Story’s The dog and My adversary

 

Story’s Ivan Turnegev

Translator to English

Constance Garnet

 

THE DOG

Us two in the room; my dog and me.... Outside a fearful storm is howling.

 

The dog sits in front of me, and looks me straight in the face.

 

And I, too, look into his face.

 

He wants, it seems, to tell me something. He is dumb, he is without words, he does not understand himself—but I understand him.

 

I understand that at this instant there is living in him and in me the same feeling, that there is no difference between us. We are the same; in each of us there burns and shines the same trembling spark.

 

Death sweeps down, with a wave of its chill broad wing....

 

And the end!

 

Who then can discern what was the spark that glowed in each of us?

 

No! We are not beast and man that glance at one another....

 

They are the eyes of equals, those eyes riveted on one another.

 

And in each of these, in the beast and in the man, the same life huddles up in fear close to the other.

MY ADVERSARY

I had a comrade who was my adversary; not in pursuits, nor in service, nor in love, but our views were never alike on any subject, and whenever we met, endless argument arose between us.

 

We argued about everything: about art, and religion, and science, about life on earth and beyond the grave, especially about life beyond the grave.

 

He was a person of faith and enthusiasm. One day he said to me, ‘You laugh at everything; but if I die before you, I will come to you from the other world.... We shall see whether you will laugh then.’

 

And he did, in fact, die before me, while he was still young; but the years went by, and I had forgotten his promise, his threat.

 

One night I was lying in bed, and could not, and, indeed, would not sleep.

 

In the room it was neither dark nor light. I fell to staring into the grey twilight.

 

And all at once, I fancied that between the two windows my adversary was standing, and was slowly and mournfully nodding his head up and down.

 

I was not frightened; I was not even surprised ... but raising myself a little, and propping myself on my elbow, I stared still more intently at the unexpected apparition.

 

The latter continued to nod his head.

 

‘Well?’ I said at last; ‘are you triumphant or regretful? What is this—warning or reproach?... Or do you mean to give me to understand that you were wrong, that we were both wrong? What are you experiencing? The torments of hell? Or the bliss of paradise? Utter one word at least!’

 

But my opponent did not utter a single sound, and only, as before, mournfully and submissively nodded his head up and down.

 

I laughed ... he vanished.

 

February 1878.

With affection,

Ruben

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Felix Mendelssohn

 

Felix Mendelssohn

German musician and compose

Source: Britannica

painting by Wilhelm Hensel.

Felix Mendelssohn

German musician and composer

Also known as: Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

Written by

Quick Facts

In full: Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

Born: February 3, 1809, Hamburg [Germany]

Died: November 4, 1847, Leipzig (aged 38)

Notable Works: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” “Briefe über die Empfindungen” “Elijah, Op. 70” “Hymn of Praise” “Italian Symphony” “Octet for Strings in E-Flat Major, Op. 20” “Scottish Symphony” “Songs Without Words” “St. Paul” “String Octet in E Flat Major” “The Hebrides, Op. 26” “Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64”

Movement / Style: Romanticism

Signature

Felix Mendelssohn (born February 3, 1809, Hamburg [Germany]—died November 4, 1847, Leipzig) was a German composer, pianist, musical conductor, and teacher, one of the most-celebrated figures of the early Romantic period. In his music, Mendelssohn largely observed Classical models and practices while initiating key aspects of Romanticism—the artistic movement that exalted feeling and the imagination above rigid forms and traditions. Among his most famous works are Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), Italian Symphony (1833), a violin concerto (1844), two piano concerti (1831, 1837), the oratorio Elijah (1846), and several pieces of chamber music. He was a grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

Early life and works

1821

Father's Mendelssohn

Felix was born of Jewish parents, Abraham and Lea Salomon Mendelssohn, from whom he took his first piano lessons. Though the Mendelssohn family was proud of their ancestry, they considered it desirable in accordance with 19th-century liberal ideas to mark their emancipation from the ghetto by adopting the Christian faith. Accordingly, Felix, together with his brother and two sisters, was baptized in 1816 as a Lutheran. In 1822, when his parents were also baptized, the entire family adopted the surname Bartholdy, following the example of Felix’s maternal uncle, who had chosen to adopt the name of a family farm.

