讀了 Radio Benjamin by Walter Benjamin數篇，必須注解許多德國文化、史地： 譬如說 Chapter 10 Theodore Hosemann 可先參考 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Hosemann --- chapter 26 "The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay"很有趣的鐵路科技發展史。 現在Wikipedia 有很清楚的說明：
The Tay Bridge carries the main-line railway across the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between the city of Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in Fife. Its span is 2.75 ...
【莫斯科日記+柏林紀事】潘小松譯，北京：商務，2012 (Moscow Diary,Harvard University Press, 【莫斯科日記】；One Way Street and Other Writings.I【柏林紀事BERLINER CHRONIK】in Reflections.)
英譯本Radio Benjamin by Walter Benjamin的導言，將它和藝術史名家貢布里希的寫給年輕人看的世界簡明史【寫給大家看的簡明世界史】，因為兩德文作品"成書"約同一時期 (30年代)，都是給年輕人的。不過，味道應該是差別很大的。
Review
“Everything which fell under the scrutiny of his words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive.” —Theodor Adorno
“A complex and brilliant writer.” —J.M. Coetzee
“Walter Benjamin was one of the unclassifiable ones ... whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre.” —Hannah Arendt
“Benjamin buckled himself to the task of revolutionary transformation … his life and work speak challengingly to us all.” —Terry Eagleton
“There has been no more original, no more serious critic and reader in our time.” —George Steiner
About the Author
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations; The Arcades Project; and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Lecia Rosenthal is the author of Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation. She has taught at Columbia and Tufts.
“The German critic was not only a theorist of the media – he was a gifted broadcaster as well.” – Financial Times
Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin’s thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated “Enlightenment for Children” youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity.
Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century’s most respected thinkers.
Radio Benjamin Edited by Lecia Rosentha, book review: A new voice graces the airwaves
Walter Benjamin's work for radio finds the German thinker in beguiling form
Walter Benjamin is a writer whose star has only brightened since his death on the French-Spanish border in 1940, in despairing flight from the Nazis. While most of that brightening has taken place inside academia, it is delightful to learn that, as well as his intense theoretical writings on literature and society, Benjamin also wrote for the radio – and often for children.
The surviving texts of his German radio broadcasts have been side-lined over the years, rather than forgotten, and as editor Lecia Rosenthal admits in her introduction to these translations (by Jonathan Lutes, Lisa Harries Schumann and Diana Reese), that's how Benjamin would have wanted it. His radio work was largely done for money, although he was also interested in the medium itself, which was still in its infancy when these broadcasts were aired, between 1927 and 1933.
The pieces included here range from talks and readings to dialogues and radio plays, and two oddities: a "novella", the rather impenetrable "Sketched in Mobile Dust", and what Benjamin called a "listening model"– a sort of didactic public information broadcast.
This "listening model" goes by the distinctly un-Benjamin-ish title "A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!" and is essentially an acted-out "how-to guide" for employees wanting to know how to deal with their boss – which, in a bizarre coincidence, is also the subject of Georges Perec's The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise. It seems they really were on our side, those maverick European 20th-century thinkers!
In truth, however, students of Benjamin are likely to find less of interest in the pieces directed at adults than in some of those written for children, which make up the bulk of the book.
These transcripts, running to six or seven pages each, cover subjects such as real and fictional figures like Kaspar Hauser and Faustus, historical events such as the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the destruction of Pompeii, and, most pertinently, the life and history of Berlin, in pieces such as "Berlin Dialect", "Berlin Toy Tour" and "The Rental Barracks".
Although the tone is obviously different, these pieces can certainly be read alongside Benjamin's autobiographical writings on the city of his childhood, and might even be considered as sorts of primers for Benjamin's work on his mammoth Arcades Project: digging at the political and economic roots of what we think of as the purely cultural artefacts of the urban environment.
Through all of this runs a liberal humanist voice that is quite beguiling. The desire to incorporate even the harshest workings of the world into an optimistic and progressive narrative is at one with that of Ernst Gombrich's wonderful children's book A Little History of the World, which was written, in fact, within two years of Benjamin's last broadcast before the worsening political climate meant that as a left-wing Jew he could find no more air time.
We are still powerless before earthquakes, yet "technology will find a way out, albeit an indirect one: through prediction". A fire in a Chinese theatre in 1845 killed 2,000, but gives Benjamin opportunity for digressions into Chinese drama and national character.
The Firth of Tay railway disaster is carefully placed by Benjamin "within the history of technology". This collection shows a lighter – though entirely characteristic – side to this most influential of 20th-century thinkers.
Reviews
“Radio Benjamin could hardly be bettered... There really is no parallel for what Benjamin did in these talks. Imagine a particularly engaging episode of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time narrated by Alan Bennett – if Bennett were more profoundly steeped in Marx and politically engaged by the revolutionary potential of the medium of radio – and you have something of their allure.”
“Like the best of children’s writers, he never condescends to his audience, and he communicates his encyclopaedic passion for the teeming immensity of the modern metropolis in vivid, engaging prose...He takes the standard villains of the children’s tale – the witch, the Gypsy, the robber – and shows that they were men and women who were often the victims of cruel prejudice.”
