Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1903?–1937) is Madagascar's national poet. He grew up impoverished and failed to complete secondary education, but taught himself the traditions of French literature and Malagasy poetry, and gained work in a publishing house as a proofreader and editor of its literary journals. He produced numerous poetry anthologies in French and Malagasy, as well as literary critiques, an opera, and two novels. After an early period of modernist-inspired poetry, the originality of his surrealist poetry garnered strong praise and drew attention in international poetry reviews. Nevertheless, Rabearivelo never gained support from colonial Madagascar's high society. He suffered personally and professionally: his three-year-old daughter died, the French authorities excluded him from the list of exhibitors at the Universal Exposition in Paris, and philandering and opium addiction worsened his debt. After his suicide by cyanide poisoning, he was hailed by literary figures including Léopold Sédar Senghor as Africa's first modern poet. A room has been dedicated to him in the National Library of Madagascar.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Joseph_Rabearivelo
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1327:
Fourteen-year-old Edward III became King of England, but the country was ruled by his mother, Queen Isabella, and her lover, Roger Mortimer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_III_of_England
1896:
Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème premiered at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy, eventually becoming one of the most frequently performed operas internationally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_boh%C3%A8me
1960:
Four African American students staged the first Greensboro sit- ins at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins
1979:
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile and soon led the Iranian Revolution to overthrow the US-backed Pahlavi dynasty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhollah_Khomeini
2009:
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became Iceland's first female Prime Minister and the world's first openly gay head of government of the modern era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3hanna_Sigur%C3%B0ard%C3%B3ttir
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
balconing: 1. The act of going from one room to another room by jumping from the balcony of one room to the balcony of the other. 2. The act of jumping from a balcony towards a swimming pool. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/balconing
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
Every today is at the same time both a cradle and a shroud: a shroud for yesterday, a cradle for tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow are equally near to one another, and equally far. … Today is doomed to die — because yesterday died, and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel, because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise, because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation. He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot's wife, already turned to a pillar of salt, has already sunk into the earth and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy: tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust. Today denies yesterday, but is a denial of denial tomorrow. This is the constant dialectic path which in a grandiose parabola sweeps the world into infinity. Yesterday, the thesis; today, the antithesis, and tomorrow, the synthesis. --Yevgeny Zamyatin https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Zamyatin