 

In 1811, during the French occupation of Hamburg, the family had moved to Berlin, where Mendelssohn studied the piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, who, as a composer and teacher, exerted an enormous influence on his development. Other teachers gave the Mendelssohn children lessons in literature and landscape painting, with the result that at an early age Mendelssohn’s mind was widely cultivated. His personality was nourished by a broad knowledge of the arts and was also stimulated by learning and scholarship. He traveled with his sister to Paris, where he took further piano lessons and where he appears to have become acquainted with the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

 

Mendelssohn was an extemely precocious musical composer. He wrote numerous compositions during his boyhood, among them 5 operas, 11 symphonies for string orchestra, concerti, sonatas, and fugues. Most of these works were long preserved in manuscript in the Prussian State Library in Berlin but are believed to have been lost in World War II. He made his first public appearance in 1818—at age nine—in Berlin.

 

In 1821 Mendelssohn was taken to Weimar to meet J.W. von Goethe, for whom he played works of J.S. Bach and Mozart and to whom he dedicated his Piano Quartet No. 3. in B Minor (1825). A remarkable friendship developed between the aging poet and the 12-year-old musician. In Paris in 1825 Luigi Cherubini discerned Mendelssohn’s outstanding gifts. The next year he reached his full stature as a composer with the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The atmospheric effects and the fresh lyrical melodies in this work revealed the mind of an original composer, while the animated orchestration looked forward to the orchestral manner of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov.

Mendelssohn also became active as a conductor. On March 11, 1829, at the Singakademie, Berlin, he conducted the first performance since Bach’s death of the St. Matthew Passion, thus inaugurating the Bach revival of the 19th century. Meanwhile he had visited Switzerland and had met Carl Maria von Weber, whose opera Der Freischütz, given in Berlin in 1821, encouraged him to develop a national character in music. Mendelssohn’s great work of this period was the String Octet in E Flat Major (1825), displaying not only technical mastery and an almost unprecedented lightness of touch but great melodic and rhythmic originality. Mendelssohn developed in this work the genre of the swift-moving scherzo (a playful musical movement) that he would also use in the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843).

In the spring of 1829 Mendelssohn made his first journey to England, conducting his Symphony No. 1 in C Minor (1824) at the London Philharmonic Society. In the summer he went to Scotland, of which he gave many poetic accounts in his evocative letters. He went there “with a rake for folksongs, an ear for the lovely, fragrant countryside, and a heart for the bare legs of the natives.” At Abbotsford he met Sir Walter Scott. The literary, pictorial, and musical elements of Mendelssohn’s imagination are often merged. Describing, in a letter written from the Hebrides, the manner in which the waves break on the Scottish coast, he noted down, in the form of a musical symbol, the opening bars of The Hebrides (1830–32). Between 1830 and 1832 he traveled in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland and in 1832 returned to London, where he conducted The Hebrides and where he published the first book of the piano music he called Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words), completed in Venice in 1830. Mendelssohn, whose music in its day was held to be remarkable for its charm and elegance, was gradually becoming the most popular of 19th-century composers in England. His main reputation was made in England, which, in the course of his short life, he visited no fewer than 10 times. At the time of these visits, the character of his music was held to be predominantly Victorian, and indeed he eventually became the favourite composer of Queen Victoria herself.

Mendelssohn’s subtly ironic account of his meeting with the queen and the prince consort at Buckingham Palace in 1843, to both of whom he was affectionately drawn, shows him also to have been alive to both the pomp and the sham of the royal establishment. His Symphony No. 3 in A Minor–Major, or Scottish Symphony, as it is called, was dedicated to Queen Victoria. And he became endeared to the English musical public in other ways. The fashion for playing the “Wedding March” from his A Midsummer Night’s Dream at bridal processions originates from a performance of this piece at the wedding of the Princess Royal after Mendelssohn’s death, in 1858. In the meantime he had given the first performances in London of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Emperor and G Major concerti. He was among the first to play a concerto from memory in public—Mendelssohn’s memory was prodigious—and he also became known for his organ works. Later the popularity of his oratorio Elijah, first produced at Birmingham in 1846, established Mendelssohn as a composer whose influence on English music equaled that of George Frideric Handel. After his death this influence was sometimes held to have had a stifling effect. Later generations of English composers, enamoured of Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, or Igor Stravinsky, revolted against the domination of Mendelssohn and condemned the sentimentality of his lesser works. But there is no doubt that he had, nevertheless, succeeded in arousing the native musical genius, at first by his performances and later in the creative sphere, from a dormant state.

