Alumni and friends wishing to offer memories, stories, and anecdotes from times spent with John Tagliabue can e-mail magazine@bates.edu. Texts will be posted to this Web page.

John Tagliabue, 1967 Mirror

Beyond Borders
Whether reciting verse from Walt Whitman or Shakespeare, Tag's lilting voice mesmerized. Some of my fondest memories at Bates were the poetry readings in John and Grace's home.  Grace and John made you feel that the Bates community extended far beyond the borders of the classroom. Some of my closest friendships were formed through these gatherings. Years after graduation, Tag sent me news of his family and included copies of his poetry. His lilting voice, his joyful personality, his infectious laugh will be deeply missed. — Julie Jackson Flynn '84

Wondrous Things
Although I never took a class from him, John Tagliabue changed my life. During my Short Term semester abroad, after our art class in Paris, a friend of mine and I decided to travel to Florence and then on to Rome. While racing across the Piazza in the center of Florence one fine sunny Italian morning, we ran into John Tagliabue, who was on sabbatical. After sharing our thoughts on this chance meeting, our travel, his work, sea travel, and our semester in Paris, he insisted that we go and see the Henry Moore exhibit at the Forte di Belvedere. Upon his suggestion we climbed the hills and came upon a life-changing exhibit — this fort was filled inside and out with hundreds if not thousands of Henry Moore’s drawings, tiny sculptures, clay pieces, small and large bronzes, and apartments sized sculptures, all set against the backdrop of Firenze. I never again visited a museum the same way — I understood the value of standing still in one place on this planet and breathing deeply with another. During my senior year, I put up an exhibit with another classmate at Chase Hall, which included sketches from my trip to the Moore exhibit plus a small tribute and thanks to John Tagliabue in my description. One morning I found that John had left a handwritten poem on my drawing, one that I still treasure. Wondrous how things happen to you. Fate? Luck? Or the gentle hands of the gods? Only John knows now. What grace. — R. John Ryan '74

John Tagliabue, 1986 Mirror

A Bow of Gratitude
Several of us who were very close with John made a trip down to see him last month, knowing he was headed in for serious surgery, and were very glad that we did, to be able to tell him how much he meant to us and how much we loved him. He was the world citizen par excellence, teaching us about Asian and Continental writers — he taught Japanese and Russian fiction in the '50s when hardly anyone else was — and recruiting us into his wonderful, balmy, playful Mario puppet plays. To take a "Tag" course was a dizzying, exhilarating wild dash through countries some of us had never heard of, reading writers that left us stunned and amazed. John would write on the board before class each day quotations from writers. I don't remember seeing him ever writing them; they were just there when we arrived, somehow. One day we came in to find a single sentence from Kafka, which I still have in a notebook: "The book must be the ax that breaks the frozen sea within us." That sentence lay across my path like a dropped tree. I remember looking at it, and thinking, "Now I know why I want to be an English major, and a teacher." This fall, I will be teaching a Bates First Year Seminar, looking at the literature of three countries — Russia, Japan and Vietnam — that were propelled through cataclysms, from feudal oligarchies run by a czar or emperor into something utterly different. I will begin my course with that sentence from Kafka, and with a deep bow of gratitude to John. — Bill Hiss '66, Vice President for External Affairs

The Greatness of Our Friend
Tag was one of those people who played a very great role in my life — perhaps bigger than he ever knew. Through his introduction of Asian literature and his wonderful Mario puppet plays, he stirred up within a need to know more aboutJapan and its Bunraku and Noh. He is one of the main reasons that I came to Japan in 1974, in order to study the Noh drama. Now I am a semi-professional Noh actor, and I also play the Gagaku flute (John loved the ethereal Gagaku music), in addition to working as a consultant for the Japan Foundation in Tokyo. I am pleased that I was able to show John and Grace around a few times during their trips to Japan, and also take them to Noh and Gagaku. The only way for me to come to terms with his passing was to write a poem, not an elegy, but a paean celebrating his ascension into Paradise. In creating it, I have interwoven my own words with those of Tag and also those of others whom he loved. I hope that it might in some way help others to remember the greatness of our friend, a man who has now joined the Buddha Uproar. — Stephen Comee '72