By 2050, Africa will be home to 85% of all French-speakers. Consider: more people speak French in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital city, than in Paris.
Baudelaire’s Parisian Scenes
Charles Baudelaire’s poetic masterpiece, Les Fleurs du mal, underwent extensive reworking between 1857 and 1868, as did the French capital in which he was writing. Daniel Finch-Race explores the ecopoetic implications of such upheaval in ‘Le cygne’, a poem torn between antiquity and modernity.
Proust and Scott Moncrieff
Scott Moncrieff’s English translation of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu is widely hailed as a masterpiece in its own right. William C. Carter explores the somewhat sticky issue of how the Shakespearean title missed the mark regarding Proust’s theory of memory.
“Frankenstein in Baghdad” Review
The prize-winning novel “Frankenstein in Baghdad” by Iraqi novelist Ahmed Saadawi has finally been translated into English. His reworking of Mary Shelley’s iconic horror story is set in the Iraqi capital torn apart by sectarian violence.
About Shakespeare
Shakespeare discovered the secret of language. He had the advantage of living at a moment in history when a new language was coming into being. Modern English was emerging in common speech as a language of exceptional flexibility.
Political Tours