Saturday 19 December 2009

Vive la France! And Vivat Petronius!

"No summer sun," said W.H. Auden in one of his late poems, "will ever dismantle the global gloom / cast by the Daily Papers." Even more true today than when this was originally written in 1973.

But occasionally, amid the doom and gloom, there's also reason to smile or cheer. For example, these articles in The Guardian and The Times give me hope that the world will put up a fight against the greatest intellectual-property robbery in our history. Once again, it's the enlightened French who lead the way in organizing some sort of RĂ©sistance against the digital cowboys of our times.

And I was delighted, both for ourselves and for our translator Andrew Brown, to see two wonderful reviews of our Oneworld Classics edition of Satyricon in The Guardian and The Independent. That a book which has only survived in fragments could still find, after almost 2,000 years, so much resonance with readers and reviewers is confirmation – and do we need one in our dire days! – that true literature never dies.

AG

PS: Read here our own blog piece on Satyricon.

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