In the summer of 1825, the Mendelssohn family moved into a mansion at 3 Leipzigerstraße on the outskirts of Berlin (view of the house in 1900).

 

A number of new experiences marked the grand tour that Mendelssohn had undertaken after his first London visit. Lively details of this tour are found in his long series of letters. On Goethe’s recommendation he had read Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, and, inspired by this work, he recorded his impressions with great verve. In Venice he was enchanted by the paintings of Titian and Giorgione. The papal singers in Rome, however, were “almost all unmusical,” and Gregorian music he found unintelligible. In Rome he describes a “haggard” colony of German artists “with terrific beards.” Later, at Leipzig, where Hector Berlioz and Mendelssohn exchanged batons, Berlioz offered an enormous cudgel of lime tree covered with bark, whereas Mendelssohn playfully presented his brazen contemporary with a delicate light stick of whalebone elegantly encased in leather. The contrast between these two batons precisely reflects the violently conflicting characters of the two composers.

 

In 1833 Mendelssohn was in London again to conduct his Italian Symphony (Symphony No. 4 in A Major–Minor), and in the same year he became music director of Düsseldorf, where he introduced into the church services the masses of Beethoven and Cherubini and the cantatas of Bach. At Düsseldorf, too, he began his first oratorio, St. Paul. In 1835 he became conductor of the celebrated Gewandhaus Orchestra at Leipzig, where he not only raised the standard of orchestral playing but made Leipzig the musical capital of Germany. Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann were among his friends at Leipzig, where, at his first concert with the Gewandhaus Orchestra, he conducted his overture Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt (1828–32; Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage).

Marriage and maturity of Felix Mendelssohn

Cecile Mendelssohn

In 1835 Mendelssohn was overcome by the death of his father, Abraham, whose dearest wish had been that his son should complete the St. Paul. He accordingly plunged into this work with renewed determination and the following year conducted it at Düsseldorf. The same year at Frankfurt he met Cécile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a French Protestant clergyman. Though she was 10 years younger than himself, that is to say, no more than 16, they became engaged and were married on March 28, 1837. His sister Fanny, the member of his family who remained closest to him, wrote of her sister-in-law: “She is amiable, childlike, fresh, bright and even-tempered, and I consider Felix most fortunate for, though inexpressibly fond of him, she does not spoil him, but when he is capricious, treats him with an equanimity which will in course of time most probably cure his fits of irritability altogether.” This was magnanimous praise on the part of Fanny, to whom Mendelssohn was drawn by musical as well as emotional ties. Fanny was not only a composer in her own right—she had herself written some of the Songs Without Words attributed to her brother—but she seems to have exercised, by her sisterly companionship, a powerful influence on the development of his inner musical nature.

 

Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64An excerpt from Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, played here with piano accompaniment (“piano reduction”).

Works written over the following years include the Variations sérieuses (1841), for piano, the Lobgesang (1840; Hymn of Praise), Psalm CXIV, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor (1837), and chamber works. In 1838 Mendelssohn began the Violin Concerto in E Minor–Major. Though he normally worked rapidly, throwing off works with the same facility as one writes a letter, this final expression of his lyrical genius compelled his arduous attention over the next six years. In the 20th century the Violin Concerto was still admired for its warmth of melody and for its vivacity, and it was also the work of Mendelssohn’s that, for nostalgic listeners, enshrined the elegant musical language of the 19th century. Nor was its popularity diminished by the later, more turgid, and often more dramatic violin concerti of Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, and Alban Berg. It is true that many of Mendelssohn’s works are cameos, delightful portraits or descriptive pieces, held to lack the characteristic Romantic depth. But occasionally, as in the Violin Concerto and certain of the chamber works, these predominantly lyrical qualities, so charming, naive, and fresh, themselves end by conveying a sense of the deeper Romantic wonder.

