Without Lifting A Finger

Slow-going but only because it's long and I'm too busy at work. I read in snatches: coffee houses, restrooms, between classes, before bed. * Another excerpt: The scene had something of the atmosphere of a burial service, complete with weeping in the congregation. Julietta wept for joy over the symbolic promotion of her papa.   Pilar wept for reasons we shall leave unexamined here. Beatrice and Zwingli behaved like Protestants at a Catholic mass: they were decorous but uninvolved in the liturgy. And I? My eyes, too, remained dry, but I felt my chest starting to expand and was suddenly seized by the impulse to deliver a short speech, something I hadn't dared to do since I committed an oratorical faux pas at my parents' silver wedding anniversary dinner. Here I could make the attempt without causing misunderstandings about my actual intent, unlike on that earlier occasion when, as a growing young man making his first Faustian pilgrimage through Western intellectual ...

Found Thelen's Quixotic book via Celan. An excerpt:      In the summer of the year 1601, Archduke Albrecht of Austria, the Spanish viceroy in the Netherlands, took up the siege of the city of Ostende. Isabella, who as daughter of Philip II of Spain had presented the Netherlands to her consort Albrecht as a dowry, vowed never to changer her chemise until the city had surrendered to the Spanish army. Albrecht's incentive to bring the siege to a rapid and victorious end was therefore very great, but the princess had underestimated the power of the Ostenders to hold out. The siege ended on the 20th of September, 1604 A.D., with a Spanish victory. Princess Isabella had thus worn her blouse for more than three years, offering proof of her patriotism and moral rectitude. There were solemn fanfares as she publicly dipped her blouse in a washtub. It turned the suds an inky color that today bears her name: a brownish-whitish-yellow tint like café-au-lait, known as "Isabell...

Albert Vigoleis Thelen (28 September 1903 in Süchteln , Lower Rhine region , Germany - 9 April 1989 in Dülken , Germany) was a German author and translator (from Portuguese). Works Thelen's main work, The Island of Second Sight , which has been praised by many as one of the great achievements in German literature of the 20th century, appeared in 1953. It was soon translated into Spanish and French, later also into Dutch. Not until 2010 when it was published by Galileo Publishing in Cambridge, through the efforts of Isabelle Weiss, was it made available to English readers. [2] The award winning translation by Donald O. White won the 2013 PEN Translation Prize . [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Vigoleis_Thelen ]