La vorágine by José Eustasio Rivera

_{José Eustasio Rivera, 1928, via Wikimedia Commons}

2024 marks 100 years since the publication of La vorágine (The Vortex) by José Eustasio Rivera, one of Colombian and Latin American literature’s most important novels. Still widely read and studied in Colombia and throughout the Spanish-speaking world, La vorágine remains arguably the definitive example of the “jungle novel”.

José Eustasio Rivera was born in 1888 in Huila in the southwest of Colombia. He graduated in law and published his first book, Tierra de promisión (a collection of 150 sonnets), in 1921. The year after this, Rivera travelled to the Amazon rainforest, which would form the setting of La vorágine, while working as part of a government commission to clarify the limits of the Venezuelan-Colombian border. This was soon after the height of the first Amazonian “rubber boom”, when extraction of rubber in the region expanded massively to meet the demands of global capitalism and industrialisation. Like his novel’s semi-autobiographical narrator-protagonist, Arturo Cova, Rivera was greatly affected by his experiences of the jungle, and La vorágine is famous for its poetic descriptions of the environment:

TODAY: Central Asian book display and talk (10 May 2024)

Today from 12 noon until 3pm, all are welcome to visit the Lecturers’ Common Room in the Raised Faculty Building (details below) to see a display of UL books from and about Central Asia curated by visiting fellow Dr Ainur Akhmetova.  There will also be a 30-minute talk by Dr Akhmetova in the room starting at 1pm and followed by a Q&A.

Video-recording of “Illustrated books and humour in Cambridge University Library’s Liberation collection (1944-1946)”

Today, Victory in Europe Day, marks the anniversary of the end of World War II on the Eastern European Front on 8 May 1945. We are delighted to share the video-recording (hosted on Cambridge University Library’s YouTube channel) of the talk on the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation collection (1944-1946) we gave on 19 March, as part of the 2024 Cambridge Festival, in partnership with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics.

Cataloguing of the Royal Commonwealth Society Library’s ‘Foreign colonies’ section

Thanks to the sterling efforts of colleagues in Collections and Academic Liaison (CAL), a hitherto underutilised section of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) library has recently been catalogued. 2252 titles running to almost 79 metres of shelving under the ‘Foreign colonies’ classification have now been added to iDiscover. Previously these titles were only discoverable through a labyrinthine card catalogue situated in the Rare Books Reading Room at Cambridge University Library; potential users had to know of the existence of this collection and had to physically visit the UL to access the card catalogue.

The Carnation Revolution – 50 years

Today marks 50 years since 25 April, 1974, the date of Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution”, which led to the overthrow of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, the introduction of democracy in the country, and the withdrawal of Portugal from its African colonies. For more detailed information about 25 April, you can read our earlier post commemorating its 40th anniversary here.

Unsurprisingly, given this momentous anniversary, much more material related to the Revolution has been published recently in Portugal and elsewhere, so we have acquired many new relevant titles. The significance of 25 April in international terms is shown by the fact that, as well as the expected titles in Portuguese, in recent years we have also bought books on the topic in French, Spanish and English:

Bowness and a touch of synchronicity

Sir Alan Bowness, director of the Tate Gallery in the 1980s and son-in-law of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, donated to the UL his extensive art history library, containing many exhibition catalogues and private view cards. In recent years several blog posts have been devoted to progress on the Bowness collection, the earliest in 2019. This year I have been working on adding more exhibition catalogues to the library catalogue. I have been struck by how relevant the collection is now as over and over again I have noticed links between it and the 2024 cultural world.

Who was Gordon Craig?

Gordon Craig in 1903 (picture via Wikimedia Commons)

Have you ever noticed the Gordon Craig Theatre when travelling through Stevenage station and wondered who Gordon Craig was? I did and after a quick search on my phone it was soon apparent that this was a figure with an interesting and complex life worth writing about. Born in Stevenage (hence the theatre being named after him), Gordon Craig (1872-1966) was the son of the famous actress Ellen Terry, and as a young man he too was an actor alongside his mother in Henry Irving’s company. Much of his later work related to the theatre – stage designs, directing and writing widely on the theatre – but he also produced woodcuts and bookplates. This blog post will explore some aspects of his life and work using the UL’s rich collections.

Beautiful Ukrainian donations : the April 2024 Ukrainian item(s) of the month

A few weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to receive a donation of five lovely books from the Kharkiv-based publisher Oleksandr Savchook and the organisation Progress-14.

The five donations add to the 12 Savchook titles we had previously bought and which were published between 2014 and 2021.  The five new publications, which reflect the core strengths of Mr Savchook’s publishing house in terms of their concentration on the arts, were published in 2022 and 2023 and make very welcome additions to Cambridge’s Ukrainian collection.

Kyivan Christianity – 14 new volumes : the March 2024 Ukrainian item(s) of the month

While the Ukrainian Christmas largely joined the western Christmas in 2023, this Easter will still see a substantial difference, with the western churches celebrating Christ’s resurrection in March and Ukrainians celebrating in May.  Nevertheless, the Easter weekend for most in Cambridge seems a good time to mark the arrival of many new volumes in the Kyivan Christianity set.

illustrations from volumes 20, 29, 31

The mystery of the Pied Piper

Cover of In search of the pied piper showing late 16th c. picture based on Hamelin church stained glass window

I wrote earlier about Till Eulenspiegel, a figure of German folklore who may have been real or fictional. In this post I will look at another legendary German character with similarly mysterious origins, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, made well known to German and English speakers by many different retellings of the story.

Scholars generally believe that the legend is based on a real historical event which occurred on June 26th, 1284 when a man with a pipe led 130 children away from the town of Hamelin (in German, Hameln) in north Germany. The first known evidence of this was a stained glass window depicting the Pied Piper and the children, erected in the town church around 1300. This was unfortunately destroyed in the 17th century but was written about several times and copied in the late 16th century. Early texts made no mention of rats but over time the story developed into one in which the piper (wearing pied – or colourful – clothes) successfully rid the town of an abundance of rats but led the children away as revenge when the townspeople refused to pay him. The German name for the character, Der Rattenfänger von Hameln, references this aspect.