In this website I intend to post some of the creative writings and opinions that do not directly pertain to my specialty. In choosing one profession, each of the other possible ones remains unchosen. Nevertheless, a true dilettante is never resigned to this loss. In the poet's words: "Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido". In some sense, this website is a mourning and, as every mourning, a rebirth.
So far, the following has been uploaded:
1. THEATRE: This is a play I wrote during a sabbatical sojourn in Rome. Although the setting is modern, it involves a fictitious encounter between Machiavelli and Richard Pace, a Tudor diplomat. It also involves John Keats and explores the meaning of poetry, love and life.
2. MUSIC: I was interviewed on the CBC regarding my lifelong involvement with the recorder. The interview audio file, lasting about 6 minutes, is included. More recently, the young piano virtuoso Liam Pond asked me to participate in a recital at the Leacock Theatre of Mount Royal University. We performed a Bach flute sonata (originally for baroque traverse flute and harpsichord), which we played on the recorder and piano. Liam displayed an unusually sensitive understanding of Bach's style and I am happy to provide a link to a you tube recording of our performance.
3. LATIN LANGUAGE: For many years, I have been offering a course at the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Calgary under the name THE LATIN OF SCIENCE. Originally intended for students of science and engineering, it is actually in demand by students from all faculties. The aim and methodology of the course are inspired by the fact that Classical Latin as typically taught in Classics Departments is almost entirely devoted to classical Latin literature, ignoring the obvious fact that Latin has been the lingua franca of Science for over two millennia. Latin, moreover, is one of the few languages for the study of which Grammar is really useful, due mainly to its mathematical precision. On the basis of these observations, I developed my own method. For the best students in the class, it represents an incredibly spectacular shortcut. In a single term they cover and master practically the whole grammatical spectrum. In the second term, we do guided readings of original scientific and philosophical texts. The weaker students still get an appreciation of the subject.
4. UNORTHODOX TEXTS: In 2019, together with my daughter Ruth Spivak, we published a book entitled "The Latin of Science" (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.) consisting of a rich selection of important scientific texts in Latin spanning almost two millennia. The book includes selections from Seneca, Vitruvius, Isidore, Bacon, Maimonides, Al-Haytham, Oresme, Copernicus, Newton, Galvani, and others. The selections are presented both in facsimile of old editions or manuscripts and in transcriptions with commentaries and grammatical aids. More recently, however, we have been working on more unorthodox selections perhaps to be published in a book. Meantime, I am uploading the present state of the manuscript under the name "Unorthodox texts from the ages of translation". They include selections from works by Benjamin of Tudela, Al-Ghazali, Stephen of Blois, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (Mongol History), Paul Fagius (parts of the Latin Talmud), Judah Halevi (The Kuzari), and Ramon Llull. The book is intended to be read as a unit, with intermediate chapters providing the necessary historical and cultural background. It may or may not be completed some day, but meantime it is accessible on this website.
5. ANCIENT SCRIPTS: In an as yet unfinished detective story, a friend and colleague asked me to help him decipher an intriguing bilingual envelope written in Arabic and in an uncommon Hebrew script, now fallen in disuse. The beginning of the story and a description of the evolution of various Hebrew scripts are described in detail.
6. POETRY TRANSLATIONS: For many years, in fact from childhood, I delighted in writing poetry, mostly rhymed and in classical forms. Most of all, I enjoyed the challenge of translating good poetry from one language to another while trying to preserve the form and the sense of the original. These are a few samples that I was able to rescue from the past, from English to Spanish, Spanish to English and Spanish to Hebrew. There is also one of my adolescent-days attempts at imitating the style of great poets, such as Luis de Góngora y Argote.
7. MATHEMATICS: My great love in mathematics is differential geometry. Nowhere else in mathematics do I feel so much at freedom to improvise, sometimes incorrectly, but never too far from the truth. Although trained as a graduate student in the classical differential geometry of surfaces, the turning point for me came many years ago when (as a beginning research associate at the University of Alberta) I took a one-year course in general relativity. So much beauty! I have uploaded the notes for a mini-course at the ICMS Workshop on Geometry and Mechanics (Edinburgh, June 2103).
8. NARRATIVE AND FAMILY HISTORY: Many times already I have attempted to write the story of my family, but every time I stopped at the end of the first chapter. The latest attempt, called Lech Lecho ("get thee out") tries to capture what must have been the dilemma of Jews living under Tzarist rule at the turn of last century. With a few biographical data available in my family by oral tradition, I composed a fictional picture. I suspect that it will remain incomplete, like all previous attempts. More recently, however, I have managed to put together, as far as possible, all the information that I could gather about my great-grandfather's and his children in Baranovich, Belarus, in the late 19th century, until the emigration of the children to Argentina. The result I called The Promised Land.
9. HUMOUR AND WISDOM: Self-explanatory. I have recently added an entry called RACISM 101, that reflects how some people, even if well-intentioned, misunderstand racism.