 

In 1843 Mendelssohn founded at Leipzig the conservatory of music where, together with Schumann, he taught composition. Visits to London and Birmingham followed, entailing an increasing number of engagements. These would hardly have affected his normal health; he had always lived on this feverish level. But at Frankfurt in May 1847 he was greatly saddened by the death of Fanny. It is at any rate likely that for a person of Mendelssohn’s sensibility, living at such intensity, the death of this close relative, to whom he was so completely bound, would undermine his whole being. In fact, after the death of his sister, his energies deserted him, and, following the rupture of a blood vessel, he soon died.

Legacy

Though the music of Mendelssohn, stylish and elegant, does not fill the entire musical scene, as it was inclined to do in Victorian times, it has elements that unite this versatile 19th-century composer to the principal artistic figures of his time. In the Midsummer Night’s Dream music, with its hilarious grunting of an ass on the bassoon and the evocative effect of Oberon’s horn, Mendelssohn becomes a partner in Shakespeare’s fairyland kingdom. The blurred impressionist effects in The Hebrides foreshadow the later developments of the painter J.M.W. Turner. Wagner understood Mendelssohn’s inventive powers as an orchestrator, as is shown in his own opera The Flying Dutchman, and, later, the French composers of the 20th century learned much from his grace and perfection of style.

 

The appeal of Mendelssohn’s work has not 

dwindled in the 21st century. It is true that Elijah is not so frequently performed as it once was and some of his fluent piano works are now overshadowed by the more-enduring works of Beethoven and Schumann. But the great pictorial works of Mendelssohn, the Scottish and Italian symphonies, repeatedly yield new vistas, and the Songs Without Words retain their graceful beauty. Mendelssohn was one of the first of the great 19th-century Romantic composers, and in this sense he remains even today a figure to be rediscovered.

Aquarell Mendelssohn 1847

Edward LockspeiserThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

With affection,

Ruben

Ruben Dario Poems

 

Ruben Dario Poems

 

Fatality

The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;

the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:

there is no pain as great as being alive,

no burden heavier than that of conscious life.

 

To be, and to know nothing, and to lack a way,

and the dread of having been, and future terrors...

And the sure terror of being dead tomorrow,

And to suffer all through life and through the darkness,

 

and through what we do not know and hardly suspect...

And the flesh that temps us with bunches of cool grapes,

and the tomb that awaits us with its funeral sprays,

and not to know where we go,

nor whence we came! ...

Far Away

Ox that I saw in my childhood, as you steamed

in the burning gold on the Nicaraguan sun,

there on the rich plantation filled with tropical

harmonies; woodland dove, of the woods that sang

with the sound of the wind, of axes, of birds and wild bulls:

I salute you both, because you are both my life.

 

You, heavy ox, evoke the gentle dawn

that signaled it was time to milk the cow,

when my existence was all white and rose;

and you, sweet mountain dove, cooing and calling,

you signify all that my own springtime, now so far away, possessed of the Divine Springtime.

Portico

I am the singer who of late put by

The verse azulean and the chant profane,

Across whose nights a rossignol would cry

And prove himself a lark at morn again.

 

Lord was I of my garden-place of dreams,

Of heaping roses and swan-haunted brakes;

Lord of the doves; lord of the silver streams,

Of gondolas and lilies on the lakes.

 

And very eighteenth century; both old

And very modern; bold, cosmopolite;

Like Hugo daring, like Verlaine half-told,

And thirsting for illusions infinite.

 

From childhood it was sorrow that I knew;

My youth-was ever youth my own indeed?-

Its roses still their perfume round me strew,

Their perfume of a melancholy seed-

 

A rainless colt my instinct galloped free,

My youth bestrode a colt without a rein;

Intoxicate I went, a belted blade with me;

If I fell not-'twas God who did sustain.

 

Within my garden stood a statue fair,

Of marble seeming, yet of flesh and bone;

A gentle spirit was incarnate there

Of sensitive and sentimental tone.

