Sunday, May 15, 2011
An Opsimath
From an email sent to me by Eric Thomson:
Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, Old Man with a Book
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Joan Coromines, the Catalan Romance linguist, was in the habit of working twelve hours a day right up until his death in 1997 at the age of ninety-two. On his bedside table during the final week of his life were 'els Evangelis en grec, dos volums de les Confessions de Sant Agustí en llatí, les obres completes de Dante en italià, els Anys d'aprenentatge de Wilhelm Meister, de Goethe, en alemany i en caràcters gòtics, un volum de les tragèdies d'Euripides en grec, el seu estimat exemplar de La vida austera, de Pere Coromines, i dos volums de la correspondència de Josep Carner'. Sergi Sol, Joan Coromines: Una Vita de Llegenda (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2005) p. 350.I don't know Catalan (or Spanish, for that matter), but I think that on Coromines' bedside table were "the Gospels in Greek; two volumes of St. Augustine's Confessions in Latin; Dante's complete works in Italian; Goethe's Wilhelm Meister: The Years of Apprenticeship, in German and in Fraktur script; a volume of Euripides' tragedies in Greek; his beloved copy of The Austere Life, by Pere Coromines; and two volumes of Josep Carner's letters."
Labels: opsimathy
