Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse. - Joseph Brodsky
Poetry
Reading: Words from Confinement by Cesare Pavese
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is another soul that belongs in our cosy anthology. Pavese grew up in Nietzsche's Turin, graduated on a thesis about poet Walt Whitman and was placed under house arrest in Brancaleone Calabro, in the south of Italy after the Mussolini regime discovered he had received letters from a jailed anti-fascist. Today's poem ...
Reading: The drowned woman by Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes (1930-1998). British giant of poetry. Married twice with ladies who committed suicide, then a third time to live a quiet rural life until his death from cancer. Very prolific. Today I want to read this poem about a drowned woman, published 1957, six years before Plath's suicide at age thirty, which charges it ...
Reading: To the barbarian by Elke Lasker-Schüler
Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945) lived a bohemian life and is famous for her love poetry. So let's read a love poem by her hand today. I found some nice English translations by Johannes Beilharz: To the barbarian I cover your face With my body and soul at night. I plant cedars and almond trees On the ...
Reading: The Vacation by Wendell Berry
Today I read a poem whose author is still alive, and I'm a fan. Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is a very versatile and prolific author of essays, novels, poetry - as well as a small farmer in his birthplace in Kentucky. Here is a fresh and simple poem about a man on vacation: The Vacation ...
Reading: The Panther by Rilke
Rilke (1876-1925), of course. His Duino Elegies have been called the 'waste land' of German poetry. Of the poem the Panther that he wrote in 1902 inspired by a panther behind bars in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, there exists several translations. I like this one by Stephen Mitchell best: The Panther His vision, from ...
Reading: A list of some observation by Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), Russian-American genius and lover of poetry, should be part of our anthology. Sentenced to hard labor in northern Russia in 1964 and exiled to the US in 1972, he had suffered from what mother Russia had become in the twentieth century. He wrote this seemingly simple list of observations: A list of ...
Reading: A Dream by Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was a hero of Russian literature, and not just for the famous Doctor Zhivago. He translated Goethe, Schiller and Shakespear and published influential books of poetry, including his breakthrough 'My sister, Life'. The English Wikipedia page on Pasternak is has lots of details that I am not going to mention here. I read ...
Reading: Beautiful Youth by Gottfried Benn
German poet Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) supported Hitler when he came to power, but changed his mind after the 'night of the long knives'. Still, he was naive enough to join the Wehrmacht, where some officers respected his disaproval of the regime. I don't care too much about the details, but it wasn't pretty. The nazis, ...