“Walter Benjamin, one of the first theorists to ponder the social impact of mass media [...] was equally entranced by the way thin air mysteriously transmits radio waves. In 1927, five years before he exiled himself from Germany in advance of the Nazi putsch, Benjamin began a series of experimental broadcasts on this new medium.”
“[An] ebullient compendium...In both their tone and mesmerizing array of subject matter, the broadcasts avoid the treacly condescension of contemporary children’s programming.”
The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin is best known as the author of seminal texts such as "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and for his influence on Theodor Adorno and the "Frankfurt School" of philosophy. But behind the much-mythologised figure of Benjamin the philosopher, there lies the little-known historical reality of Benjamin the broadcaster...
When the Gestapo stormed Walter Benjamin's last apartment in 1940, they stumbled upon a cache of papers which the fleeing philosopher had abandoned in his hurry to escape Paris. Amongst these papers were the scripts for an extraordinary series of radio broadcasts for children covering everything from toy collecting to the politics of tenement housing, from the psychology of witch hunts to human responses to natural catastrophes. Designed to encourage young listeners to think critically, to question sources and to challenge clichés, Benjamin's broadcasts stand in stark contrast to the fascist propaganda which would come to take their place.
Benjamin committed suicide in 1940, when his flight out of Europe was blocked at the Spanish border. He died believing that most - if not all - of his writings were lost.
Here Radio4 listeners have an exclusive chance to discover them in this Archive on Four documentary presented by Michael Rosen, and with Henry Goodman as the voice of Walter Benjamin. It's the first ever English recreation of his pre-war broadcasts to children.
Producer: Kate Schneider A Made in Manchester Production for BBC Radio 4.
From 1927 to early 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote and delivered some eighty to ninety broadcasts over the new medium of German radio, working between Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt. These broadcasts, many of them produced under the auspices of programming for children, cover a fascinating array of topics: typologies and archaeologies of a rapidly changing Berlin; scenes from the shifting terrain of childhood and its construction; exemplary cases of trickery, swindle, and fraud that play on the uncertain lines between truth and falsehood; catastrophic events such as the eruption of Vesuvius and the flooding of the Mississippi River, and much more. Now the transcripts of many of these broadcasts are available for the first time in English—Lecia Rosenthal has gathered them in a new book,Radio Benjamin. Below is one of his broadcasts for children, including thirty brainteasers.(Want the answers? They’re here.)
Perhaps you know a long poem that begins like this:
Dark it is, the moon shines bright, a car creeps by at the speed of light and slowly rounds the round corner. People standing sit inside, immersed they are in silent chatter, while a shot-dead hare skates by on a sandbank there.
Everyone can see that this poem doesn’t add up. In the story you’ll hear today, quite a few things don’t add up either, but I doubt that everyone will notice. Or rather, each of you will find a few mistakes—and when you find one, you can make a dash on a piece of paper with your pencil. And here’s a hint: if you mark all the mistakes in the story, you’ll have a total of fifteen dashes. But if you find only five or six, that’s perfectly alright as well.
But that’s only one facet of the story you’ll hear today. Besides these fifteen mistakes, it also contains fifteen questions. And while the mistakes creep up on you, quiet as a mouse, so no one notices them, the questions, on the other hand, will be announced with a loud gong. Each correct answer to a question gives you two points, because many of the questions are more difficult to answer than the mistakes are to find. So, with a total of fifteen questions, if you know the answers to all of them, you’ll have thirty dashes. Added to the fifteen dashes for mistakes, that makes a total of forty-five possible dashes. None of you will get all forty-five, but that’s not necessary. Even ten points would be a respectable score.
You can mark your points yourselves. During the next Youth Hour, the radio will announce the mistakes along with the answers to the questions, so you can see whether your thoughts were on target, for above all, this story requires thinking. There are no questions and no mistakes that can’t be managed with a little reflection.
One last bit of advice: don’t focus on just the questions. To the contrary, keep a lookout for the mistakes above all; the questions will all be repeated at the end of the story. It goes without saying that the questions don’t contain any mistakes; there, everything is as it should be. Now pay attention. Here’s Heinz with his story.
*
What a day! It all started early this morning—I had hardly slept a wink, because I couldn’t stop thinking about a riddle—anyway, the doorbell rang early. I opened the door and there was my friend Anton’s deaf housekeeper. She handed me a letter from Anton.
“Dear Heinz,” writes Anton, “yesterday, while I was at your house, I left my hat hanging by the door. Please give it to my housekeeper. Best regards, Anton.” But the letter continues. Below he writes: “I just now found the hat. Forgive the disturbance. Many thanks for your trouble.”
That’s Anton for you, the absent-minded professor type. By the same token, he’s also a great fan and solver of riddles. And when I looked at the letter, it occurred to me: I could use Anton today. Perhaps he knows the solution to my riddle; I made a bet that I would figure out the riddle by this morning. The riddle goes like this (Gong):
The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all. What is it?
Yes, that’s it, I thought to myself, I have to ask Anton. I was hoping to ask his housekeeper whether he was already at school—Anton is a teacher—but she had already left.
I thought to myself, Anton must be at school. I put on my hat and just as I was heading down the stairs, it occurred to me that summer daylight saving time began today, so everything starts an hour earlier. I pulled out my watch and set it back one hour. When I reached the street, I realized that I had forgotten to shave. Just around the corner to the left I saw a barbershop. In three minutes I was there. In the window hung a large enamel sign: “A shave today ten pfennigs, a shave tomorrow free.” (Gong): A shave today ten pfennigs, a shave tomorrow free. The sign struck me as odd. I wish I knew why. I went in, took a seat and got a shave, all the while looking in the large mirror hanging before me. Suddenly the barber nicked me, on my right cheek. And sure enough, blood appeared on the right side of my mirror image. The shave cost me ten pfennigs. I paid with a twenty-mark note and got back nineteen marks in five-mark coins, along with five groschen and twenty five-pfennig coins. Then the barber, a jolly young man, held open the door and said to me as I went out: “Say hello to Richard if you see him.” Richard is his twin brother who has a pharmacy on the main square.
Now I’m thinking: the best thing is to go straight to Anton’s school and see if I can’t track him down. On my way there, walking down a street, I saw a large crowd of people standing around a carnival magician performing his tricks. With chalk he drew a tiny circle on the sidewalk. He then said: “Using the same center point, I will draw another circle whose circumference is five centimeters greater than the first.” After doing so he stood up, looked around with a mysterious smile and said (Gong): “If I now draw a gigantic circle, let’s say as big as the circumference of the Earth, and then I draw a second one whose circumference is five centimeters greater than that of the giant circle, which ring is wider: the one that lies between the tiny circle and the one five centimeters larger, or the ring between the giant circle and the one five centimeters larger?” Yes, I would like to know this, too.
I’d finally managed to push my way through the crowd, when I noticed that my cheek still hadn’t stopped bleeding, and as I was on the main square, I went into the pharmacy to buy a bandage. “Greetings from your twin brother, the barber,” I said to the pharmacist. He’s old as the hills and a bit of an odd bird to boot. And more than anything, he’s terribly anxious. Whenever he leaves his ground-floor shop, not only does he double-lock the door, he also walks around the whole building, and if he sees he’s left a window open somewhere, he reaches inside to close it. But the most interesting thing about him is his collection of curiosities, which he’ll show to anyone who comes into his shop. Today was no exception and, before long, I was left to admire everything at my leisure. There was a skull of an African Negro when he was six years old, and next to it a skull of the same man when he was sixty. The second was much larger, of course. Then there was a photograph of Frederick the Great, playing with his two greyhounds at Sanssouci. Next to it lay a bladeless antique knife that was missing its handle. He also had a stuffed flying fish. And hanging on the wall was a large pendulum clock. As I paid for my bandage, the pharmacist asked (Gong): “If the pendulum on my clock swings ten times to the right and ten times to the left, how often does it pass through the middle?” This, too, I wanted to know. So, that was the pharmacist.
Now I needed to hurry if I wanted to make it to the school before lessons were over. I jumped onto the next streetcar and just managed to get a corner seat. A fat man was seated to my right and on my left was a small woman talking to the man across from her about her uncle (Gong): “My uncle,” she said, “has just turned one hundred years old, but has only had twenty-five birthdays. How can that be?” This, too, I wanted to know, but we had already reached the school. I went through all the classrooms looking for Anton. The teachers were very annoyed at being disturbed.
And they asked the oddest questions. For example, I walked into a math class where the teacher was getting cross with a young boy. He had not been paying attention and the teacher was going to punish him. He said to the boy (Gong): “Add up all the numbers from one to a thousand.” The teacher was more than a little surprised when, after a minute, the boy stood up and gave the right answer: 501,000. How was he able to calculate so fast? This I also wanted to know. First I tried it with just the numbers one through ten. Once I came upon the quickest way to do this, I had figured out the boy’s trick.
Another class was geography. (Gong): The teacher drew a square on the blackboard. In the middle of this square he drew a smaller square. He then drew four lines, each connecting one corner of the small square with the nearest corner of the large square.This resulted in five shapes: one in the middle, this was the small square, and four other shapes surrounding the small square. Every boy had to draw this diagram in his notebook. The diagram represented five countries. Now the teacher wanted to know how many different colors were needed so that each country was a different color than the three, or four, countries that it bordered. I thought to myself, five countries need five colors. But I was wrong, the answer was smaller than five. Why? This, too, I wanted to know.
I then entered another class, where students were learning to spell. The teacher was asking very strange things, for example (Gong): “How do you spell dry grass with three letters?” And (Gong): “How can you write one hundred using only four nines?” And (Gong): “In your ABC’s, which is the middlemost letter?” To conclude the lesson he told the children a fairy tale (Gong):
“An evil sorcerer transformed three princesses into three flowers, perfectly identical and planted in a field. Once a month, one of them was allowed to return to her house for the night as a human. On one of these occasions, one of the princesses said to her husband just as dawn broke and she had to return to her two friends in the field and become a flower again: ‘If you come to me this morning and pluck me, I will be redeemed and can stay with you for evermore.’ This came to pass. Now the question is, how did her husband recognize her, since the flowers looked identical?” This, too, I wanted to know, but it was high time for me to get hold of Anton, and because he wasn’t at school, I headed to his home.
Benjamin in 1928.
Anton lived not far away, on the sixth floor of a building on Kramgasse. I climbed the stairs and rang the bell. His housekeeper, who had been at my house in the morning, answered right away and let me in. But she was alone in the apartment: “Herr Anton is not here,” she said. This irritated me. I thought the smartest thing to do was to wait for him, so I went into his room. He had a gorgeous view onto the street. The only hindrance was a two-story building across the way, which obstructed the view. But you could clearly see the faces of passersby, and on looking up, you could see birds fluttering about in the trees. Looming nearby was the large train station clock tower. The clock read exactly 14:00. I pulled out my pocket watch for comparison and sure enough, it was 4 pm on the nose. I had waited for three hours when, out of boredom, I started browsing the books in Anton’s room. (Gong) Unfortunately a bookworm had gotten into his library. Every day it ate through one volume. It was now on the first page of the first volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I thought to myself, how long will it need to reach the last page of the second volume ofGrimm’s Fairy Tales? I wasn’t concerned about the covers, just the pages. Yes, this is something I wanted to know. I heard voices outside in the hallway.
The housekeeper was standing there with an errand boy, who had been sent by the tailor to collect money for a suit. (Gong) Because the errand boy knew the housekeeper was deaf, he had handed her a piece of paper with one word written on it in large capital letters: MONEY [GELD]. But the housekeeper had no money with her, so to convey her request that he be patient, she drew just two more letters on the piece of paper. What were these two letters?
I had had enough of waiting. I headed out to find a little something to eat after such a tedious day. As I reached the street the moon was already in the sky. There had been a new moon a few days prior, and by now it had waxed to a narrow crescent that looked like the beginning of a capital German “Z” hovering over the rooftops. In front of me was a small pastry shop. I went in and ordered an apple cake with whipped cream. (Gong): When the apple cake with whipped cream arrived, it didn’t appeal to me. I told the waiter I would prefer a Moor’s Head [i.e., a mallomar]. He brought me the Moor’s Head, which was delicious. I stood up to go. As I was just on my way out, the waiter ran after me, shouting: You didn’t pay for your Moor’s Head!—But I gave you the apple cake in exchange, I told him.—But you didn’t pay for that either, the waiter said.—Sure, but I didn’t eat it either! I retorted, and left. Was I right? This, too, I’d like to know.
As I arrived home, imagine my astonishment at seeing Anton, who had been waiting there for five hours. He wanted to apologize for the silly letter he had sent to me early this morning via his housekeeper. I said that it didn’t matter all that much, and then told Anton my whole day as I’ve just told it to you now. He couldn’t stop shaking his head. When my story was over he was so astounded that he was speechless. He then left, still shaking his head. As he disappeared around the corner, I suddenly realized: this time he really has forgotten his hat. And I—of course I had forgotten something as well: to ask him the answer to my riddle (Gong): The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all.
But perhaps you’ve found the answer by now. And with this, I say goodbye.
*
Repetition of the fifteen questions:
The first question is an old German folk riddle: The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all. What is it?
What’s fishy about a barber who hangs an enamel sign in his window reading, “A shave today ten pfennigs, a shave tomorrow free”?
If I have a small circle and then around its center point I draw a circle whose circumference is five centimeters greater than that of the original, this creates a ring between the two circles. If I then take a giant circle, one as big as the circumference of the Earth, and around the same center point I draw another one, whose circumference is five centimeters greater than that of the first giant one, there is then a ring between those two circles. Which of the two rings is wider, the first or the second?
If the clock pendulum swings ten times to the right and ten times to the left, how often does it pass through the middle?
How can a man who is a hundred years old have had only twenty-five birthdays?
What is the quickest way to add up all the numbers from one to 1,000? Try it first with the numbers from one to ten.
A country is surrounded by four other countries, each of which borders the middle country and two of the others. What is the fewest number of colors needed so that each country has a different color than its neighbors?
How do you spell dry grass with three letters?
How can you write 100 using only four nines?
In your ABC’s, which is the middlemost letter?
There are three identical flowers in a field. In the morning, how can you tell which of them has not been there overnight?
If each day a bookworm eats through one volume in a series of books, how long will it take for it to eat its way from the first page of one volume to the last page of the next, provided he eats in the same direction in which the series of books is arranged?
You have a piece of paper with the word money [Geld] written on it. Which two letters can you add to convey a request for patience [Geduld]?
What’s wrong with the logic of a man who orders a piece of cake, exchanges it for another once it arrives, and then won’t pay for the new piece because he claims he traded the old piece for it?
The old riddle once more, whose solution is worth four points because it has now appeared twice: The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all.
You can find the answers to these fifteen questions, as well as a list of the fifteen mistakes,here.
Translated from German by Jonathan Lutes. Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, probably on July 6, 1932. The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitungannounced for the Youth Hour on July 6, 1932, at 3:15 pm, “‘Denksport’ [Mental Exercise], by Dr. Walter Benjamin (for children ten years and older).” “A Crazy Mixed-Up Day” was most likely the text Benjamin prepared for this broadcast.
This transcript appears in Radio Benjamin, available now. Reprintedwith the permission of Verso Books.
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
《清秀佳人》（Anne of Green Gables，又譯為紅髮安妮[1]（香港）、绿山墙的安妮（中國大陸）或綠色屋頂之家的安妮[2]）是一部由加拿大作家露西·莫德·蒙哥馬利（Lucy Maud Montgomery）所著的長篇小說。這個故事於1908年首度發表，其背景是在設定在作者蒙哥馬利童年成長的地方——愛德華王子島。
Mother's Day is approaching. Which fictional mothers do you love and which do you love to hate? As the best mother in literature we choose Marilla Cuthbert from Anne of Green Gables. The worst is Madame Bovary. What would your choices be?
Great writers often shape our impressions of a place. Steinbeck and Dust Bowl Oklahoma, for instance. Sometimes a writer might even define a place, as Hemingway did for 1920s Paris. Rarely, though, does a writer create a place. Yet that is what the Indian poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore did with a town called Shantiniketan, or “Abode of Peace.” Without Tagore’s tireless efforts, the place, home to a renowned experimental school, would not exist.
Tagore produced many of his famous poems at the school, which has always been known for its arts program.
For Indians, a trip to Shantiniketan, a three-hour train ride from Kolkata, is a cultural pilgrimage. It was for me, too, when I visited last July, in the height of the monsoon season. I had long been a Tagore fan, but this was also an opportunity to explore a side of India I had overlooked: its small towns. It was in places like Shantiniketan, with a population of some 10,000, that Tagore — along with his contemporary Mohandas K. Gandhi — believed India’s greatness could be found.
As I boarded the train at Kolkata’s riotous Howrah Station, there was no mistaking my destination, nor its famous resident. At the front of the antiquated car hung two photos of an elderly Tagore. With his long beard, dark eyes and black robe, the poet and polymath, who died in 1941, looked like a benevolent, aloof sage, an Indian Albus Dumbledore. At the rear of the car were two of his paintings, one a self-portrait, the other a veiled woman. Darkness infused them, as it does much of Tagore’s artwork, unlike his poems, which are filled with rapturous descriptions of nature. As the train ambled through the countryside, Tagore’s words echoed in my head. “Give us back that forest, take this city away,” he pleaded in one poem.
The son of a Brahmin landlord, Tagore was born in Calcutta, as Kolkata was called back then, in 1861. He began writing poetry at age 8. In 1913, he became the first non-Westerner to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The committee cited a collection of spiritual poems called “Gitanjali,” or song offerings. The verses soar. “The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end,” reads one.
Tagore became an instant international celebrity, discussed in the salons of London and New York. Today, Tagore is not read much in the West, but in India, and particularly in West Bengal, his home state, he remains as popular — and revered — as ever. For Bengalis, Tagore is Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Andy Warhol and Steven Sondheim — with a dash of Martin Luther King Jr. — rolled into one. Poet, artist, novelist, composer, essayist, educator, Tagore was India’s Renaissance man. He was also a humanist, driven by a desire to change the world, which is what he intended to do in Shantiniketan. Upset with what he saw as an India that mooched off other cultures — “the eternal ragpickers of other people’s dustbins,” he said — he imagined a school modeled after the ancient Indian tapovans, or forest colonies, where young men meditated and engaged in other spiritual practices. His school would eschew rote learning and foster “an atmosphere of living aspiration.”
Equipped with this vision — and unhappy with Calcutta’s transformation from a place where “the days went by in leisurely fashion,” to the churning, chaotic city that it is today — Tagore decamped in 1901 to a barren plain about 100 miles north of Calcutta. Tagore’s father owned land there, and on one visit experienced a moment of unexpected bliss. He built a hut to mark the spot, but other than that and a few trees, the young Tagore found only “a vast open country.”
Undaunted, he opened his school later that year, readily admitting that it was “the product of daring inexperience.” There was a small library, lush gardens and a marble-floored prayer hall. It began as a primary school; only a few students attended at first, and one of those was his son. Living conditions were spartan. Students went barefoot and meals, which consisted of dal (lentils) and rice, were “comparable to jail diet,” recalled Tagore, who believed that luxuries interfered with learning. “Those who own much have much to fear,” he would say.
Shantiniketan and its school represented an idea as much as a place: people do their best learning and thinking when they divorce themselves from the distractions of urban life and reconnect with their natural environment. That’s not easy to do in India. As my train trundled past rice fields and open space, I was inundated with offers of a shoeshine, pens, biscuits, flowers, jhalmuri (puffed rice), newspapers, musical performances and a magic show that featured the transformation of a Pepsi bottle into a bouquet of flowers.
Before I knew it, the train pulled into a tiny station, and the touts and hawkers were replaced by a few young men meekly asking if I needed a taxi. We drove past a moving collage of small-town India: squat buildings, women in saris riding sidesaddle on motor scooters, men in rickshaws selling banners emblazoned with verses from the Great Poet, tailors working from sidewalk shops, a sign for the “Tagore Institute of Management for Excellence.” Fifteen minutes later, I entered the lush grounds of the Mitali inn — and exhaled. India often takes your breath away; rarely does it give it back.
After settling into my simple room, lined from floor to ceiling with books (including Tagore’s), I met the inn’s owner, Krishno Dey, a former United Nations official who returned to his native Bengal some years ago. Sitting in a portico with ceiling fans whirling, we dined on chom-chom, or mango pulp (it tastes better than it sounds).
“You’re not going to see much here,” Mr. Dey warned me, “because there’s really not much to see.”
Perfect, I thought. I had just spent three weeks in Kolkata, an unrelenting city of 13 million, and “not much” was precisely what I craved. India may have invented the concept of zero, but traveling in the country has more to do with infinity. A seemingly infinite number of people, vehicles, noises, odors, wonders and hassles. Not in Shantiniketan, thankfully, where there are just enough sights to justify a few days’ stay.
The perfect activity is to read Tagore, and that’s what I did on the veranda, where I stumbled across a poem called “The Gardener”: “Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”
Tagore, who lived on campus, produced much of his poetry in Shantiniketan (and nearly all of his paintings), taught a few courses and hosted a parade of visitors that included Ramsey MacDonald, a future British prime minister, and Gandhi.
Ridiculed at first, Tagore’s new school, which he called Patha Bhavan (“a place for the wayfarer”), became a college in 1921 and attracted thousands, including a young Indira Gandhi, the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen and Satyajit Ray, the Indian filmmaker.
“If Shantiniketan did nothing else,” Mr. Ray once recalled, “it induced contemplation, and a sense of wonder in the most prosaic and earthbound of minds.”
Today, more than 6,000 students attend the university, which is now known as Visva-Bharati. Despite a drop in academic standards, its art school is still considered one of the best in the world.
As the school grew, so did the town. Its streets are lined with stately sal trees (some planted by Tagore), tea stalls and tiny bookstores. The poems and paintings of Tagore are everywhere.
Bicycles, which outnumber cars, are the best transportation. One day, Mr. Dey lent me his clunky bike equipped with a single gear and a bell, which came in handy given that there seem to be no passive-aggressive drivers on Indian roads, only aggressive-aggressive ones. Riding under a blanket of monsoon clouds, I passed schoolgirls in crisp blue uniforms, two or three to a bike. My destination was Rabindra Bhavan, the small museum that celebrates Tagore’s life.
Built on his former estate, it consists of a clutch of bungalows separated by raked gravel. Inside the dimly lighted exhibition hall are a few handwritten pages from “Gitanjali,” Tagore’s most famous poem, and black-and-white photographs of Tagore — a few of him as a dashing young man, but most of an older Tagore with crinkly eyes, looking off into the distance.
There are photos of Tagore with Helen Keller, Freud and Gandhi. Notable for its absence is the Nobel Prize itself. It was stolen from the museum in 2004, a crime that remains unsolved and that is, some believe, emblematic of a deeper problem.
“Long before the prize was stolen, Tagore was stolen,” quipped Kumar Rana, an aid worker I met. Reminiscing about Shantiniketan’s “good old days” is a popular sport here. Everyone I met told me how the air was once cleaner, the streets quieter, the people gentler.
Later that afternoon, I strolled through the sprawling university campus, with its simple concrete buildings and rows of sal trees. In the art studios, students’ work was on display: intricate bas-reliefs of Hindu goddesses, a sculpture made from a bicycle rickshaw.
A group of students gestured to me from a dormitory balcony. I climbed some stairs and found them slumped about a simple room — perhaps not as austere as Tagore had in mind, but close. On the ledge of the balcony sat one of their assignments, a bust of a well-known artist, a Shantiniketan alumna, drying slowly in the humid air.
Tagore left Shantiniketan rarely, but when he fell gravely ill in 1941, he went to Calcutta for treatment. It was there, in his ancestral home, that he dictated his last poem. “Today my sack is empty. I have given completely whatever I had to give. In return if I receive anything — some love, some forgiveness — then I will take it with me when I step on the boat that crosses to the festival of the wordless end.” Nine days later, the Sage of Shantiniketan died.
Toward the end of my stay, I encountered a baul singer alongside the road, strumming an ektara, a guitarlike instrument with a single string. He waved and I steered my bike toward him.
With their unruly hair, matted beards and saffron kurtas, the singers (baul means “crazy”) are difficult to miss. Neither Hindu nor Muslim, they are said to be insane with the love of God and wander the countryside, as they have for centuries, singing enigmatic songs about the blessings of madness and the life of a seeker. Tagore adored the bauls, and even declared himself one of them.
I sat on the ground and listened to the hypnotic music. Bauls have grown popular in recent years and, inevitably, poseurs have tried to cash in. So when another traveler, a well-off Kolkatan with an expensive camera, joined us, I asked, “Do you think he is a real baul singer?”
Clearly displeased with my question, he said after a long pause, “He’s as real as you want him to be.”
Sitting on the hard Shantiniketan earth, a breeze foreshadowing the monsoon rains, I closed my eyes, listened to the music, and asked no more questions.
IF YOU GO
Getting There
Shantiniketan is reached via Kolkata. The fastest way is by train. The Shantiniketan Express runs daily and takes about two and half hours. Round-trip fare: approximately 1,560 rupees, or about $30, at 52 rupees to the dollar, on Indian Railways: indianrail.gov.in.
Where to Stay
Mitali Homestays (91-94-3307-5853, mitalishantiniketan.com; 1,560 to 4,160 rupees, about $30 to $80, a night) is a delightful B&B run by Krishno and Sonali Dey with lush gardens, an impressive library and delicious food. They will lend you a bicycle for the day, and offer suggestions about what to do.
What to See
The Rabindra Bhavan Museum features several of Rabindranath Tagore’s original manuscripts, as well as letters and photographs. Closed Wednesdays.
What to Buy
Shantiniketan is known for its leather goods, batik prints and artwork. Visit the bustling Saturday market on the outskirts of town.
Eric Weiner, author of “Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine,” is working on a book about the connection between place and genius.
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Asia and the West
Never the twain
The intellectual roots of Asian anti-Westernism
Jul 28th 2012 | from the print edition
Dreaming of doing down the overlords
From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. By Pankaj Mishra. Allen Lane; 356 pages; £20. To be published in America in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $27. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk RARELY has the prestige of the West fallen lower in Asian eyes. Seemingly endless wars and the attendant abuses, financial crisis and economic malaise have made Europe and America look less like models to aspire to than dire examples to be shunned. In response, Asian elites are searching their own cultures and intellectual histories for inspiration.
In this section
As Pankaj Mishra, a prolific Indian writer, shows in this subtle, erudite and entertaining account of Asian intellectuals’ responses to the West, much the same was true over a century ago. He defines Asia broadly, as bordering with Europe at the Aegean Sea and Africa at the River Nile. A century ago, what he calls “an irreversible process of intellectual…decolonisation” was under way across this huge region. For Mr Mishra, and many Asians, the 20th century’s central events were the “intellectual and political awakening of Asia and its emergence from the ruins of both Asian and European empires”. China and India have shaken off foreign predators and become global powers. Japan has risen, fallen and risen again. It is commonplace to describe the current century as Asia’s. Mr Mishra tells the story of this resurgence through the lives of a number of pivotal figures, as they grappled with the dilemma of how to replicate the West’s power while retaining their Asian “essence”. He pays most attention to two, both little known in the West. One, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, was like most of them “neither an unthinking Westerniser, nor a devout traditionalist”. Despite his name, and despite a tomb in Kabul restored at America’s expense, al-Afghani was born in Persia in 1838. An itinerant Islamist activist, he also spent time in Egypt, India, Turkey and Russia, railing against the feebleness and injustices of Oriental despotisms and the immorality of Western imperialism, and trying to forge a Pan-Islamic movement. He had the ear of sultans and shahs. The other main character is Liang Qichao, a leading Chinese intellectual in the twilight of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, and the chaotic early years after it fell in 1911. Steeped in the old Confucian traditions and aghast at the weak new republic, he came to the conclusion that “the Chinese people must for now accept authoritarian rule; they cannot enjoy freedom”. Writing in 1903, however, he saw this as a temporary phenomenon. He would have been surprised to find China’s rulers today arguing much the same. Two other developments would also have surprised these men. The first is how disastrously some of the syntheses of West and East worked out: from Mao’s and Pol Pot’s millenarian communism, to al-Qaeda’s brand of Islamist fundamentalism and Japan’s replication of the worst traits of Western imperialism. Japan’s later aggression helps explain the other surprise: that in many ways the links between Asian thinkers look more tenuous now than they did a century ago. Then, men such as Liang, or Rabindranath Tagore (pictured) from Bengal, would travel to Tokyo. They would dream of a pan-Asian response to the West, inspired by Japan’s example. China is now the coming Asian power, but it is not an intellectual hub of pan-Asianism, either in Communist orthodoxy or in efforts to revive Confucianism. And the Islam of al-Afghani’s ideological heirs has made little headway in non-Muslim countries. There is one contemporary Asian phenomenon that, Mr Mishra notes, would seem far less surprising to the author’s subjects than to many present-day Westerners. That is the depth of anti-Western feeling. Millions, he writes, “derive profound gratification from the prospect of humiliating their former masters and overlords.” That prospect, however, masks what Mr Mishra concedes is an “immense intellectual failure”, because “no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy”. The ways of the West may not be working. Yet the alarming truth, Mr Mishra concludes, is that the East is on course to make many of the same mistakes that the West has made in its time.
“讀The Cambridge Companion to THOMAS MANN （2002；重慶出版社影印，2006），發現末章是探討其原授權之德譯英版本的許多「翻譯」問題（Mann in English）。有些是翻譯者誤會/不懂，有些是翻譯者似乎圖謀不軌（稍微改動會讓讀者對人物的看法很不相同…….）”
Video essay on HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY (1977, dir. Hans-Jurgen Syberberg). Text taken from Susan Sontag,"Syberberg's HITLER" (1979西貝爾貝格的希特勒). Film available on Facets DVD and on Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's website: www.syberberg.de. For more information visit alsolikelife.com/shooting
Doctor Faustus
Novel by Thomas Mann
Doctor Faustus is a German novel written by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde. Wikipedia
Birds of North America, Revised and Updated: A Guide To Field Identification (Golden Field Guide Series) [Paperback] Chandler S. Robbins (Author), Bertel Bruun (Author), Herbert S. Zim (Author), Arthur Singer (Illustrator)
The double elephant folios of John J. Audubon's "The Birds of America" displayed at the Beinecke were packed up yesterday and moved to the Peabody Museum, where they will be on view during the library's renovation. "The Birds of America" was financed through pay-as-you-go subscriptions. Every couple of months, subscribers would receive a large plate, a medium-sized plate, and then a smaller plate featuring song birds. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were subscribers.
