Robert Girvan | Essays and Poetry 

Theatre Director Guy Sprung's Double Cancellation Italian Theatre, Roanne, France Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth. Arthur Schopenhauer This article was originally posted on subtack under the title: Theatre Director Guy Sprung's Ticket to Hell. I have altered the title in this expansion of this article. The lastest, complete, and canonical version is here, on my website. Identity Rules. Quality is Unrecognized or Hated In the Canadian

Clear, but missing the song - and a third of the text. Yet.... Read to the end! Insights from Mary Beard and Daniel Mendelsohn I posted this review on Medium on February 7th, 2024. I now have my own blog here, so I have deleted the original review and updated it to take into account comments about Wilson's translation by classics scholar Daniel Mendelsohn in his own recent translation of The Odyssey. This is now the latest and canonical version of my essay. I am repostin

Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky and Immortal Song The Beauty of a Formal French Garden Note: A shorter version of this article was published on my site and then substack. This is my latest, most complete version. In our era of declining education and mass media we often don't have the knowledge of past forms to use as a foundation to create new forms today. This article draws attention to some very wise words by Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky, and expands on them, to suggest som

Honouring Alexei Navalny with the poem "The Monument" In my recent post " Does poetry make nothing happen? I examine the complex relationship between poetry and questions of justice and history from many sides. In this essay, it use two poems of W.H. Auden, and my own award-winning poem "The Monument." My poem is in dialogue with Horace’s “Exegi Monumentum” and a similiar poem by Pushkin. I attempt to rethink and imagine these fine poems for our times, in the attempt to und