January 2011
4 posts
8 tags
Delacroix cases a Jewish wedding in Morocco, part...
My translation from the Journal of Eugène Delacroix, evening of February 21st, 1832, original here.  Part 1 here.  Delacroix writes from Tangier, Morocco: “Going out to the Jewish wedding, the merchants in their stalls.  Lamps mounted on the wall, more often suspended in front of it by a cord, pots on a board, some palancos.  They take butter with their hands and put it on a leaf. ...
Jan 29th
5 tags
Richter on Prokofiev
from Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, ed. Bruno Monsaingeon: “Sergei Prokofiev was an extremely interesting person, but … dangerous.  He was capable of hurling you against a wall.  One day a pupil was playing him his Third Concerto, accompanied by his teacher at a second piano, when the composer suddenly got up and grabbed the teacher by the neck, shouting:...
Jan 16th
21 tags
In Agamemnon's Tent
Achilles’ face Is like a chalkpit fringed with roaring wheat. His brain says: “Kill him. Let the Greeks sail home.” His thigh steels flex. And then, Much like a match-flame struck in full sunlight We lose him in the prussic glare Teenage Athena, called the Daughter Prince—who burst Howling and huge out of God’s head—sheds From her hard, wide-apart eyes,...
Jan 15th
8 notes
17 tags
Balearic Passages
A translation by Simon Friedrich at www.ernst-juenger.org, from Ernst Jünger’s Das Abenteuerliche Herz: “… In the afternoon I located a solitary island of rock whose steep spine covered with honey-coloured wood spurge rose up out of the fields. I heard sounds everywhere in the scorched bushes – not the evenly drawn-out winding of snakes but rather the short rummaging...
Jan 12th
1 note