Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano: The Man, His Time, and His Significance

Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano was a Nigerian expert in the Yoruba language and culture who was born in the Ifo District of the Abeokuta Province on the 4th of November, 1904.2 He was born to the family of Chief Edmund Delano and Rebecca Delano (both Egba indigenes). His educational exploits started from Holy Trinity Primary School situated at Okenla Christian Village in Ifo. From there, he was moved to Lagos Grammar School under the tutelage of an Anglican Bishop, Solomon Odutola, and his principal, Reverend E. J. Evans. However, situations necessitated his transfer to Kings College in 1921 where he met with his lifetime friends and college mates; Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, Justice N.O.A. Morgan as well as Dr. Oladele Ajose, to mention a few. Having passed his Senior Cambridge Examinations in 1923, Chief Delano proceeded to successfully write his Senior Clerical Examination in 1924, which propelled him to join the civil service in the same year. However, a severe injury sustained from an accident in 1947 led to his invalidation from the civil service. Worthy of note is the fact that he never blended into the civil service bureaucracy, as his principles and religious faith were constantly tested by various practices within the service. His dream to become more lettered was not going to succeed by his involvement with the civil service alone, and he was not positioned in those days to enjoy the privilege of travelling overseas to further his education. He had studied shorthand, and his love for writing by default made him aspire to a lifetime of authoring. While belonging to a number of literary societies, he tried his hand at writing newspaper articles which were generally well-received by the public. He was able to maintain a following from there, and this fueled his desire to write more works for public consumption; he was determined to make his mark in the field of writing. His first work as an author was published in 1937 under the title The Soul of Nigeria. Tis feat gave him his first taste at writing as an occupation, and the happiness that followed suit spurred him to achieve more. Isaac Delano believed that the first one was always going to be the hardest. His first published work had landed him on top of the world, and he was determined not to rest on his oars.

There’s Something about Murray: Victorian Literary Societies and Alfred Forman’s Translation of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen

Alfred Forman’s translations of Richard Wagner’s operas are often derided for their weird diction and minute imitation of German poetic devices. Forman has seemed to represent a zealous and uncritical approach to Wagner that was typical of the early London Wagner Society. But London’s literary societies were important preprofessional gatherings for the appreciation and research of vernacular literature at a time when universities restricted who could study and what could be studied. Forman contributed to other London societies and organized for them dramatic readings of Wagner’s poetry featuring Forman’s wife, Alma Murray. In making Wagner legible and audible for these societies, Forman aligned Wagner with contemporary radical poets and promoted the Ring as a political allegory. Forman’s translations, far from cranky or cultish, show how Victorian society culture affected translation practices, renewed study of poetic alliteration, and inaugurated the political interpretation of Wagner’s works.

Stranger Publics

This chapter discusses the Arabic literary circulation and how the exclusive distribution of prints disconnected people. Qiṣṣat Rūbinṣun Kurūzī and the other Church Missionary Society publications were printed annually in small quantities and distributed by agents of the church by hand. The forms of Arabic literary circulation that existed when al-Shidyāq began his career in print were mainly restricted to religious and government publications, which were focused on liturgical and scientific texts, and only occasionally produced editions of poetry or narrative fiction. Literary societies served smaller and more selective audiences still. The chapter mentions the Syrian Society for Arts and Sciences, the Oriental Society of Beirut, and the Syrian Scientific Society. Those “disconnected” peoples that al-Shidyāq imagined connecting via the printing press would have been limited to a small group of readers. Al-Bustānī's “Khuṭba,” proposed a comprehensive plan for the renovation of the Arabic letters and sciences that hinged on the creation of a reading public. He called for reforming Arabic lexicography through the elimination of “dead words” “weighing down” Arab authors, increasing literacy through the founding and funding of schools, and above all investing in print. Reading print required too much translation, as al-Khūrī put it: writing for the public was not only like translation but entailed translation. It was, for him, not a sphere but an “abyss.” The modern reader, and that institution of literary modernity the public sphere, emerged as a problem of translation.

“My Real Life Is in Solitude…”: From the Diary of Maria Pozharova

The publication is dedicated to the poetess Maria Pozharova, who actively published in the Russian press at the beginning of the 20th century, and participated in the meetings of a number of St. Petersburg / Petrograd literary societies and circles in the 1910s. In the Soviet years, only her “children's” poems appeared in print — “for a younger age”, the publication of which was assisted by K. Chukovsky and especially S. Marshak. The published excerpts from Pozharova's diary (for 1909–1916) record her meetings and conversations with Z. Gippius, N. Gumilev, S. Yesenin, the poetess M. Moravskaya, prose-writer and literary critic N.N. Wentzel and other writers, contain detailed descriptions of the evenings of “Sluchevsky's Circle”, the literary life of the capital in the pre-revolutionary years. The introductory article also describes M. Pozharova’s difficult living conditions and marginal existence in the literature of the 1930–1950s. The text of M. Pozharova's diary is accompanied by a historical and literary commentary.

‘Haar geheele geest ademt deftigheid en waardigheid’

Joannes Matthias Schrant (1783-1866) became the first professor of Dutch Language at the University of Ghent from 1818 to 1830 and was appointed professor at the University of Leiden from 1831 to 1853. Several scholars of Dutch studies have discussed Schrant’s scientific work and concluded that he was an unimportant and uninteresting figure, mainly for his insignificant role in the development of Dutch studies, because he only built upon the scientific ideas of Matthijs Siegenbeek and did not offer his own insights on language and literature. In this article, I adjust this negative view of Schrant as an insignificant figure by studying his scholarly work in the context of the ‘cultivation of culture’ (). Schrant was a typical cultivator of national culture: his speeches, literary histories, and editorial work show he was an active scholar who disseminated, sustained, and extended existing ideas about national culture. He did not just disseminate these ideas in his function of professor, but also as a member of the literary societies Regat Prudentia Vires and the Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde, and as a public intellectual.

Literary Societies in Russia in the First Half of the 19th Century: Approaches to an Interdisciplinary Description

The review article systematizes the principle achievements in the studies of the literary societies and associations in the Russian and foreign historiography of the 1990–2010s, and analyzes approaches to this material within the framework of various disciplines and methodologies. The author suggests an institutional approach as the basis for the development of a conceptual and fact-fortified language for describing the literary societies in Russia in the fi rst half of the 19th century. An institutional approach provides an opportunity to link the history of the literary associations with the broader socio-historical context and to describe the role played by the literary societies in the formation of the «public sphere» and civil society in the 19th-century Russia