Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

We no longer believe that language and reality ‘match up’ so congruently – indeed, we probably think that words give birth to things as much as things give birth to words.

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Kafka and Rilke

Kafka remarking (in a letter) on Rilke's words re Kafka's work: Incidentally, back in Prague I remembered Rilke's words. After some extremely kind remarks about "The Stoker," he went on to say that neither Metamorphosis nor "In the Penal Colony" had achieved the same effect. This observation may not be easy to understand, but it is discerning. The footnote on this passage reads (in part): Rilke and Kafka probably never met personally. Kafka may have heard of Rilke's opinion about his works through Eugen Mondt. Since "In the Penal Colony" was not printed at the time, Rilke, who then lived in Munich, must have seen the manuscript which had arrived in Munich on September 30 and discussed it with Eugen Mondt....   Rilke followed Kafka's work with great interest; in a letter to Kurt Wolff of February 17, 1922, he says, "Please put me down especially for anything that appears by Franz Kafka. I am, I might assure you, not his ...
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The Parlograph

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Felice worked for the Carl Lindstrom Company. From Kafka's Letters to Felice : Here, by the way, is a rather nice idea: a Parlograph goes to the telephone in Berlin, while a gramophone does likewise in Prague, and these two carry on a little conversation with each other. *** Carl Lindström A.G. was a global record company founded in 1893 and based in Berlin , Germany . Founded by Carl Lindström (1869–1932), a Swedish inventor living in Berlin , it originally produced phonographs or gramophones with the brand names "Parlograph" and "Parlophon" and eventually began producing records as well. It became the holding company for Odeon Records , Parlophone Records (originally "Parlophon"), Beka Records and Okeh Records . Lindström sold the company to Max Straus (Odeon co-founder), but Lindström remained with the company as an engineer and inventor. World War I caused the company to cut back its holdings closing the United Kingdom branch of O...
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Rilke's "Requiem for a Friend"

Surprised I hadn't put this up long ago. Guess it's because there are so few translations on the Net and I didn't want to copy it out? Not sure. Anyway, I was thinking of this this morning and had to post it. It was written for Rilke's friend, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (I have been to her grave and her husband's museum). This translation is by A.S. Kline (2001); I have a copy of Mitchell's Rilke on my shelf (perhaps more "poetic," but not always closer to "authorial intent").         Requiem for a Friend I have dead ones, and I have let them go, and was astonished to see them so peaceful, so quickly at home in being dead, so just, so other than their reputation. Only you, you turn back: you brush against me, and go by, you try to knock against something, so that it resounds and betrays you. O don’t take from me what I am slowly learning. I’m sure you err when you deign to be homesick at all for any Th...
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TÜBINGEN, JANUARY by Paul Celan

T Ü BINGEN, JANUARY Eyes talked in- to blindness. Their  -- "a riddle, what is pure- ly arisen" --, their memory of floating H ö lderlintowers, gull- enswirled. Visits of drowned joiners to these plunging words: Came, if there came a man, came a man to the world, today, with the patriarchs' light-beard: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble, ever- ever- moremore. ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")* * Pallaksch A word that H ö lderlin, spending his last years in the home of a T ü bingen carpenter, was given to uttering in his dementia; it could signify Yes or No. [Poem Translated by John Felstiner; the explanation of Pallaksch is also from his "Notes" in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan ]  
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