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

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