Пушкинскому Дому

Это — звоны ледохода

Это — древний Сфинкс, глядящий

Наши страстные печали

Что за пламенные дали

Пропуская дней гнетущих

Пушкин! Тайную свободу

Не твоих ли звуков сладость

Вот зачем такой знакомый

Вот зачем, в часы заката

1921 г.

A recording of a newly translated Alexander Blok poem entitled "On Pushkin House" by David Grunwald.  This was Blok's last poem and it had special meaning because Blok delivered it on the date of Pushkin's death in 1837.

Марина Ивановна Цветаева (1892–1941 гг.) – знаменитая русская поэтесса, прозаик, переводчик, которая своим творчеством оставила яркий след в литературе XX века. В ее стихотворениях ярко выражена музыкальность, поскольку в детстве Цветаева обучалась игре на фортепиано.  Это одно из моих любимых стихотворений.

Подробнее: https://obrazovaka.ru/alpha/t/cvetaeva-marina-ivanovna-tsvetaeva-marina-ivanovna

20-е числа октября 1936

Ernst Toller (1 December 1893 – 22 May 1939) was a German author, playwright, left-wing politician and revolutionary, known for his Expressionist plays. He served in 1919 for six days as President of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, after which he became the head of its army. He was imprisoned for five years for his part in the armed resistance by the Bavarian Soviet Republic to the central government in Berlin. While in prison Toller wrote several plays that gained him international renown. They were performed in London and New York as well as in Berlin.

In 1933 Toller was exiled from Germany after the Nazis came to power. He did a lecture tour in 1936–1937 in the United States and Canada, settling in California for a while before going to New York. He joined other exiles there. He committed suicide in May 1939.

Ernst Toller: The Playwright as Revolutionary (translated by David Grunwald)

MUSIC 

Jacqueline du Pre & Daniel Barenboim - Elgar Cello Concerto

Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, his last notable work, is a cornerstone of the solo cello repertoire. Elgar composed it in the aftermath of the First World War, when his music had already gone out of fashion with the concert-going public. In contrast with Elgar's earlier Violin Concerto, which is lyrical and passionate, the Cello Concerto is for the most part contemplative and elegiac.

UNSER WEG

Die Klöster sind verdorrt und haben ihren Sinn ver

loren,

Sirenen der Fabriken überschrillten Vesperklang,

Und der Millionen trotziger Befreiungssang

Verstummt nicht mehr vor klösterlichen Toren.

Wo sind die Mönche, die den Pochenden zur Antwort

geben:

„Erlösung ist Askese weltenferner Stille ...“ —

Ein Hungerschrei, ein diamantner Wille

Wird an die Tore branden: „Gebt uns Leben!“

Wir foltern nicht die Leiber auf gezähnten Schragen,

Wir haben andern Weg zur Welt gefunden,

Uns sind nicht stammelndes Gebet die Stunden,

Das Reich des Friedens wollen wir zur Erde tragen,

Den Unterdrückten aller Länder Freiheit bringen —

Wir müssen um das Sakrament der Erde

ringen!

A special reading of the last poem in Robert Bly's "Silence in the Snowy Fields" entitled Snowfall in the Afternoon.    Read along with the beautiful song Vieille chanson du jeune temps (Hugo) which speaks to the famous haunting song of the girl in Victor Hugo's "Last Day of a Condemned Man".  Please find the previously untranslated song of a human tragedy - a careful mixing of the genius of Bly and Hugo.

The poems of Robert Bly are rooted deep in the earth. Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now--these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an important way the inward and hidden life. This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly aware of the complexities of the moment but equally mindful of the great stream of life--all life--of which mankind is only a part.

A reading from Robert Bly's (1926-2021) first book of poetry Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962).  The poems of Robert Bly are rooted deep in the earth. Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now--these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an important way the inward and hidden life. This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly aware of the complexities of the moment but equally mindful of the great stream of life--all life--of which mankind is only a part.

Bly's "Old Boards" reminds me of the life as a journey described in the "Book of Disquiet" written by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935).  One of the entries reads "I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything."  Bly's unique lamentation is for life and its rejuvenative beauty, but a loss in the bargain.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-bly

Poem Against the Rich

Each day I live, each day the sea of light

Rises, I seem to see

The tear inside the stone

As if my eyes were gazing beneath the earth.

The rich man in his read hat

Cannot hear

The weeping in the pueblos of the lily,

Or the dark tears in the shacks of the corn.

Each day the sea of light rises

I hear the sad rustle of the darkened armies,

Where each man weeps, and the plaintive

Orisons of the stones.

The stones bow as the saddened armies pass.

Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov (Russian: Павел Иванович Чичиков) and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle-class of the time. Gogol himself saw his work as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book characterised it as a "novel in verse".

The character in today's short reading is having dinner with Chichikov, a middle official, who learns that there are dead souls to be bought.   Gogol presents the character Sobakevich, a bear of a man, who had a fiery red complexion.   

“It is well-known that there are many faces in the world over the finishing of which nature did not take much trouble, did not employ any fine tools such as files, gimlets, and so on, but simply hacked them out with round strokes: one chop-a nose appears; another chop-lips appear; eyes are scooped out with a big drill; and she lets it go into the world rough-hewn, saying: "It lives.”  Sobakevich held his head more down than up, he did not turn his neck at all, and because he could not turn it, he rarely looked at the person he was talking to, but instead at the corner of the stove or at the door."  Such detail!

A reading from Robert Bly's first book of poetry Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962).  The poems of Robert Bly are rooted deep in the earth. Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now--these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an important way the inward and hidden life. This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly aware of the complexities of the moment but equally mindful of the great stream of life--all life--of which mankind is only a part.