a special issue of the South African Historical Journal on this theme and also began supervising graduates working on these themes."

"My first degree was in Journalism and English Literature so I have always had a strong interest in media. In my postgraduate work, I was soon drawn into archival research and working with old newspapers and magazines."

"How great soe’er your rigours are, With them alone I’ll cope; I can endure my own despair, But not another’s hope."

"Of all the torments, all the cares, With which our lives are curst; Of all the plagues a lover bears, Sure rivals are the worst! By partners in each other kind Afflictions easier grow; In love alone we hate to find Companions of our woe."

"But, bold, unconcerned At thoughts of the pain, He calmly returned To his cottage again."

"And sadly reflecting, That a lover forsaken A new love may get, But a neck when once broken Can never be set."

"But, mad with his love, To a precipice goes, Where a leap from above Would soon finish his woes."

"The Italian nation rose, as did all the others in Europe, about the close of the Middle Ages; but its birth was different. Italy was not the creation of kings and warriors; she was the creature of a poet, Dante. The foreigners who identify Italy with Dante are essentially right. His character and work had a decisive influence which grew in the centuries, until they became paramount to the leading class of the Italian people. It is hardly an exaggeration to hold that he was to Italy what Moses may have been to Israel."

"Cuánto gozo a la flor deja Preciosamente la abeja!"

"L’âme des Dieux habite dans les plantes."

"I had never had a piece of toast Particularly long and wide, But fell upon the sanded floor, And always on the buttered side."

"To the truly benevolent mind, indeed, nothing is more satisfactory than to hear of a miser denying himself the necessaries of life a little too far and ridding us of his presence altogether."

"He was no coward, but it had suddenly struck him that the present was a very ill-chosen time for a row with his younger relative, however successful might be the issue. Such violence should not go unpunished, but vengeance is a dish that can be eaten cold."

"Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe—appearing either as the Cringe Direct, or as the Cringe Inverted, in the attitude of the Blatant Blatherskite, the God's-Own-Country and I'm-a-better-man-than-you-are Australian bore."

"May he perish, inch by inch, within reach of the aid that shall never come, ere the God of the poor take him into his hand."

"If memories had a limited shelf life, we would be relieved of much of our pain and give our souls and minds a chance to heal. The experience ends, but the memory remains. And this permanence is the secret of our suffering!"

"Unfortunately, many of us do not know God except in supplication."

"From my perspective, there are two memories: one for love and the other for life. When one of them is active, the other completely stops functioning because it recognizes the amount of confusion it would face if it were active at the same time. But in reality, I don’t know if we can use one whenever we want, or if they control this as well."

"All beautiful things are temporary, like holidays."

"Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage, Ou comme cestui là qui conquit la toison, Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison, Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge!Quand reverrai-je, hélas, de mon petit village Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison, Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage?"

"France, mère des arts, des armes et des lois ..."

"Languages do not spring up like plants, some weak and sickly, others healthy and robust. All their virtue lies in the will and determination of mortals. To condemn a language as being struck with impotence is to adopt a tone of arrogance and temerity; as certain of our fellow-countrymen do to-day, who, being nothing less than Greeks or Latins, regard with a more than stoical superciliousness everything written in French. If our language is poorer than the Greek or Latin, this is not attributable to our own inability, but to the ignorance of our own predecessors who have bequeathed it to us in so meagre and so bare a form that it stands in need of ornament, and, so to speak, of plumage from other sources."

"Vois quel orgueil, quelle ruine: et comme Celle qui mit le monde sous ses lois, Pour dompter tout, se dompta quelquefois, Et devint proie au temps, qui tout consomme.Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. Le Tibre seul, qui vers la mer s'enfuit, Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance! Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit, Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance."

"Rome de Rome est le seul monument Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement."

"Sacrés coteaux, et vous saintes ruines, Qui le seul nom de Rome retenez, Vieux monuments, qui encor soutenez L'honneur poudreux de tant d'âmes divines. * * * Et bien qu'au temps pour un temps fassent guerre Les bâtiments, si est-ce que le temps Oeuvres et noms finablement atterre. Tristes désirs, vivez doncques contents: Car si le temps finit chose si dure, Il finira la peine que j'endure."

"When you pass from the text to the translation, you seem to travel from the burning mountain of Etna to the icy summit of Caucasus."

"The Romans well knew how to enrich their language without applying themselves to the labour of translation. They imitated the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, devouring them, and after having well digested them, converting them into blood and tissue. In like manner we must imitate the Greeks and Latins."

"Thou, then, who devotest thyself to the service of the Muses, turn thee to the Greek, Latin, and even Spanish and Italian authors, from whence thou mayest derive a more exquisite form of poetry than from our French authors. In no way trust to the examples of such of our own as have acquired a great renown, with little or no science; and do not allege that poets are born, for this would be too easy a method of achieving immortality. Therefore read and re-read day and night Greek and Latin models, and leave to me all those old French poems for the Floral Games of Toulouse and the Puy de Rouen, such as rondeaux, ballads, virelays, chants royal, chansons, and other suchlike sweetmeats, which corrupt the taste of our language, and only serve to testify to our ignorance."

"Тяжёлый крест достался ей на долю: Страдай, молчи, притворствуй и не плачь; Кому и страсть, и молодость, и волю — Всё отдала, — тот стал ее палач!"

"Средь лицемерных наших дел И всякой пошлости и прозы Одни я в мире подсмотрел Святые, искренние слёзы — То слезы бедных матерей! Им не забыть своих детей, Погибших на кровавой ниве, Как не поднять плакучей иве Своих поникнувших ветвей."

"Ты и убогая, Ты и обильная, Ты и забитая, Ты и всесильная, Матушка-Русь!"

"Are sorrows hard to bear,—the ruin Of flowers, the rotting of red fruit, A love’s decease, a life’s undoing, And summer slain, and song-birds mute, And skies of snow and bitter air? These things, you deem, are hard to bear.But ah, the burden, the delight Of dreadful joys! Noon opening wide, Golden and great; the gulfs of night, Fair deaths, and rent veils cast aside, Strong soul to strong soul rendered up, And silence filling like a cup."

"The life-work of Sir Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College for over thirty years, and Oxford Professor of Poetry, was to rediscover and re-create the history and literature of the Ancient Classical world. Though he became a scholar of international standing, he was never a pure scholar in the strict sense. He does not belong to the crystalline limbo of Scaliger or Bentley or Housman. His purpose was missionary: to reconvert a modern audience and readership for whom the urbane tradition of classical learning—in fact the whole august zodiac of classical reference—has come to seem deeply alien, if not actually menacing in its humped posture of intellectual introversion. But the whole tenor of Bowra's writing was extrovert."

"I don't know about you, gentlemen, but in Oxford I, at least, am known by my face."

"Without you, Heaven would be too dull to bear, And Hell would not be Hell if you are there."

"Can't help you. Pity. Slept with him once—should have asked him then."

"Where there's death, there's hope."

"Though I knew very well that I had nothing like Denniston's linguistic equipment for the study of Greek, I agreed with him about its purpose. The task of a Greek scholar, we both thought, was to revive as best he could for the modern world the inner life of the Greeks by a close examination of their literature."

"Whatever you hear about the war, remember it was inconceivably bloody — nobody who wasn't there can ever imagine what it was like."