Category: Writing

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Giuseppe Ungaretti – Au repos — BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD

Le soleil s’essaime en diamants
de gouttes d’eau
sur l’herbe souple

Je reste docile
à l’inclination de l’univers serein

Les montagnes se dilatent
en gorgées d’ombre lilas
et vaguent avec le ciel

Là-haut à la voûte légère
l’enchantement s’est brisé

Et je tombe en moi

Et je m’enténèbre dans mon coin

Versa, 27 avril 1916

*** Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) – Sentimento del tempo (1933) – Vie d’un homme. Poésie, 1914-1970 (Poésie/Gallimard, 1981) – Traduit de l’italien par Jean Lescure.

Giuseppe Ungaretti – Au repos — BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD

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Barthes: Ideas Circulate — Time’s Flow Stemmed

“There’s never really any originality. We live in a sort of large-scale exchange, a sort of grand intertext. Ideas circulate and languages too. In the end, the only thing we can do—and claim it as our own—is to combine them. That’s more or less how I see things. But you don’t create an idea—it’s there, it’s like a sort of major transaction in a large-scale economy. Ideas circulate and, at a certain point, you stop them, arrange them and edit them, a little bit the way they do in films, and that produces a work.”

Roland Barthes, ‘Simply a Particular Contemporary’, (trans. Chris Turner)

Barthes: Ideas Circulate — Time’s Flow Stemmed

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Here Stood Mayakovsky — Travel Between The Pages

The Brooklyn Bridge literally loomed large in my Brooklyn family’s history for a century, so I was intrigued when I stumbled upon this impressive limited edition volume. The accordion-fold book Brooklyn Bridge with a poem by the 20th century Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky  and original woodcuts by Canadian printer and book designer Glenn Goluska . The award-winning […]

Here Stood Mayakovsky — Travel Between The Pages
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John Burroughs — The Vale of Soul-Making

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is, “Look under foot.” You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the centre of the world.

— John Burroughs, Studies in Nature and Literature (Fredonia Books [NL] July 27, 2002) 

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Roland Barthes — The Vale of Soul-Making

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.

— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. (Hill and Wang; Second Printing edition June 1, 1979) Originally published 1977.

Roland Barthes — The Vale of Soul-Making
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Fernando Pessoa – Parfois, en certains jours de lumière… — BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD

Parfois, en certains jours de lumière parfaite et exacte,où les choses ont toute la réalité dont elles portent le pouvoir,je me demande à moi-même tout doucementpourquoi j’ai moi aussi la faiblesse d’attribueraux choses de la beauté. De la beauté, une fleur par hasard en aurait-elle ?Un fruit, aurait-il par hasard de la beauté ?Non : […]

Fernando Pessoa – Parfois, en certains jours de lumière… — BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD