/lit/ - Literature

>On a typical evening at Tribschen Wagner and his wife ask, when the children are asleep, what book they should read together. Plato? Not yet bound. Schiller? Read him recently. Calderon? Shakespeare? Homer? 'We decide,' Cosima writes, 'on the last.' (I'm pleased at that, for Homer is far and away my favourite reading.) 'Most wonderful impression,' Cosima writes, 'a sublimely intimate evening, indelible images stamped on my mind. Untroubled sleep.'
>In the next day's entry she writes, 'The evening [is] crowned with four cantos from the Odyssey (Calypso, Nausicaa, Leucothea). Only distraction during the reading is watching R[ichard]'s fine, radiant counternance and delighting in the sound of his voice.' And on successive evenings she writes, about subsequent books of the Odyssey, 'Great delight ... The splendid happenings seem like a dream picture to me ... [Richard's] voice and his manner encompass the immortal work like music.
>One day, over lunch, Wagner rates Plato's Symposium above all other literary works: 'In Shakespeare we see Nature as it is, here we have the artistic awareness of the benefactor added; what would the world know about redeeming beauty without Plato?'
>One night they decide that there are seven great books. 'Over supper we discussed our indispensables and classified them thus: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato's Symposium, Cervantes Don Quixote, the whole of Shakespeare, and Goethe's Faust.' (Dante likely being forgotten rather than ignored)
>The theatre at Bayreuth is opened, and they move into Wahnfried, the house Wagner designed there for himself. Properly married at last, they now have a library of over two thousand books to choose from for their evening reading. They make their way through several books of Thucydides together. Wagner wants to contrast German politics with those of classical Greece. 'Ah, they were too intelligent, those fellows,' he says of the Athenians. 'They could not last.' One day Cosima finds him reading Sophocles Oedipus and checking the translation against the original Greek. 'It is a torrent of beauty,' he says, 'now vanished forever: we are barbarians.'
>A son is born, and they draw up plans for his future reading. Philosophy: Schopenhauer. Religion: Eckhart, Tauler. Art: R. Wagner. And then, much the same great-books program as before, climaxing in the big three - Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles.

>>22487326
From Shall We Hope?:

>I believe I may say without presumption that the thought worked out in that essay on "German Art and German Policy" was no idle caprice of a self-deluding fancy: it took shape within me from an ever plainer recognition of the powers and qualities peculiar to the German spirit, as witnessed by a lengthy roll of German masters all striving—in my way of feeling—for that spirit's highest manifestation in an Artwork national to the human race. The importance of such an Artwork for the very highest culture of this and all other nations, once it were tended as a living, ever new possession of our people, must strike the mind of him who has ceased to expect aught beneficial from the working of our modern State and Church machinery. If with Schiller we call them both "barbaric" by singular good fortune it is another great German who has rendered us the meaning of this word, and that from Holy Writ itself. Luther had to translate the eleventh verse of the fourteenth chapter of the first epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. Here the Greek word "barbaros" is applied to him whose tongue we do not understand; the Latin translator—for whom the word had already lost its Greek significance and become a mere synonym for uncivilised and lawless foreign races—sets down a half unmeaning "barbarus", no longer to the point. All subsequent translators, in every language, have followed the Latin example; especially weak and formal seems the French translation of the text, "Si donc je n'entends pas ce que signifient les paroles, je serai barbare pour celui a qui je parle; et celui qui me parle sera barbare pour moi"—from which one might deduce a maxim that governs the French to this day, and not to their advantage, in their judgment of other nations. Even in this connection, on the contrary, Luther's rendering of "barbaros" by "undeutsch" gives a milder, unaggressive aspect to our attitude towards the foreign. To the dismay of all philologists he translates the verse as follows: "If I know not the meaning (Deutung) of the voice, I shall be undeutsch to him that speaketh, and he that speaketh will be undeutsch to me."—

CONT

>>22483242
From Wagner's Shall We Hope?:

>I believe I may say without presumption that the thought worked out in that essay on "German Art and German Policy" was no idle caprice of a self-deluding fancy: it took shape within me from an ever plainer recognition of the powers and qualities peculiar to the German spirit, as witnessed by a lengthy roll of German masters all striving—in my way of feeling—for that spirit's highest manifestation in an Artwork national to the human race. The importance of such an Artwork for the very highest culture of this and all other nations, once it were tended as a living, ever new possession of our people, must strike the mind of him who has ceased to expect aught beneficial from the working of our modern State and Church machinery. If with Schiller we call them both "barbaric" by singular good fortune it is another great German who has rendered us the meaning of this word, and that from Holy Writ itself. Luther had to translate the eleventh verse of the fourteenth chapter of the first epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. Here the Greek word "barbaros" is applied to him whose tongue we do not understand; the Latin translator—for whom the word had already lost its Greek significance and become a mere synonym for uncivilised and lawless foreign races—sets down a half unmeaning "barbarus", no longer to the point. All subsequent translators, in every language, have followed the Latin example; especially weak and formal seems the French translation of the text, "Si donc je n'entends pas ce que signifient les paroles, je serai barbare pour celui a qui je parle; et celui qui me parle sera barbare pour moi"—from which one might deduce a maxim that governs the French to this day, and not to their advantage, in their judgment of other nations. Even in this connection, on the contrary, Luther's rendering of "barbaros" by "undeutsch" gives a milder, unaggressive aspect to our attitude towards the foreign. To the dismay of all philologists he translates the verse as follows: "If I know not the meaning (Deutung) of the voice, I shall be undeutsch to him that speaketh, and he that speaketh will be undeutsch to me."—

CONT

>The increasing and often excessive ill-humour of poor Hans [von Bulow] had drawn many an involuntary sigh from me. He seemed to be in perpetual torment. On the other hand, Cosima appeared to have lost the shyness she had evinced towards me when I visited Reichenhall in the previous year, and a very friendly manner had taken its place. While I was singing 'Wotan's Abschied' to my friends I noticed the same expression on Cosima's face as I had seen on it, to my astonishment, in Zurich on a similar occasion, only the ecstasy of it was transfigured into something higher. Everything connected with this was shrouded in silence and mystery, but the belief that she belonged to me grew to such certainty in my mind, that when I was under the influence of more than ordinary excitement my conduct betrayed the most reckless gaiety. As I was accompanying Cosima to the hotel across a public square, I suddenly suggested she should sit in an empty wheelbarrow which stood in the street, so that I might wheel her to the hotel. She assented in an instant. My astonishment was so great that I felt all my courage desert me, and was unable to carry out my mad project.