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Marguerite Yourcenar

Born on June 8th. Becoming the Emperor: How Marguerite Yourcenar reinvented the past. Then she came upon the drafts of a novel about Hadrian that she had begun when she was twenty-one and had later put aside. …. She was forty-five when she went back to Hadrian. Marcus AureliusMarguerite YourcenarMemoirs of Hadrianphilosophical literatureYukio Mishima

Marguerite Yourcenar

Born on June 8th. Becoming the Emperor: How Marguerite Yourcenar reinvented the past. Then she came upon the drafts of a novel about Hadrian that she had begun when she was twenty-one and had later put aside. …. She was forty-five when she went back to Hadrian. Marcus AureliusMarguerite YourcenarMemoirs of Hadrianphilosophical literatureYukio Mishima

Is Japan Finally Coming to Terms With Mishima?

Mishima once famously told his wife that “even if I am not immediately understood, it’s OK because I’ll be understood by the Japan of 50 or 100 years time.” The short answer according to the very excellent Mishima scholar Damian Flanagan is “no”. Today marks the 45th anniversary of Mishima’s death. Speaking of which see Yourcenar’s thoughts…

Books are not life, only its ashes

Here is an interview I came across with Yourcenar. As one would expect she takes no prisoners and clearly would rub up activists the wrong way — hence they systematically avoid her, assuming they’d even read top-notch stuff like “Hadrian”. I guess she would be unknown to “creative writing” courses constituted as they seem to be by…