I am in deep agreement with your words about beauty & Rilke, Alison. And
would add that in the (Chaucerian?) poem you allude to, "Mercilesse
beautee", the potential terror of beauty is recognized in the words "I may
the beautee of hem nat sustayne", which last word comes very close to
Rilke's "ertragen" ~ your translation of "noch grade ertragen" bothers me,
though, as Rilke's tone here is determinedly "diesseitig", almost banal: "we
just about manage to bear". I also do not like the 2 qualifiers in line1 ,
where R has "but the beginning of terror, which we just about manage to
bear". (Yes, Rilke's verse does still have an old style metrical pulse most
of the time.) Celan's work is written from the other side of unbearable
terror. Harriet is perhaps saying that on the other side you can't "see" the
beauty any more and are too paralysed by terror to more than sense & grope
for what is real.
Myself, I remain irresolutely on this side, clinging to what Brecht called
the culinary, though it's a mixture of traditional cooking (ah those
yellowing recipes) & Nouvelle Cuisine with a prise of the Conceptional. I
feel the search for beauty in everything Harriet writes, a beauty she must
disavow in order to write. No doubt Sophokles was looking for the truth &
found it partially in the recognition of the compulsive nature of
death-seeking (for oneself or others), bound up as it is with notions of
justice ~ I'm thinking of _Antigone_ in particular, a *play I can hardly
bear to *read, beautiful as it is (even more so in Greek, of course, which
is all Greek to me.)
_Les Liaisons dangereuses_ transformed to Müller's _Quartett_ one beautiful
vision of ugliness to another, which, if I recall rightly, takes place in a
fallout bunker after the nuclear catastrophe, on the other side of terror, a
sort of nuclear age _Huis Clos_ . Müller, it is worth recalling, did some
amazing overwrite(s) of Greek tragedy, like _Alkestis_, a short prose piece
from that other side the Greek play mocks & terrifies us by withholding,
where it is the beauty of banality that is so difficult to bear. (This is my
memory of the piece, not having looked at anything by Müller for a long
time.) I just can't see though, Harriet, why the tragedy of a play like
_King Lear_ should not apply to our times; I remember a powerful production
by Strehler, a demonstration of the dehumanisation that Günther Anders
warns us of in _The Supersession of the Human_ (as I would translate _Die
Antiquiertheit des Menschen_. (It was in Italian, a guest performance in
Frankfurt. A little anecdote: next to me a few minutes before the curtain
went up sat a man in his 30s who turned to me & said "What's it about then?"
He was quite serious & obviously knew no Italian. Ubi sunt die
Bildungsbürger of yesteryear?) But enough already, quoth the loquacious
pilgrim.
Martin
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