On This Date in History: March 1
"March 1, 1781 - Formal ratification of the Articles of Confederation was announced by Congress. Under the Articles, Congress was the sole governing body of the new American national government, consisting of the 13 original states. The Articles remained in effect through the Revolutionary War until 1789, when the current U.S. Constitution was adopted.
March 1, 1932 - The 20-month-old son of aviation pioneer Charles A. Lindbergh was kidnapped from his home in Hopewell, New Jersey. The Lindberghs then paid a $50,000 ransom. However, on May 12, the boy's body was found in a wooded area a few miles from the house.
March 1, 1961 - President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps, an organization sending young American volunteers to developing countries to assist with health care, education and other basic human needs.
March 1, 1974 - Seven former high-ranking officials of the Nixon White House were indicted for conspiring to obstruct the investigation into the Watergate break-in. Among those indicted; former chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, former top aide John Ehrlichman, and former attorney general John Mitchell.
Birthday - American band leader Glenn Miller (1904-1944) was born in Carilinda, Iowa. His music gained enormous popularity during the 1940's through recordings such as Moonlight Serenade and String of Pearls. On December 15, 1944, his plane disappeared over the English Channel while en route to Paris where he was scheduled to perform."
http://www.historyplace.com/specials/calendar/march.htm
"As Monopoly celebrates its 80th birthday, the mayor of Atlantic City, N.J., said the town on which the popular board game is based is struggling, but staying true to the game’s spirit of wheeling and dealing. (AP)"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/business/economy/as-monopoly-turns-80-boardwalk-struggles/2015/03/18/73788fdf-72f0-4054-8d22-d4a898390050_video.html
If you've ever played this family table game, what was your token? Yeah, mine as a teenager was the Top Hat. LOL
"Tomas Transtromer, Nobel-Winning Poet, Dies at 83 By Bruce Weber March 27, 2015
Photo: Tomas Transtromer with his wife, Monica, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. Credit Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse —
Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011 for a body of work known for shrewd metaphors couched in deceptively spare language, crystalline descriptions of natural beauty and explorations of the mysteries of identity and creativity, died on Thursday in Stockholm. He was 83.
The Swedish publisher Albert Bonniers announced the death without giving a cause. In 1990, at age 59, Mr. Transtromer had a stroke that severely curtailed his ability to speak; he also lost the use of his right arm.
With a pared-down style and brusque, forthright diction, Mr. Transtromer (pronounced TRAWN-stroh-mur) wrote in accessible language, though often in the service of ideas that were diaphanous and not easy to parse; he could be precisely observant one moment and veer toward surrealism the next.
“The typical Transtromer poem is an exercise in sophisticated simplicity, in which relatively spare language acquires remarkable depth, and every word seems measured to the millimeter,” the poet David Orr wrote in an essay in The New York Times in 2011.
He was a hugely popular figure in his home country — one American critic referred to him as Sweden’s Robert Frost — whose more than 15 books over nearly six decades were translated into 60 languages. And though he was not especially well known among American readers, he was widely admired by English-speaking poets, including his friends Robert Bly, who translated many of his poems, and Seamus Heaney, himself a Nobel laureate in 1995.
“I was utterly delighted when I heard Tomas Transtromer had won the Nobel Prize,” Mr. Heaney, who died in 2013, said in 2011. “Everybody was hoping for that. For years.”
Many of Mr. Transtromer’s themes and interests, including music (he was an accomplished pianist) and the beauty and inspiration of the outdoors, were evident in his first book, “17 Poems,” published in 1954. The succinct poem “Ostinato” (translated by Robin Fulton) — the title is a musical term referring to a repeated phrase or rhythmic figure — observes nature in both meaning and form:
Under the buzzard’s circling point of stillness
ocean rolls resoundingly on in daylight...
For many years, Mr. Transtromer, a trained psychologist, worked in state institutions with juvenile offenders, parole violators and the disabled, and many critics noted that he frequently deployed his inventive and striking metaphors to examine the depths of the human mind.
He often began his poems with descriptions of mundane settings and acts, but he was also interested in dreams and the other uncontrollable wanderings of thought. In “Preludes” (translation by May Swenson) he wrote:
Two truths approach each other
One comes from within,
one comes from without — and where they meet you have the chance
to catch a look at yourself.
His poems often had transcendental moments that led some critics to consider him a religious poet or a mystic. In “Further In,” from the 1973 volume “Paths,” the quotidian and the unfathomable collide, in both the body of the poet and in the world. Translated by Robin Fulton, the poem reads in its entirety:
On the main road into the city
when the sun is low....
Tomas Gosta Transtromer was born in Stockholm on April 15, 1931. His father was a journalist. His parents divorced when he was young, and he was reared mostly by his mother, a teacher. He studied literature, history, religion and psychology at Stockholm University, graduating in 1956. His survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, the former Monica Bladh, and two daughters.
Mr. Transtromer’s poetry production slowed after his stroke, but he took refuge in music, playing the piano with just his left hand. As a testament to his prominence in Sweden, several composers there wrote pieces for the left hand specifically for him.
He was also an amateur entomologist. The Swedish National Museum presented an exhibition of his childhood insect collection, and a Swedish scientist who discovered a new species of beetle named it for him.
Mr. Transtromer was considered a candidate for the Nobel for a decade or more. Each year, on the day the prizes were to be announced, Swedish journalists, anticipating his selection, gathered in the stairwell of his Stockholm apartment building, about a mile from the Swedish Academy, which administers the prizes.
He was the seventh Swede to win the Nobel for literature, and he was the only winner in nearly 20 years to be known mainly as a poet. (The last was Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.) His selection was not without controversy. Some critics complained of home-nation favoritism and said that Philip Roth and other fiction writers were more deserving.
Mr. Transtromer’s work was also at the center of a dispute between translators: Robin Fulton, whose work with Mr. Transtromer included the 2013 collection “The Great Enigma,” and Robin Robertson, a Scottish poet who translated a 2006 Transtromer volume, “The Deleted World.”
Mr. Robertson, who does not speak Swedish, referred to his work as “versions” of Mr. Transtromer’s poems and suggested that it was more important to get the spirit and tone of a poem right than every last idiom. The book set off a debate about the nature of translation. Mr. Fulton objected to what he called “the strange current fashion whereby a ‘translation’ is liable to be praised in inverse proportion to the ‘translator’s’ knowledge of the original language.”
Mr. Transtromer’s other works in English translation include the collection “The Half-Finished Heaven,” translated by Mr. Bly; “Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer”; and a memoir, “Memories Look at Me,” translated by Mr. Fulton. “Through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality,” the Swedish Academy said in awarding him the Nobel."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/books/tomas-transtromer-crystalline-swedish-poet-dies-at-83.html?_r=0