an incomplete guide to my silly little internal tagging system:
#studia felicitatis: personal stuff (pursuits & such) as well as Felix Mendelssohn.
#songs within words: music & poetry, pun on Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words.
#Herr Moses in Berlin: Moses Mendelssohn and particularly the 1979 biography & urban palimpsest by Heinz Knobloch, which I've translated and hope to see published in 2029. See also #die aufgabe des ausgrabers, a liveblog of my Comparative Literature thesis translation from spring 2025.
#übertrager übertreter: translation stuff. an approximate translation of the famous italian traduttore, traditore that attempts to keep the conceit of phonetic similarity but ultimately widens the gap in a self-demonstrative way :)
#sherb's sub sub library: books I've read and am interested in. From Moby-Dick; or, the Whale.
#not being on boats: boats & the ocean. Secondarily, death. From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard.
#comings and goings of men: history and the past. From "Free in the Harbor" by Stan Rogers
#we catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught: the transtemporal experience of being human. From The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard.
#sifting through centuries/for moments of our own: geology. Slightly modified from the song "Capricorn" by Vampire Weekend. Previous tags include #sherb's field notes and #the geology of it all
#now and then stab as occasion serves: fencing & swordfighting. From Edward II by Christopher Marlowe.
#who knows what we might have thought/in his place at his age: catholic guilt; monks & knights. From Nathan der Weise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
#23 years old/and nothing done for immortality: Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller. Current translation project.
#dr blochposting: Fish! From 18th-century ichthyologist and friend of Mendelssohn, Dr. Marcus Elieser Bloch.
#rhymes with thaumaturge: theater & dramaturgy. For plays I've been in, see #filicide fall (The Bacchae, Agave) and #by the art of known and feeling sorrows (King Lear, Edgar), and for a scene I've directed, #transgegmont (Egmont)
#sherb's birbs: birds
#once I dreamed I was a codicologist: manuscripts and art books. I did once dream of specializing in medieval codicology but the 18th century got me.
#death and her kin: ghosts and vampires and the like.
#fruits of the third coast: the Great Lakes region of the USA (where I'm from) & Canada.
#sherb's gender: affinity of presentation.
#I miss her: snow
#Bread. and. Soup.: Food. Bread and soup are my favorite foods.
#I love my classics friends dearly: I may not be a classicist but some of my mutuals are :)
#I love you friends who write in my books & #I love you all terribly: my infinite love for my friends. From my heart.
#you have some moral in this benedictus: Spinoza and the Pantheism Controversy. From Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare.
AND INTRODUCING...
#sylvan spring: As You Like It, which I'm acting in this semester. I'm playing Duke Frederick, which may incidentally lead me to creating a dedicated F2 tag.
"Unlike Faust, Mephisto has a sense of humor and is even capable of laughing at himself; he is a keen psychologist who sees through convention and pretense; and, though radically dishonest when it suits his purposes, he confronts us with a rarely equaled candor just when Faust's enthusiasm outsoars all scrupulous concern with truth or honesty. It may well be that Mephistopheles is Goethe's greatest single creation, and that he has come into his own only in the twentieth century, after Heine and Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, Freud and Shaw, Gide and Joyce, Mann and Sartre - who would hardly be offended at being called Mephisto's progeny - had changed our sensibilities. [...] The function of Mephistopheles resembles that of Heine's sudden sarcasms: romantic reverie is felt to be too glib, too near the cliché, too far from honesty - and hence must be exposed. It will no longer do to import comic scenes into a tragedy, as Shakespeare did: what is wanted is a device that will permit the poet a continual contrast to point up the questionable character of our feelings and conventions - what feelings hide behind conventions , and how conventional most of our feelings are - in one world - Mephistopheles. Thus Goethe's Faust is closer to Ulysses than to the Odyssey. It is one of the first and greatest works of modern literature. And Mephistopheles is one of the most inspired characters in the whole of world literature."
- Walter Kaufmann, in the intro to his peerless translation of Faust (full quote under the break)
'Faust was quickly hailed as the incarnation of the German character and influence German historiography, philosophy, and self-interpretation. Millions of young men decided they were like Faust, and some found the German destiny in boundless, ruthless, Faustian striving. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation (1819), considered such striving as the essence not merely of man but of the cosmos. Spengler, precisely a hundred years later, saw Faust as the representative of Western man and called Western civilization "the Faustian culture."