 

So timid of the world, it fain would hide

And from its walls of silence issue not,

Save when the Spring released upon its tide

The hour of melody it had begot-

 

The hour of sunset and of hidden kiss;

The hour of gloaming twilight and retreat;

The hour of madrigal, the hour of bliss,

Of 'I adore thee' and 'Alas' too sweet.

 

And 'mid the gamut of the flute, perchance,

Would come a ripple of crystal mysteries,

Recalling Pan and his glad Grecian dance

With the intoning of old Latin keys,

 

With such a sweep, and ardor so intense,

That on the statue suddenly were born

The muscled goat-thighs shaggy and immense,

And o the brow the satyr's pair of horn.

 

As Gongora's Galatea, so in fine

The fair marquise of Verlaine captured me;

And so unto the passion half divine

Was joined a human sensuality;

 

All longing and all ardor, the mere sense

And natural vigor; and without a sign

Of stage effect or literature's pretence-

If there is ever a soul sincere-'tis mine.

 

The ivory tower awakened my desire;

I longed to enclose myself in selfish bliss,

Yet hungered after space, my thirst on fire

For heaven, from out the shades of my abyss.

 

As with the sponge the salt sea saturates

Below the oozing wave, so was my heart,-

Tender and soft,-bedrenched with bitter fates

That world and flesh and devil here impart.

 

But through the grace of God my conscience

Elected unto good its better part;

If there were hardness left in any sense

It melted soft beneath the touch of Art.

 

My intellect was freed from baser thought,

My soul was bathed in the Castalian flood,

My heart a pilgrim went, and so I caught

The harmony from out the sacred wood.

 

Oh, sacred wood! Oh, rumor, that profound

Stirs from the sacred woodland's heart divine!

Oh, plenteous fountain in whose power is wound

And overcome our destiny malign!

 

Grove of ideals, where the real halts,

Where flesh is flame alive, and Psyche floats;

The while the satyr makes his old assaults,

Loose Philomel her azure drunken throats.

 

Fantastic pearl and music amorous

Adown the green and flowering laurel tops;

Hypsipyle stealthily the rose doth buss;

And the faun's mouth the tender stalking crops.

 

There were the god pursues the flying maid,

Where springs the reed of Pan from out the mire,

The Life eternal hath its furrows laid,

And wakens the All-Father's mystic choir.

 

The soul that enters there disrobed should go

A-tremble with desire and longing pure

Over the wounding spine and thorn below,

So should it dream, be stirred, and sing secure.

 

Life, Light and Truth, as in a triple flame

Produce the inner radiance infinite;

Art, pure as Christ, is heartened to exclaim;

I am indeed the Life, the Truth, the Light!

 

The Life is mystery; the Light is blind;

The Truth beyond our reach both daunts and fades;

The sheer perfection nowhere do we find;

The ideal sleeps, a secret, in the shades.

 

Therefore to be sincere is to be strong.

Bare as it is, what glimmer hath the star;

The water tells the fountain's soul in song

And voice of crystal flowing out afar.

 

Such my intent was,-of my spirit pure

To make a star, a fountain music-drawn,

With horror of the thing called literature-

And mad with madness of the gloam and dawn.

 

Of the blue twilight, such as gives the world

Which the celestial ecstasies inspires,

The haze and minor chord,-let flutes be heard!

Aurora, daughter of the Sun,-sound, lyres!

 

Let pass the stone if any use the sling;

Let pass, should hands of violence point the dart.

The stone from out the sling is for the waves a thing;

Hate's arrow of the idle wind is part.

 

Virtue is with the tranquil and the braves;

The fire interior burneth well and high;

Triumphant over rancor and the grave,

Toward Bethlehem-the caravan goes by!

Blazon

The snow-white Olympic swan,

with beak of rose-red agate,

preens his eucharistic wing,

which he opens to the sun like a fan.

 

His shining neck is curved

like the arm of a lyre,

like the handle of a Greek amphora,

like the prow of a ship.

 

He is the swan of divine origin

whose kiss mounted through fields

of silk to the rosy peaks

of Leda's sweet hills.

