idio-bibles

a selection from my notebooks

"...P D Ouspensky...in his book Tertium Organum, an English translation of which was brought out by Knopf in 1922 and became a favorite, not to say sacred, book for Hart Crane early in his poetic career." —John T Irwin, The Poetry of Weldon Kees: Vanishing as Presence (2017).

"Pessoa's first biographer tells us that Pessoa read Nordau's book [Entartung] as others read the Bible." --George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American literature (2000)

"Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature was translated into Japanese quite early in the 20th century. In Japan it became a sort of critical bible. The young Korean poets had some English and less French. Most of their translations seem to have been made from Japanese texts with an eye sometimes on the English." --A Handbook of Korea (1990)

“…he [Li He] states quite plainly in his poem Presented to Chen Shang that the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra is his constant companion, along with the Chu Ci [.]” —J D Frodsham in his intro to Goddesses, Ghosts, and Demons: The Collected Poems of Li He (1983)

“That first night he praised Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance: ‘It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.’ ” —W B Yeats