After all that, Faust - as who would not? - seems rather trying: one finds oneself eager to not his faults, his lack of humor, his pretentiousness, his self-deceptions. But Goethe used Faust's incurable romanticism as an effective foil for Mephistopheles. The nineteenth century thrilled to Faust's elevated cadences and put up with Mephistopheles' uninhibited sarcasm. The modern reader finds himself embarrassed by Faust's flowery phrases, and relieved by the cynical retorts that reminds us continually that Goethe never wholly identified himself with his romantic hero. If Faust's poetic flights sometimes seem glib, that is not Goethe's fault but Faust's - and not his only fault either. It is, moreover, one of the devices by which Goethe makes Mephisto an engaging personality in spite of everything.
Even as Shakespeare enlists our sympathy for Lear and Coriolanus - although they behave repulsively in many ways - by wisely choosing their antagonists [love the idea of faust as mephisto's antagonist instead of vice versa, but also intrigued by the coriolanus/aufidius parallel drawn...], Goethe forces us to sympathize with Mephistopheles. Unlike Faust, Mephisto has a sense of humor and is even capable of laughing at himself; he is a keen psychologist who sees through convention and pretense; and, though radically dishonest when it suits his purposes, he confronts us with a rarely equaled candor just when Faust's enthusiasm outsoars all scrupulous concern with truth or honesty. It may well be that Mephistopheles is Goethe's greatest single creation, and that he has come into his own only in the twentieth century, after Heine and Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, Freud and Shaw, Gide and Joyce, Mann and Sartre - who would hardly be offended at being called Mephisto's progeny - had changed our sensibilities.
Of course, Goethe's Mephistopheles is not without ancestors, and the most important of these may be found in the Bible. It is a commonplace that Goethe's Prologue in Heaven is modeled on the first two chapters of the Book of Job, but it has not been widely noted how much his Mephisto owes to the few lines spoken by Satan. After God's praise of Job, "that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil, Satan answered the Lord: Does Job fear God for nothing?" And after God has taken away all that Job had and reproved Satan, saying that "still he holds fast his integrity," Satan retorts: "Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life; but put forth your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face." This is Mephistopheles in ovo: a cynicism of nihilistic proportions. But what poet before Goethe realized this possibility? And it was Goethe, too, who fused this nihilism with his own inimitable sense of humor, now broad and earthy, now acidly penetrating.
Some critics still lament the fact that some of Heine's tenderest poems are punctured in the last line by a ruthless cynicism. They do not deny that this is specifically modern, but it is an aspect of modernity that they oppose. it was partly for this reason that the early twentieth-century poet Stefan George, and his very influential "Circle", considered Heine an arch-villain. (They had other reasons, too; for example, Heine's immensely witty but nasty polemic against the poet Platen, though written in 1829, was in many ways applicable to Stefan George - not only as a man but also as a poet.) George's followers, ranging all the way from the perceptive Friedrich Gundolf to some brutal Nazi hacks, lacked the deeply humane quality of Heine's irony and underestimated both his poetry and his superb prose. They considered him the ancestor of modern journalism. But it seems far more just to see him as a link between Goethe and Nietzsche (as Nietzsche himself saw Heine) - a link between Faust and the twentieth century.
Goethe realized the limitations of romanticism and its questionable character even before romanticism had become the style of an age. The very figure of Faust which inspired romantic poets, philosophers, and composers, and was accepted by the German people as their own ideal prototype - this poetic but unscrupulous tital who, for all his noble sentiments, becomes involved in brutal deeds - is the constant butt of Mephisto's mockery. The function of Mephistopheles resembles that of Heine's sudden sarcasms: romantic reverie is felt to be too glib, too near the cliché, too far from honesty - and hence must be exposed. It will no longer do to import comic scenes into a tragedy, as Shakespeare did: what is wanted is a device that will permit the poet a continual contrast to point up the questionable character of our feelings and conventions - what feelings hide behind conventions , and how conventional most of our feelings are - in one world - Mephistopheles. Thus Goethe's Faust is closer to Ulysses than to the Odyssey. It is one of the first and greatest works of modern literature. And Mephistopheles is one of the most inspired characters in the whole of world literature.'
@sherbertilluminated this is the passage i mentioned earlier!
people can’t be immortal. so in order to be immortal you can’t be a person anymore. you have to be distilled. stripped of everything. till you come out the other side as an abstract concept.
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"This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" is such a banger line that you'd think it would be from Vergil or Homer not some popular garbage they put on at the Globe
vampire fuckers are weird like y'all are like "i want my blood drained" and baby girl its just gonna make you sluggish and tired. that is not fun for anyone involved
