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

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