Reading and enjoying The Canterville Ghost

Some of my 2nd year ESO students (Compulsory Secondary Education) have read and enjoyed Oscar Wilde´s The Canterville Ghost.  They have drawn some comics, an amusing tool to foster their written expression and communicative skills, and searched about the great Irish writer´s work. Good excuse today, Saint Patrick´s Day, to show it to you.

"Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin. After that he wrote lots of plays like The Duchess of Padua, poems like Ravenna and tales like The Canterville Ghost." (Irene Cagigas)

"Nobody wanted to live in that house because they said that it was haunted. But Americans are very practical and the Otis family didn´t believe in ghosts" (Selena Martín)

"The tale teaches you many lessons but it is disappointing too." (Sara Cecín)

"Strange things happen and it´s exciting." (Nahia Martínez)

"It´s fantastic to practice my reading in English." (Paula Arce)

"When you read you feel in another place. With books you can travel around the world. When we read we can´t see the words, we see pictures, we see the story in our head. Books make you think about the world, the humans, the animals and our future. Books are our world, our culture, our past, our present and our future... Don´t stop reading, please!" (Cristina Pérez de las Cuevas)

Seamus Heaney, Dante and Asturias

Seamus Heaney, who was born Catholic in a predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland, never forgot the world where he came from. He was intensely aware of the often violent political and religious struggles that plagued his country and the unrest and oppression it entailed. At the same time, his roots and poetry lay deep and were grounded in that Irish rural countryside. 

The Little Canticles of Asturias is a beautiful tribute to a region he loved and used to visit because one of his sisters-in-law lived here. Besides, Asturian landscape lovingly evoked his homeland. This work is also a version of The Divine Comedy, the well-known 14th c. epic poem where Dante describes his journeys through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, an allegory of the soul´s pilgrimage towards God. Like the Italian genius, Heaney looks into human experience trying to explain the mystery of our own identity. 

All along three stanzas, he renders a splendid account of a drive in Asturias. In the first one, it is midnight, they are driving through an industrial area among furnaces and hot refineries and they curse the hellish roads. (And then at midnight as we started to descend / into the burning valley of Gijón, / .../ for we almost panicked there in the epic blaze / of those furnaces and hot refineries / ... / and gathered speed and cursed the hellish roads.). 

In the second canticle, during the purgatorial next morning, the farmers who are working in the fields on both sides of the road wave at him. Their rural labour brings him memories of his childhood in Ireland. (Next morning on the way to Piedras Blancas / I felt like a soul being prayed for, / ...). In the third and last stanza, he arrives at a paradise of rivers under sunlight. (At San Juan de la Arena / it was a bright day of the body. / Two rivers flowed together under sunlight. / ...). The final words (of distant Compostela, stela, stela) emulate the Italian stelle which also finish the three canticles of Dante´s masterpiece.

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize in 1995, and one of the most productive, lauded and beloved of the living poets, has passed away. Ireland, Asturias and the whole world mourn his death. Life is ephemeral, we know,  but let's remember poetry is not. Cherished and celebrated, his verses will remain forever.

Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

"Life is a chaos between two silences", said Samuel Beckett. The Irish playwright was only sure of two things: he had been born and he had to die. He left Dublin and travelled to Paris with the obsession of meeting James Joyce. He joined the novelist´s literary circle there and became his assistant. But Lucia, Joyce´s schizophrenic daughter, fell in love with him and his refusal of her caused Ulysses´s author to ban him from his home.

Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, Beckett is one of the great names of the Theatre of the Absurd. First written in French, Waiting for Godot is a metaphor of the absurdity of human existence, of man´s loneliness and boredom and of the deseperate search for meaning in life. Throughout the play, and while they are waiting for Godot, the main characters, two tramps, try to fill in the empty time on an eternal Saturday which follows Good Friday but which never becomes Easter Sunday. Very little 

happens, life is meaningless. Like them, we also spend much of our time waiting constantly for something new to happen so that our life has sense. Their incoherent dialogue dramatically shows our failure to communicate. Literary critics have wondered who this Godot is, someone who seems to be on the point of arriving but who never does so. Beckett used to say that if he had had the answer, he would have written it.

One day, Beckett was flying to Paris when the chief flight attendant said: "I´m speaking in Captain Godot´s name..." Immediately, he wanted to jump out of the plane up in the air.

Saint Patrick's Day

This weblog begins on the 17th of March of 2012. From the Irish capital of Dublin to the US city of Chicago, where the river is dyed green, thousands of people around the world are celebrating Saint Patrick´s Day.

It commemorates the most recognizable of Ireland´s patron saints and the arrival of Christianity in that country centuries ago. It is a day of parades, fireworks shows and marching bands. Participants dress up as leprechauns and green clothes and shamrocks are worn. Saint Patrick was said to have used this three-leaved plant to explain the Holy Trinity to the pagan Irish. 

Having started with this entry about Ireland may not be just a coincidence if the aims of the blog are to promote good reading and share a passion for literature. It is remarkable that such a small country has been recognised with the Nobel Prize for Literature on four occasions so far: Yeats, Bernard Shaw, S. Beckett and Seamus Heaney.