Behind the Seen
Mermen. Russian lubok. circa 1866
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این جا پشت پرده ی رندان
Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926)
What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.— Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1960)
Samuel Beckett: April 13, 1906 – December 22, 1989
“I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.” - The Letters of Samuel Becket 1929–1940 (2009), p. 209
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From an interview Beckett granted to a French newspaper:
- I never read philosophy.
- Why not?
- I don’t understand it.
[…]
- Why did you write your books?
Robert Bly, poet, translator (Tomas Tranströmer, among others), masculinity guru, abysmal taste in neckties and waist-coats:
Born Dec. 23, 1926 - 83 today!
Driving through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings - Robert Bly
We drive between lakes just turning green;
Late June. The white turkeys have been moved
A second time to new grass.
How long the seconds are in great pain!
Terror just before death,
Shoulders torn, shot
From helicopters. “I saw the boy
being tortured with a telephone generator,”
The sergeant said.
“I felt sorry for him
And blew his head off with a shotgun.”
These instants become crystals,
Particles
The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and you will look down in your cup
And see
Black Starfighters.
Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!
Therefore we will have to
Go far away
To atone
For the suffering of the stringy-chested
And the short rice-fed ones, quivering
In the helicopter like wild animals,
Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.
Photo by Chris Felver
Juan Ramón Jiménez, Spanish Nobel Laureate of Literature (1956), was born Dec. 24, 1881 (d. 1958). An advocate of ‘pure poetry’ Jiménez was awarded the Nobel “for his lyrical poetry, which in Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity”…
Nonetheless, Jiménez also wrote erotic verse about his poetic alter ego dallying with a number of nuns…
Three verses
Sister! We stripped off our ardent bodies
In endless and senseless profusion….
It was autumn and the sun - don’t you remember?
Added sweet sadness to the white splendour of our abode
Sister Pilar, are your eyes still so black?
And your mouth so fresh and red?
And your breasts…? How are they?
Oh, do you recall how you would come into my room late at night, calling to me like a mother, telling me off like a child?
When she fled, in a flight of deranged wimples,
from the impetuous will of my desire
she would seek shelter in a corner, like a cat …
but her nails were sweeter than my kisses.
— Juan Ramón Jiménez
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Matthew Arnold (Dec. 24, 1822 - 1888), Victorian poet with spectacular sideburns, was the type of writer who liked to chastise and instruct the reader on contemporary social issues… Not surprisingly he also had an influential career as a critic.
A Caution to Poets
What poets feel not, when they make,
A pleasure in creating,
The world, in its turn, will not take
Pleasure in contemplating. (1867)
Photo of Arnold, 1863
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Charles Olson, Song 1, from The Songs of Maximus
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Daniil Kharms (Dec. 30, 1905 – 1942) was an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. He signed his name in Latin alphabet as Daniel Charms…
Splendid photo of Kharms, plus unknown - possibly Alisa Poret
Kharms text:
These are all decent people, but they just can’t get on in life on a firmfooting.”
Daniil Harms (Incidences #2)
Transl: Roman Turovsky - Source
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