 

White king of Castalia's fount,

his triumph illumines the Danube;

Da Vinci was his baron in Italy;

Lohengrin is his blond prince.

 

His whiteness is akin to linen,

to the buds of white roses,

to the diamantine white

of the fleece of an Easter lamb.

 

He is the poet of perfect verses,

and his lyric cloak is of ermine;

he is the magic, the regal bird

who, dying, rhymes the soul in his song.

 

This winged aristocrat displays

white lilies on a blue field;

and Pompadour, gracious and lovely,

has stroked hs feathers.

 

He rows and rows on the lake

where dreams wait for the unhappy,

where a golden gondola waits

for the sweetheart of Louis of Bavaria.

 

Countess, give the swans your love,

for they are gods of an alluring land

and are made of perfume and ermine,

of white light, of silk, and of dreams.

Nocturne

Silence of the night , a sad, nocturnal

silence--Why does my soul tremble so?

I hear the humming of my blood,

and a soft storm passes through my brain.

Insomnia! Not to be able to sleep, and yet

to dream. I am the autospecimen

of spiritual dissection, the auto-Hamlet!

To dilute my sadness

in the wine of the night

in the marvelous crystal of the dark--

And I ask myself: When will the dawn come?

Someone has closed a door--

Someone has walked past--

The clock has rung three--If only it were She!—

 

 

Vultures a-wing have sullied the glory of the sky;

The winds bear on their pinions the horror of Death's

cry;

Assassinating one another, men rage and fall and die.

 

Has Antichrist arisen whom John at Patmos saw?

Portents are seen and marvels that fill the world with awe,

And Christ's return seems pressing, come to fulfill the Law.

 

The ancient Earth is pregnant with so profound a smart,

The royal dreamer, musing, silent and sad apart,

Grieves with the heavy anguish that rends the world's great

heart.

 

 

 

Slaughterers of ideals with the violence of fate

Have cast man in the darkness of labyrinths intricate

To be the prey and carnage of hounds of war and hate.

 

Lord Christ! for what art waiting to come in all Thy might

And stretch Thy hands of radiance over these wolves of

night,

And spread on high Thy banners and lave the world with

light?

 

Swiftly arise and pour Life's essence lavishly

On souls that crazed with hunger, or sad, or maddened be,

Who tread the paths of blindness forgetting the dawn

and Thee.

 

Come Lord, to make Thy glory, with lightnings on Thy

Brow!

 

With trembling stars around Thee and cataclysmal woe,

And bring Thy gifts of justice and peace and love below!

 

Let the dread horse John visioned devouring stars, pass by;

And angels sound the clarion of Judgment from on high.

My heart shall be an ember and in thy censer lie

Song of life and Hope

I am he who only yesterday said

the blue verse and the profane song,

in whose night there was a nightingale

that was a lark of light in the morning.

 

I was the owner of my garden of dreams,

full of roses and vague swans;

the owner of the turtledoves, the owner

of gondolas and lyres on the lakes;

 

and very eighteenth century and very old

and very modern; bold, cosmopolitan;

with strong Hugo and ambiguous Verlaine,

and a thirst for infinite illusions.

 

I knew pain from my childhood,

my youth… was it youth?

Its roses still leave me the fragrance…

a fragrance of melancholy…

 

My instinct launched itself like a colt without a bridle,

my youth mounted a colt without a bridle;

it was drunk and with a dagger at its belt;

if it did not fall, it was because God is good.

 

In my garden a beautiful statue was seen;

She judged herself to be made of marble and was living flesh;

a young soul lived in her,

sentimental, sensitive, sensitive.

 

And shy, before the world, so

that, locked in silence, she did not come out,

except when in the sweet spring

it was the hour of melody…

 

Hour of sunset and of discreet kiss;

twilight hour and retreat;

hour of madrigal and rapture,

of 'I adore you', of 'ay!' and of sigh.

 

And then it was in the dulzaina a game

of mysterious crystalline ranges,

a renewal of notes of the Greek Pan

and a shelling of Latin music.

 

With such an air and with such lively ardor,

that suddenly the statue grew

on the virile thigh goat's legs

and two satyr horns on the forehead.

 

Like Gongora's Galatea,

I was enchanted by the Varlenian Marquise,

and thus joined divine passion

with a sensual human hyperesthesia;

 

all longing, all ardor, pure sensation

and natural vigor; and without falsehood,

and without comedy and without literature…:

If there is a sincere soul, that is mine.

 

The marble tower tempted my desire;

I wanted to shut myself in,

and I was hungry for space and thirsty for heaven

from the shadows of my own abyss.

 

Like the sponge that salt saturates

in the juice of the sea, was my sweet and tender

heart, filled with bitterness

for the world, the flesh and hell.

 

But, by the grace of God, in my conscience

Good knew how to choose the best part;

and if there was harsh bile in my existence,

Art mellowed all bitterness.

 

I freed my intellect from thinking below,

the water of Castalia bathed my soul,

my heart made a pilgrimage and brought

harmony from the sacred forest.

 

Oh, the sacred forest! Oh, the deep

emanation of the divine heart

from the sacred forest! Oh, the fertile

source whose virtue conquers destiny!

 

Ideal forest that complicates reality,

there the body burns and lives and Psyche flies;

while below the satyr fornicates,

intoxicated with blue Philomela dissolves.

 

Pearl of dream and loving music

in the flowering dome of the green laurel,

subtle Hypsipyle drinks from the rose,

and the mouth of the faun bites the nipple.

 

There the god in heat goes after the female,

and the reed of Pan rises from the mud;

eternal life sows its seeds,

and the harmony of the great All springs forth.

 

The soul that enters there must go naked,

trembling with desire and holy fever,

on a wounding thistle and a sharp thorn:

thus it dreams, thus it vibrates and thus it sings.

 

Life, light and truth, such a triple flame

produces the infinite inner flame.

Pure Art, like Christ, exclaims:

Ego sum lux et veritas et vita!

 

And life is a mystery, the light blinds

and the inaccessible truth astonishes;

the austere perfection never surrenders,

and the ideal secret sleeps in the shadow.

 

That is why to be sincere is to be powerful;

the star shines so naked;

the water speaks of the soul of the fountain

in the crystal voice that flows from it.

 

Such was my attempt, to make of the pure soul

mine, a star, a sonorous fountain,

with the horror of literature

and mad with twilight and dawn.

 

From the blue twilight that gives the pattern

that inspires celestial ecstasy,

mist and minor key - the whole flute!,

and Aurora, daughter of the Sun - the whole lyre!

 

A stone passed by that was launched by a sling;

an arrow passed by that was sharpened by a violent man.

The stone of the sling went to the wave,

and the arrow of hatred went to the wind.

 

Virtue is in being calm and strong;

with the inner fire everything burns;

if it triumphs over resentment and death,

and towards Bethlehem… the caravan passes!

Song of Hope

 

 

Vultures a-wing have sullied the glory of the sky;

The winds bear on their pinions the horror of Death's

cry;

Assassinating one another, men rage and fall and die.

 

Has Antichrist arisen whom John at Patmos saw?

Portents are seen and marvels that fill the world with awe,

And Christ's return seems pressing, come to fulfill the Law.

 

The ancient Earth is pregnant with so profound a smart,

The royal dreamer, musing, silent and sad apart,

Grieves with the heavy anguish that rends the world's great

heart.

 

Slaughterers of ideals with the violence of fate

Have cast man in the darkness of labyrinths intricate

To be the prey and carnage of hounds of war and hate.

 

Lord Christ! for what art waiting to come in all Thy might

And stretch Thy hands of radiance over these wolves of

night,

And spread on high Thy banners and lave the world with

light?

 

Swiftly arise and pour Life's essence lavishly

On souls that crazed with hunger, or sad, or maddened be,

Who tread the paths of blindness forgetting the dawn

and Thee.

 

Come Lord, to make Thy glory, with lightnings on Thy

Brow!

 

With trembling stars around Thee and cataclysmal woe,

And bring Thy gifts of justice and peace and love below!

 

Let the dread horse John visioned devouring stars, pass by;

And angels sound the clarion of Judgment from on high.

My heart shall be an ember and in thy censer lie

With affection,

Ruben