by Rafaël Newman You’ve heard the story before. The poet Orpheus, celebrated for the enchanting quality of his voice, is grieving the sudden death of his young wife Eurydice. In his despair he resolves to harrow the Underworld, where he so impresses the god Hades with his singing that he is permitted to retrieve the…

by Rafaël Newman For John Duffy (November 5, 1963—March 3, 2022) …great confusion ensued, and everyone was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went away—he himself fell asleep, and was awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep,…

by Rafaël Newman It’s the final day of February 2022, a month that began with the centenary of the publication, on February 2, 1922, of Ulysses, on what was also the 40th birthday of its author, James Joyce. Commemorations were held, among other places, in Dublin, where Joyce was born and which plays a central…

by Rafaël Newman One afternoon in the 1980s, when I was at grad school at a university in the northeastern United States, I went for coffee with a slightly senior colleague. A boisterous, opinionated, well-liked Brooklyn native, she was renowned (or notorious, depending on one’s philologico-political position) for applying the latest “French theory” to ancient…

by Rafaël Newman Beginnings are a theme for sages, For adepts of our Golden Ages: When the victuals were prodigious, And division un-litigious— Since the stores, in their abundance, Rendered striving a redundance; Why in gardens Paradisal Our ancestors scorned reprisal As they supped upon the flower That was bounty, boon, and bower; How dread…

by Rafaël Newman Leave plenty of time to stand in line at the gift shop when you visit Einsiedeln Abbey, in the Swiss canton of Schwyz. The Klosterladen, in a courtyard to the right of the 18th-century complex—which is built on the site of the 9th-century hermitage where Saint Meinrad was sustained by the Waldleute,…

by Rafaël Newman Neapolitan conversation is impenetrable to outsiders. Ears, nose, eyes, breast and armpits are signal stations to be pressed into use by fingers, a distribution that recurs in the particular specializations of the local erotics. The foreigner is struck by so much solicitous gesturing and impatient touching, whose regularity rules out coincidence. And…

by Rafaël Newman What is the present? When did it begin? Stoics simply consult the calendar for an answer, where they find each new span of 24 hours reassuringly dubbed Today. Archaeologists speak of “Years Before Present” when referring to the time prior to January 1, 1950, the arbitrarily chosen inauguration of the era of…

by Rafaël Newman Fatherhood and motherhood are always a compromise between a form of Nazi eugenics and a compulsion for repetition. —Paul B. Preciado If it were up to certain contemporary authors, the title of arch-villain—or rather, Worst Person Ever—might go collectively to a particular category of human normally held up as a model of nurturance…

by Rafaël Newman …the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence…This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at…

by Rafaël Newman History is the one true fatality: you can re-read it as much as you like, but you can’t re-write it. —Laurent Binet One of my oldest friends, an economic historian who serves as the Academic Director of a museum of Jewish life in northern Germany, is, like me, a child of May;…

by Rafaël Newman It’s been 40 years this past month since the election of François Mitterrand as President of France. Today, June 21, is the day chosen by his first Minister of Culture for the Fête de la Musique: what has come to be known as “World Music Day” in the English-speaking countries that have…

by Jurczok 1001 The article below was published in German on Mother’s Day in Republik, in a year that marks the 50th anniversary of Swiss women’s right to vote. The text appears here in English translation by Rafaël Newman.  I had heard many of the stories before, but today, on Mother’s Day, they took on…

by Rafaël Newman Love is as strong as death, but no stronger. The NewMen, “Uncle Leo” On Saturday, April 10, 2021, in Fribourg in the west of Switzerland, Besuch der Lieder, the troupe of musicians with whom I serve as a dramaturge, staged its first performance after a hiatus of more than a year: for…

by Rafaël Newman By a quirk of the calendars, Passover, the annual commemoration of the flight from bondage, is precisely coterminous this year with Academic Travel. This latter, a twice-yearly feature of the university in Switzerland at which I am guest teaching this semester, is that institution’s “signature program”: a week-and-a-half course, typically offered in…

by Rafaël Newman Mourning is in season. Newspapers of record these days publish interactive mass obituaries, images of “ordinary” people fallen to “the opioid crisis” or to Covid-19 (the front page of the Sunday New York Times was recently riven down the middle by a monolith composed of thousands of dots, growing denser towards the…

by Rafaël Newman In the summer of 1977 my father invited me to tea at the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens. I had turned 13 that spring, and instead of a bar mitzvah, prohibited by matrilineal descent and an antipathy to organized religion, my father and I were en route to Israel, to visit the…

by Rafaël Newman Arma virusque cano: Sing, O Muse, through me, the wandering Of something lowly, microscopic, But found at both Poles, and each Tropic. An opportunist virus, which Is banished by mere soap (or bleach), And yet has billions, masked, in arma, Awaiting backup from Big Pharma! Now, whether to the Orient The creature…

by Rafaël Newman All my life I’ve been fascinated by the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors… —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2019 When I was quite…

by Rafaël Newman It’s November 9 – what Europeans, with their rational, smallest-to-greatest date format, might call “9/11”, if that particular shorthand hadn’t already been otherwise coopted for the 21st-century world’s symbology. At the same time, Europeans, particularly Germans, would be hard pressed to say which of the several events to have taken place on…