[metamorphesque]

The Cathedral, Auguste Rodin (1840 -1917)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“And now I know what most deeply connects us after that summer so many years ago, and it isn’t poetry, although it is poetry”

— Jason Shinder, from “Coda,” The American Poetry Review (November / December 2008)

[weltenwellen]

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

[brutalistarchitecture2]

From Jeanette Winterson's recent substack article

[aseaofquotes]

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

[figlip]

“The centrifugal force of our planet is still fearfully strong…I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe; yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky. I love some people, whom one loves, you know, sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

[rotmance-deactivated20210324]

a friend suggested i read ‘the task of the translator’ by walter benjamin when i asked her if she could recommend texts in translation sciences… it’s so fascinating! i’m reading a pdf, look at this part:

Pannwitz writes: “Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a mistaken premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works …. The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own, he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible, to what extent any language can be transformed, how language differs from language almost the way dialect differs from dialect. However, this last is true only if one takes language seriously enough, not if one takes it lightly.”

[violentwavesofemotion]

“She’s all emotion: heart and womb, tears and blood, a voice that sometimes rises to hysteria, sometimes sinks to a melancholy whine, but isn’t often enough detached, self-critical (in a genuine sense: she is of course self-pitying and self-contemptuous, self-despising).”

— Joyce Carol Oates, from a journal entry, on Anne Sexton’s letters (via violentwavesofemotion)

[merulae]

“Like most people, I suppose, I’ve lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I’m at the awkward stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on with.”

— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

[theoptia]

Pier Paolo Pasolini, from The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini; “Gramsci’s Ashes”

Text ID: It’s not May that brings this impure air, / makes the darkness [...] darker still,

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes

[existential-celestial]

“You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the colour blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes— the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.”

— Joan Didion, Blue Nights

[propertiesofjoy]

rainer maria rilke, letters to a young poet

[existential-celestial]

“each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,”

— Anne Sexton, from “Courage”

[720p]

“The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.”

— Mikko Harvey, from “For M,” Foundry (no. 9, September 2018)

[woundgallery]

Jacques Derrida from “Roland Barthes” in Works of Mourning edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

[watchoutforintellect]

Forugh Farrokhzad, from a letter to Ebrahim Golestan featured in Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad