Nordkirchen

Adalbert Stifter

“Die großen Taten der Menschen sind nicht die, welche lärmen. Das Große geschieht so schlicht wie das Rieseln des Wassers, das Fließen der Luft, das Wachsen des Getreides”.

De aquí al verano, salvo el tercer volumen de Stieg Larsson, no se va a editar apenas nada, así que es un buen momento –como cualquier otro, vaya– para recomendar, de cara a la Feria del Libro, los diez libros que más me han gustado de lo que llevamos de año. Obviamente, es una elección del todo personal, maniática, accidental y subjetiva, así que allá usted.

1.    Dora Bruder, de Patrick Modiano (Seix Barral)
2.    Anatomía de un instante, de Javier Cercas (Mondadori)
3.    Juan Belmonte matador de toros, de Manuel Chaves Nogales (Libros del Asteroide)
4.    Indignación, de Philip Roth (Mondadori)
5.    Los vivos y los muertos, de Edmundo Paz Soldán (Alfaguara)
6.    La condesa sangrienta, de Alejandra Pizarnik (Libros del Zorro Rojo)
7.    Los domingos de Jean Dézert, de Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (Impedimenta)
8.    Segundo matrimonio, de Philip Lopate (Libros del Asteroide)
9.    Operación Masacre, de Rodolfo Walsh (Ediciones de la Flor)
10.  Un lugar en la cumbre, de Norman Mailer (451 Editores)

Mención aparte para la editorial Impedimenta. Uno no quiere abusar, pero metería todos los libros que editan. En concreto, de 2009, y además del que ha entrado en la lista personal, maniática, accidental y subjetiva:

1.    Francia combatiente, de Edith Warton
2.    Sanshiro, de Natsume Soseki
3.    El rival de Prometeo, de varios autores
4.    El solterón, de Adalbert Stifter

Ich brauche Ruhe und Heiterkeit der Umgebung

und vor allem Liebe, wenn ich arbeite.

Adalbert Stifter

Foto: de.wikisource.org

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Adalbert Stifter

23. Oktober 1805 in Oberplan, Böhmen, als Albert Stifter geboren

28. Jänner 1868 in Linz, Oberösterreich gestorben

war ein österreichischer Schriftsteller, Maler, Pädagoge. Er zählt zu den bedeutendsten Schriftstellern des Biedermeier.

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Zum Zitat

WIE WAHR. Ich brauche diese 3 auch!

As I read Aldalbert Stifter’s 1845 Christmas story Rock Crystal, which was published in 1999 as a petite volume by London’s Pushkin Press, it was easy to see why W.G. Sebald admired this nineteenth-century writer so much. Rock Crystal contains the bits and pieces required to construct a morality piece, but in the end Nature shoves everything aside with all of the rudeness of an avalanche.

South of the village you see a snowy mountain with dazzling horn-shaped peaks.

A shoemaker from one village successfully woos the daughter of a wealthy dyer from a village on the other side of the mountain. But more than a mountain separates the two villages. The dyer’s daughter has broken tradition by crossing over to the other village, and her father responds by withholding most of the dowry. Within a few years, the shoemaker and his wife have two young children who regularly trek across the mountain to spend a few hours with their grandparents before returning home.

Mothers may love their children and tenderly long for them when they are absent, but a grandmother’s love for her grandchildren amounts almost to a morbid craving.

One year on the day before Christmas, after a dry and warm autumn, the two children cross over the mountain for a holiday meal with the grandparents. They are dutifully warned about the dangers of winter storms by their father before the depart and they receive the same ominous warning from the grandparents as they set out on the return trip. Naturally, halfway home, a furious snowstorm suddenly begins.

But on every side there was nothing but a blinding whiteness, white everywhere that none the less drew its ever narrow circle about them, paling beyond into fog that came down in waves, devouring and shrouding everything till there was nothing but the voracious snow.

The two children are soon hopelessly lost in an environment that becomes less and less real and more and more dangerous.

As far as the eye could reach there was only ice. Pointed masses and irregular clumps thrusting up from the fearsome snow-encrusted ice. Instead of a barricade that could be surmounted, with snow beyond, as they had expected, yet other walls of ice rose from the buttress, cracked and fissured, with innumerable meandering blue veins, and beyond these walls, others like them; and beyond, others, until the falling snow blurred the distance in its veil of gray.

At night they take shelter beneath to massive boulders and struggle to stay awake and alive. The blinding storm abates and reveals its opposite – the infinite universe of the sky.

The arch of heaven was an even blue, so dark it was almost black, spangled with stars blazing in countless array, and through their midst a broad luminous band was woven, pale as milk…

The following day the two children are found, rescue parties from both villages having set out in a symbolic breaking with the past. Stifter makes token mention of the improved relations between the villages, but the last word, as it were, goes to the mountain.

The children, however, can never forget the mountain, and earnestly fix their gaze upon it when in the garden, when as in times past the sun is out bright and warm, the lime tree diffuses its fragrance, the bees are humming, and the mountain looks down upon them as serene and blue as the sky above.

The sublime beauty and terror of snow, ice, alpine heights, and northern extremes is a thread that runs through Sebald’s book-length poem After Nature. In the first section, devoted to the sixteenth-century German painter Matthias Grünewald, we see “the ice age, the glaringly white / towering of the summits…” in the background of Grünewald’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. At the end of this section, Sebald imagines Grünewald staring at the landscape, mourning the death of his teen-aged son.

The forest recedes, truly,
so far that one cannot tell
where it once lay, and the ice-house
opens, and rime, on to the field, traces
a colourless image of the Earth.
So, when the optic nerve
tears, in the still space of the air
all turns as white as
the snow on the Alps.

In the second section of After Nature, Sebald writes of the voyage of exploration of Vitus Bering, who pursued the “vast tracts of whiteness” of the Arctic Ocean between Siberia and Alaska.

All was a grayness, without direction,
with no above or below, nature
in a process of dissolution, in a state
of pure dementia.

And in the final, autobiographical section, Sebald recounts how, at the hour he was born, a freak mountain storm killed four canopy bearers who were helping with the blessing of the fields on Ascension Day.

…Many
terrible midnights
of doubt have I passed
since that time, but now peace
returns to the dust and I read
of the eighteenth century how a
verdant land is submerged
in the blue shadows of the Jurassus
and in the end only the age-old
ice on the Alps retains a faint
afterglow…

For more reading along these lines, try Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), possibly the ultimate novel of the Alps and the Arctic, and Peter Davidson’s wide-ranging study The Idea of North (London: Reaktion Books, 2005). The cover illustration for Rock Crystal, by the way, is from a painting by the British artist Jason Martin.

Zwei Auszüge aus einem Beitrag von Michael Braun zum Basler Lyrikfestival, NZZ 22.9.:

Wie es um die “Wirkmacht der Dichtung” auf Lyrikfestivals bestellt ist, lässt sich am bündigsten mit einer Gedichtzeile des Berliner Sprachakrobaten Ulf Stolterfoht zusammenfassen: “Man schleppt sich von Wendung zu Wendung”. Denn das ist der desaströse Normalfall eines Lyrikfestivals: Zu sehr hat sich eine atemlose Event-Kultur solcher Veranstaltungen bemächtigt, als dass es noch möglich wäre, jenseits der Statuskämpfe und Platzhirschsyndrome der einzelnen Dichter auch den Suchbewegungen ihrer Gedichte zu folgen. Der Basler Literatur-Impresario Matthyas Jenny hat jetzt bewiesen, dass es auch anders geht. Jenny hält an der altmodischen Vorstellung fest, die divergierenden Stimmen, Tonlagen und Schreibansätze der Gegenwartspoesie auf ganz unspektakuläre Weise miteinander ins Gespräch zu bringen. Sein jüngster Versuch mit fünfzehn Autoren ermöglichte eine aufschlussreiche Konfrontation der lyrischen Extreme. …

Auch die für tot erklärte Tradition der Sprachmagie ist noch da – wie Ingrid Fichtners Versuch zeigte, an Adalbert Stifter anzuknüpfen und das “grosse Alphabet der Natur” (Carl von Linné) emphatisch durchzubuchstabieren. Ein Schreibansatz, der kaum vereinbar schien mit den Dekonstruktionsabsichten von Dichtern wie Ulf Stolterfoht und Urs Allemann. Beides Autoren, die ironisch oder wortwütig ihr Unbehagen an jenem Aggregatzustand der Sprache ausagieren, den Roland Barthes einmal “die Knechtschaft der Zeichen” genannt hat.

Außerdem geht der Text auf Werner Lutz und Peter Gisi, Ursula Krechel, Lutz Seiler und Markus Stegmann ein.