Thursday, June 09, 2011

Rio de la Plata, Uruguay

A fantasia on Uruguay from Woolf's great 1925 essay, "The Elizabethan Lumber Room":
“what if the passage to the fabled land of uncounted riches lay only a little farther up the coast? What if the known world was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama? When, after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor in the great river of the Plate and the men went exploring through the undulating lands, startling grazing herds of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the trees, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds or sand that might be gold; or sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw, far off, a string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on their heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for the Spanish King”


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The map is wrong.

Great work at the International Conference in Montevideo.

Hopefully you will know a little bit more of my country.

See you at the next Intenational Conference of English Literature.