Ivan Bunin

I think I would enjoy what's on the linked page below a lot more if I knew Russian. But I'm the kind of guy who won't ignore something that is interesting just because I don't know what's being said.

stuff on Bunin from Russia

My friend Matt Dioguardi...

...lives and teaches in Japan. They have flowers in Japan. Matt likes to take photos of flowers. He attaches a few lines of verse to his flower photos. Most of these lines are old rhyming poems, which make me sort of nervous and irritable. But sometimes, he will attach lines that are swell:


In eastern lands they talk in flowers.
And they tell in a garland their loves and cares.
Each blossom that blooms in their garden bowers
On its leaves a mystic language bears.

~ James Gates Percival

Copyright © Matt Dioguardi, 2013

 

Matt's blog: Shadow of Iris

I'm just an American...

...who's never been anywhere and who doesn't know a damn thing. But you know what? Nature abhors a vacuum:

So nature continually shifts things around, leaks certain substances into the heads of beings of the void. A kind of algorithmic mercy takes place: to the untraveled and the ignorant, nature will bestow the gifts of curiosity and imagination.

Thus, I find myself today involved in reading this 18-page PDF:

Searching for a New Identity: The Acculturation of Russian–born Adolescents in Israel

Kissin and Liszt

Harmonies du soir

Kiefer and Celan

  Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

by artist Anselm Kiefer

This painting's title, translated as "your ashen hair Shulamith," not only refers to a line from Paul Celan's poem "Todesfuge," but also graphically incorporates that line onto the canvas. 

Or as Andréa Lauterwein says in her review of the book Anselm Kiefer / Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory:

Yet those words are not simply self-contained on the canvas, they are not just repeated in another context, nor are they merely mentioned, for they now participate in the life of the canvas: the dark letters are one with the lines of black paint, white paint and charcoal that thickly cross the canvas. Kiefer is showing how the reality of the Shoah manifests itself to him, and is using Celan's disclosure of the Shoah in "Todesfuge" as an exemplary manifestation of the same grim reality, one that has allowed him to make the Shoah manifest in his own way.

Here's another book:

Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, 

Specularity and the Visual Arts

amazon.com

Here's part of that book's text online:

Google Books

Maurice Blanchot

1907 - 2003

From Wikipedia about his thought on language:

Literary language, therefore, is a double negation, both of the thing and the idea. It is in this space that literature becomes possible where words take on a strange and mysterious reality of their own, and where also meaning and reference remain allusive and ambiguous.

Blanchot himself:

And what language is (not what it means, not the form in which it says what it means), what language is in its being, is that softest of voices, that nearly imperceptible retreat, that weakness deep inside and surrounding every thing and every face - what bathes the belated effort of the origin and the dawnlike erosion of death in the same neutral light, at once day and night.  

There's something about what was inside this fellow's head that is interesting to me and that warrants further pondering by me.

Here's a book:

SUNY Press

Here's an article:

Maurice Blanchot : The Infinite Conversation : The Absent Voice

Hungarian writer Miklós Szentkuthy said this:

Two things excite me: the most subjective epic details and the ephemeral trivialities of my most subjective life, in all their own factual, unstylized individuality — and the big facts of the world in their allegorical, Standbild-like grandiosity: death, summer, sea, love, gods, flowers.

1908 - 1988

amazon.com

Some selected passages: PDF.