Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction: Carmen Placker — Friend, Scholar and Wife
- List of Contributors
- List of Plates
- Map of Japan
- Japan's Prefectures
- PART I CARMEN BLACKER AS SEEN BY HER FRIENDS
- PART II SELECTED EXTRACTS FROM CARMEN BLACKER’S DIARIES AND OTHER AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS
- PART III SELECTED BIOGRAPHICAL PORTRAITS BY CARMEN BLACKER
- PART IV SELECTED ACADEMIC WRITINGS
- PART V SELECTED CARMEN BLACKER LECTURES
- PART VI A CELEBRATORY ESSAY
- APPENDIX Carmen’s Literary Gift. Compiled
- Bibliography
- Index
APPENDIX - Carmen’s Literary Gift. Compiled
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction: Carmen Placker — Friend, Scholar and Wife
- List of Contributors
- List of Plates
- Map of Japan
- Japan's Prefectures
- PART I CARMEN BLACKER AS SEEN BY HER FRIENDS
- PART II SELECTED EXTRACTS FROM CARMEN BLACKER’S DIARIES AND OTHER AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS
- PART III SELECTED BIOGRAPHICAL PORTRAITS BY CARMEN BLACKER
- PART IV SELECTED ACADEMIC WRITINGS
- PART V SELECTED CARMEN BLACKER LECTURES
- PART VI A CELEBRATORY ESSAY
- APPENDIX Carmen’s Literary Gift. Compiled
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
CARMEN WAS AN acute observer of detail — whatever the subject, but especially Nature and people — which is evident throughout her writings. She relished language, had a natural instinct for the bon mot and displayed her fine descriptive powers in whatever she wrote, as can be seen in what is published in this volume, not least in her diary entnes. Underpinning this was a great sensitivity, a wonderful and sometimes ‘wicked’ sense of humour — perhaps on occasion with a certain Chaucerian gloss — combined with an incisive mind, and an instinctive warmth and empathy. These qualities were also invanably echoed in her great gift of delivering the spoken word in what always seemed an effortless musicality in her delightful mellifluous voice, that would engage, entertain and sometimes entrance her audience.
Below are a random selection of quotations from her diary that speak to her life and literary legacy:
1937. WRITING ON BABA TATSUI
Perhaps I am one of the last people to have made serious use of Baba's Grammar. On rereading it after so many years, I feel for it a flow of gratitude and affection. I realize now that I understood almost nothing of what it had to teach, but it came to me as an amulet, a talisman which promised marvels in the years to come. And as an amulet it has proved wonderfully efficacious. Little did I dream, when I first held the maroon book in my hand, of the joys, the treasures, the ennchment of my life which were to come to me through the study of Japanese.
1945. ON A BUS WITH T.S. ELIOT
.. .whom should I meet in the bus but T. S. Eliot. He recognised me and at once came and sat next to me. We talked very amicably all the way back. He really was most awfully nice and we discussed Chinese poems, Arthur Waley, his recent broadcast to Sweden, Mrs Tandy, the Roman Temple on the heath and I told him about our attempt to raise a ghost there.
1951. AT KEIŌ UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
It was peculiarly moving to see the breathless reverence with which these Keiō sensei looked at Fukuzawa's letters and possessions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Carmen BlackerScholar of Japanese Religion, Myth and Folklore: Writings and Reflections, pp. 459 - 462Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017