Dec 5, 2024
You would have taken my soul spellbound into your embracing arms as into a magic circle.
— FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN ⚜️ Hyperion, transl. by Ross Benjamin, (2008)
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You would have taken my soul spellbound into your embracing arms as into a magic circle.
— FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN ⚜️ Hyperion, transl. by Ross Benjamin, (2008)
'Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained by the smallest, is divine.'
--Epigraph, Hyperion by Hölderlin, trans. Ross Benjamin
Hyperion
Friedrich Hölderlin, Tr. Ross Benjamin
I write this most definitely out of despair over my body and over the future with this body
The Diaries of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka and Ross Benjamin
Why do I, like many others, find Kafka’s voice so invigorating, when it incessantly expresses such agony and despair?
Why do I, like many others, find Kafka’s voice so invigorating, when it incessantly expresses such agony and despair? It must have to do with the inventiveness he brought to, as he put it in the diaries, “depicting my dreamlike inner life.” Far from sounding like a broken record, he is perpetually reimagining his plight, now in an animal story, now in a collection of enigmatic aphorisms, now in a charmingly self-deprecating letter. In my translation of the diaries, I sought to reveal his genius not as something fully formed, embalmed and fit for a museum but as that propensity for unsparing self-examination and open-ended literary experimentation that animated all his work.
— Ross Benjamin, from A Century On, the Search for the Real Franz Kafka Continues (NY Times, Feb 2, 2023)
O you, with your Elysian silence.
— FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN ⚜️ Hyperion, transl. by Ross Benjamin, (2008)
She was my Lethe, this soul, my holy Lethe, from which I drank the forgetting of existence.
— FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN ⚜️ Hyperion, transl. by Ross Benjamin, (2008)
You have followed me into my night, now come, and let me follow you to your light! Let us return to your grace, beautiful heart! […] Let my excess fall asleep forever before your image of peace.
— FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN ⚜️ Hyperion, transl. by Ross Benjamin, (2008)