On taking people as they should be

    If we just take people as they are . . . we make them worse;  but, if we treat them not as they are but as they should be, we help them to become what they can become.

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship: Book 8, chapter 4 (1796)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Translated by Eric A. Blackall and Victor Lange
(p. 326 in the 1995 Princeton University Press edition)

• Some memorable lines from "Faust"
• The Goethe National Museum in Weimar
• Goethe's birthplace in Frankfurt
• Rüdiger Safranski's new Goethe biography
• VIDEO: Trailer for "Young Goethe in Love"

1787 portrait of Goethe by Angelika Kauffmann

In the night, unable to sleep . . .

      In the night, unable to sleep on the overcrowded train, it became clear that he was really going for the sake of his childhood, hoping to find something in those old streets: a doorway, a tower, a fountain, anything to induce some joy or sorrow by which he might recognize himself again.

Rainer Maria Rilke, "A Story Told to the Dark" (from Stories of God, 1900), translated by M.D. Herter Norton

The bridge in the photograph is in Prague, where Rilke spent the first 21 years of life. He then went to Munich to study art history and there met Lou Andreas-Salome, who became his lover and, for the rest of his life, his most trusted confidante. Her support, through Rilke's long periods of doubt and depression, enabled him to complete the Duino Elegies. A new film tells the story of their relationship.

• The story of Rilke and Salome comes to the screen
• The Duino Elegies at 100
• "You must change your life": Rilke's encounter Ancient Greece

How do I imagine love?

How do I imagine love? That is quite uncomplicated--very simple and wholesome. I would compare it with things that are least demonic or romantic, like the daily bread that is blessed and stills our hunger, like the stream of air that comes into our homes to refresh us. In short, with that which is most important, most beautiful, and most natural, on which we most depend and about which we do not need to engage in empty rhetoric.

Lou Andreas-Salome, Fenitschka

Translated by Dorothee Einstein Krahn

(University Press of America, 1990), p. 19

Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937) was a novelist and pioneering psychoanalyst to whom Freud sometimes referred patients. She was also a confidante of Nietzsche and Rilke. 

Lou Andreas-Salome: The Audacity to Be Free, a film based on her extraordinary life, is now available on Amazon Prime.

• VIDEO: How to stream the film
• A behind-the-scenes look at the film
• Raleigh Whitinger's translation of Lou Andreas-Salome's short story collection, 'The Human Family'

Andreas-Salomé's novella, 'Fenitschka', is set in St. Petersburg in the 1890s (Painting by Eugene Lushpin)

A great yearning

'Don't you think that a great yearning is like the birds' heading south -- a sign that somewhere life is in bloom?'

Lou Andreas-Salomé

Menschenkinder (1899); translated by Raleigh Whitinger

The Human Family, p. 173 (University of Nebraska Press)

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was a prominent German novelist and a pioneering psychoanalyst to whom Freud sometimes referred patients.

A 2016 film told the story of her extraordinary life, and Raleigh Whitinger and I have just published the first English translation of her 1921 novel, Das Haus under the title Anneliese's House (Boydell and Brewer). 

• VIDEO: How to watch the film
• My review of the film
  
• Anneliese's House from Boydell and Brewer
  
• Lou Andreas-Salomé on love
• 'A Prayer to Life' by Lou Andreas-Salomé

The gods still reign

Don't talk to me

of civilization

and its decline:

the gods still reign.

These lines, translated by Julia Vickers, come from a poem Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937) wrote as a teenager. Salome went on to become a prominent German novelist, critic and pioneering psychoanalyst. A new film by Cordula Kablitz-Post tells the story of her extraordinary life. It was released in the United States in Spring 2018 and is now available on iTunes, Vimeo and Amazon.

• Lou Andreas-Salomé's 'Prayer to Life'
• Trailer for 'Lou Andreas-Salome: The Audacity to Be Free'
• A behind-scenes look at the film

Poetry like bread?

"Poetry like bread? This bread would have to be ground between the teeth and to reawaken hunger before appeasing it. And this bread will have to be acrid with knowledge and bitter with longing--to have the power to trouble people's sleep. For we are sleepers. We are sleepers out of fear of having to look at ourselves and our world."

We're often told that poetry is a staple of life, like bread, and as such should be available to everyone. If so, Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), in her 1959 Frankfurt Lectures, described the kind of poetry she thought modern readers needed. Bachmann is one of the most important European writers of the postwar period; the first full-scale biography of her appeared in 2013.

The links below include Peter Filkins' superb translations of two of Bachmann's poems and her readings of both of them.

• AUDIO: Ingeborg Bachmann's poem, "Stay"
• AUDIO: Bachmann's poem, "Every Day"
• My translation of Bachmann's "Bohemia Lies by the Sea"
  
• VIDEO: A new film based on the Bachmann/Celan letters
• Other favorite quotes

A song the angels sing

It's the Summer Solstice tonight, here in the Northern Hemisphere, and that makes me think of these lines from Goethe in praise of the Sun:

Ihr Anblick gibt den Engeln Starke,
Wenn keiner sie ergrunden mag;
Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.

Your shining gives the angels power,
Yet none can understand your ways;
Incomprehensible Creation
Stuns as it did on the first day.

"Song of the Archangels"
from Faust, Part One, lines 247-50 (1787-1808)
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Translated by Frank Beck

• Goethe's birthplace in Frankfurt
• Goethe House in Weimar
• A new Goethe biography by Rudiger Safranski
• VIDEO: David Constantine and Karen Leeder on translating "Faust"
• VIDEO: Trailer for Philipp Stoelzl's "Young Goethe in Love"

Portrait of Goethe by Angelika Kaufmann, 1787

(Goethe National Museum, Weimar; detail)

A human being in love

"A human being in love, regardless of the exalted state of both his spirit and soul, remains a priest in his robes who has but a dim idea of what it is he's celebrating."

--Lou Andreas-Salomé

from Looking Back, translated by Breon Mitchell (New York: Paragon House, 1991), p. 132.

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was a German novelist and a pioneering psychoanalyst to whom Freud sometimes referred patients. She was also a confidante of Nietzsche and Rilke. Raleigh Whitinger and I have published the first English translation of Andreas-Salomé's sixth and final novel, Das Haus (see the first link below for details).

The photo shows the author with her husband, Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846-1930), a scholar of Persian literature. 

• The first English translation of Das Haus
  
• Other quotes from the author
  
• A film about Andreas-Salomé by Cordula Kablitz-Post
  
• VIDEO: Watch or download the film at Vimeo

Katharina Lorenz is one of four actresses who share the film's title role