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| Joseph Conrad |
Today is the birthday of a Polish novelist Joseph
Conrad (03 December 1857 – 03 August 1924), who wrote in English, after
settling in England. Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in
English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his
twenties (and always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels,
often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst
of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a
distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. Writing in
the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national
experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant
navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a
European-dominated world, while also plumbing the depths of the human soul.
Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have
gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and
international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. Presenting some
Quotations : Being Poet
- A word carries far—very far—deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
- A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns.
- Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.''
- It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the inca...
