is among them—admit the reader The essays in Portrait Inside
Does the transference
into an egalitarian living room—not
an elitist salon—where they enjoy a
conversation involving the eye, the
ear, and the mind. Nor is the conver-
sation one-sided; the reader-auditor
responds in a variety of ways: quizzi-
cally, meditatively, gesturally, laugh-
ingly, or even profanely. Lopate is not
meant for the silent.
Since publishers have now
acknowledged the essay as a literary
form worthy of being incorporated
into freshman readers, they should
consider using some of Lopate’s from
To Show and to Tell. Unlike trendy
essays selected for one edition and
replaced in the next, Lopate’s do
not date because he has distilled the
personal into the universal. Anyone
who has ever tried to remember the
past, much less write about it, knows
what it is like to embark on that
ghostly venture. You hear a voice in
the mind’s echo chamber. “Who sent
me that voice?” Lopate asks in “The
Made Up Self: On the Difficulty of
Turning Oneself into a Character.”
The voice is single-tongued but capa-
ble of many inflections and nuances.
This is the kind of essay that will
inspire students to listen for an inner
voice that may not be familiar but is
still intelligible, beckoning to depths
yet to be plumbed.
Since many courses require
students to keep journals, “On the
Necessity of Turning Oneself into a
Character” is ideal for anthologies.
A journal entry crafted as a minidra-
ma, purged of the irrelevant and the
nondramatic, will have a vividness,
an immediacy, and perhaps even an
art that would not have been pos-
sible if it were just another diaristic
response, rooted in subjectivity.
78 worldliteraturetoday.org
of one’s age?
My Head are personal but pensive.
Lopate, adopting an older and wiser
voice, reflects on his youth, his mar-
riages, his beloved Brooklyn, the poet
he once was, and the critic he still is.
These essays possess the maturity
that comes from both age and sub-
ject matter, the latter of particular
importance in this collection, which
crystallizes the essence of Lopate’s
art: his ability to begin with a topic
that he approaches like a cubist, see-
ing it from different perspectives,
and then using it as a point of depar-
ture for another topic that seems
unrelated but is as much of a deriva-
tion of the first as a corollary is of a
theorem.
“Wife or Sister? Abraham and
Sarah in Egypt and Gerar” begins
with the biblical account of Abraham
and Sarah crossing into hostile ter-
ritory (Egypt), where he passes her
off as his sister. After summariz-
ing the scholarship, Lopate examines
the nature of the husband/brother,
wife/sister relationship, pondering
the possible evolution of husband
into brother and wife into sister,
and drawing examples from both
literature and life. In Paul Bowles’s
The Sheltering Sky, a marriage of
codependency—from which sex has
all but varnished, except with other
partners—ends nightmarishly with
the husband’s illness and death and
the wife’s ravishment. Lopate pro-
ceeds to a similar but less tragic expe-
rience in Morocco—where he fell ill
like Bowles’s character, and his first
wife went off to hear native music
and was almost raped—causing the
author to wonder if he behaved more
like a brother than a husband. Is the
spouse of one’s youth the sibling
begin earlier, perhaps at the very
start of a relationship? Overwhelm-
ing questions, eloquently posed.
Bernard F. Dick
Fairleigh Dickinson University
William Ospina. La lámpara
maravillosa: Cuatro ensayos
sobre la educación y un elogio
a la lectura. Bogotá. Random
House / Mondadori. 2012. isbn
9789588640174
In an admirable page of La lámpara
maravillosa: Cuatro ensayos sobre la
educación y un elogio a la lectura (The
marvelous lamp: Four essays about
education and a tribute to the act of
reading), Colombian William Ospina
(b. 1954) writes: “Of course it is pos-
sible to live without books. However,
we expose ourselves to the danger
that the worst of the world will take
possession of us: greed, rush, tur-
moil, anger, and above all boredom.”
It is without a doubt that in a world
without books, our life experiences
and visions diminish. However, the
problem that Ospina analyzes in this
short but meaningful essay collection
is even deeper: we also live in a world
in which education has deteriorated
to an unbearable degree.
The book is divided into four
sections and a final essay. In the first
section, Ospina asks himself what is
it that we really learn, and he ana-
lyzes how a faulty education often
damages our curiosity toward what
needs to be questioned in the world.
But the crisis of today’s education is
not a mystery. The author observes
that both the media and the market
economy, one that favors cost over
real value, make things even worse.

In the second section, entitled
“Letter to the unknown mentor,”
Ospina explains the importance
of teachers in today’s society. The
author states that education “does
not mean so much to fulfill our-
selves with certainties, but to guide
and nourish our quests.” To learn is
not to reproduce complex scientific
formulas with precision or to repeat
long paragraphs by heart about this
or that event. To learn is a journey
and a test in which we confirm our
desire to abandon barbarism and
obscurity.
In the third and fourth sections,
Ospina analyzes the importance of
language, not only as a means toward
education but as the way to acquire
a personal style in order to become
unique beings with respect to others.
In this context, the author refers to
the pre-Socratic philosophers, who
thought with their bodies, by walk-
ing, by connecting with the physical
reality that surrounded them.
It is noteworthy that, in an essay
written by a poet, someone like Steve
Nota Bene
Jobs is highlighted. Ospina states
how the creator of Apple was always
a man who preferred “intuition over
discipline, vocation over imposed
knowledge . . . the uncertainty of try-
ing out new things over the certainty
of success.” This means that success
doesn’t only arise from efficacy and
persistence; sometimes humanity’s
highest achievements come from the Louise Viljoen
adventure of someone who under- Ingrid Jonker: Poet under Apartheid
stood that in order to create some- Ohio University Press
thing new and beautiful, it was also
necessary to close one’s eyes and The public’s fascination with the phenomenon
imagine what did not yet exist. of South African poet Ingrid Jonker has
Ospina’s book ends with a beau- inspired several biographies, academic
tiful tribute to the act of reading, studies, translations, plays, and a movie.
which is also, indirectly, in praise Works about Jonker far outnumber the pages
of human imagination. However, of her own writing. She drowned herself in
the act of reading is not only that. the ocean at the age of thirty-one, ending a
Books “are not only imagination, tumultuous life that intersected with a volatile
they are also memory and thought, period of South African political and social
knowledge and song.” This means change.
they are tools of aesthetic reflec-
tion that allow us to experience what
will never be a part of our lives, to
know other epochs and other people,
to know how others feel, live, and
think. The act of reading is a way to
understand and love the world. For
this reason, Ospina asks himself if it
would be possible for us to renounce
the gift that books contain, if we
can really renounce the possibility
of being more complete, free, and
imaginative human beings. “One of
the inevitable experiences of life is Jonas Zdanys
loneliness, another one is friendship, The Kingfisher’s Reign
and the other happiness. But in our Virtual Artists Collective
relationship with books, these three
merge together.” The totality that is Poet and translator Jonas Zdanys brings his
found in books is for Ospina like a cultivated aesthetic to bear in this collection of
marvelous lamp. It is important to short prose poems. His verse is evocative of the
rub it to understand what is hidden mundane present day, but an aura of mythology
inside. and deeper meaning is always present beneath
Marcelo Rioseco the surface. He describes places and people with
University of Oklahoma a subtle sense of wonder and communicates his
sentiments with calm craftsmanship.
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