The double elephant folios of John J. Audubon's "The Birds of America" displayed at the Beinecke were packed up yesterday and moved to the Peabody Museum, where they will be on view during the library's renovation.
"The Birds of America" was financed through pay-as-you-go subscriptions. Every couple of months, subscribers would receive a large plate, a medium-sized plate, and then a smaller plate featuring song birds. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were subscribers.
Bertel Bruun, a co-author and designer of a hugely successful guidebook that helped make bird-watching easier for millions of binocular-toting neophytes, died on Sept. 21 at his home in Remsenburg, on Long Island. He was 73.
The cause was heart failure, his son Erik said. Dr. Bruun, a neurologist and an amateur ornithologist, wrote or helped write more than a dozen books, but none has been more popular than “Birds of North America,” part of the Golden Field Guides series. First published in 1966, it became an instant hit with birders (a term they prefer to bird-watchers), and more than four million copies have been sold. The guidebook built on the work of the renowned ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson, whose “Field Guide to the Birds” (1934) popularized what had been an esoteric interest with a blend of science and evocative prose. “Birds of North America,” written by Dr. Bruun with Chandler Robbins and Herbert Zim and illustrated by Arthur Singer, was a more terse and accessible handbook for those trying to discern whether it was a golden-winged warbler or an eastern wood pewee that had just fluttered away. “What is compelling about it is its utilitarian simplicity,” said Pete Dunne of New Jersey Audubon, an organization independent of the National Audubon Society. Though Dr. Bruun wrote some of the text, perhaps his biggest contribution was designing a layout that served that simplicity. Whatever the reader needs to know about a genus or a species is presented across two pages. On the right-hand page are vivid illustrations; on the left, the information: distinguishing characteristics, behaviors, habitat, a map showing the season-by-season range across the continent. (A distinguishing characteristic of the eastern wood pewee: “Song is a plaintive, whistled pee-oo-wee, pee-oo.”) Dr. Bruun’s layout, though no longer considered unusual, was a breakthrough. In Peterson’s guides, the illustrations (with brief summations) were on one page while the full texts were elsewhere in the book. “In a way, even though he contributed the least amount of content, Bruun’s contribution was the most important,” said Kenn Kaufman, a field editor for Audubon magazine. “The design was just so convenient for field use that it became hugely popular right away and affected the design of almost all subsequent field guides — birds and other subjects.” Mr. Dunne recalled how one day as a youngster he was roaming the woods near his home in northern New Jersey when he caught “a one-second glimpse of a golden-winged warbler as it hopped from one branch to another, and I recognized it. I wouldn’t have done that without this book.” Born in Skaelskor, Denmark, on Nov. 13, 1937, Bertel Bruun was the son of Erik and Ebba Poulsen Bruun. After earning his bachelor’s and medical degrees at the University of Copenhagen, he moved in the mid-1960s to New York, where he specialized in neurology. Besides his son Erik, Dr. Bruun is survived by his wife of 41 years, the former Ruth Dowling; two other sons, Peter and Christian; two stepsons, Timothy and Thomas Newman; a stepdaughter, Isabel Blackburn; and 15 grandchildren. His first marriage, to the former Barbara Leventhal, ended in divorce. After a stroke left him unable to practice medicine, Dr. Bruun moved to Long Island in 1989 and, in addition to wandering the woods in search of birds, engaged in another childhood fascination. He started March of Time, a company that traded in antique toy soldiers — more than 5,000 of which lined his shelves, many posed in battle formations. In 1994 he wrote “Toy Soldiers Identification and Price Guide.”
Poe Yu-ze Wan "Bei meiner Aufnahme in die 1969 gegründete Fakultät für Soziologie der Universität Bielefeld fand ich mich konfrontiert mit der Aufforderung, Forschungsprojekte zu benennen, an denen ich arbeite. Mein Projekt lautete damals und seitdem: Theorie der Gesellschaft; Laufzeit: 30 Jahre; Kosten: keine." (Niklas Luhmann. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 11)
簡要翻譯：「我進入 1969 年成立的 Bielefeld 大學社會系時，對方要求我填寫在進行的研究計畫。我的計畫當時是且至今仍是：社會的理論（Theorie der Gesellschaft）；研究時間：三十年；費用：無。」（Niklas Luhmann，1997，《社會的社會》，頁11）
*****
1968: Vertrauen: Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexität, Stuttgart: Enke
(English translation: Trust and Power, Chichester: Wiley, 1979.)
*** 1996: Modern Society Shocked by its Risks (= University of Hong Kong, Department of Sociology Occasional Papers 17), Hong Kong, available via HKU Scholars HUB
弗朗兹・李斯特（Franz von Liszt，1811―1886），匈牙利作曲家、钢琴家和指挥家。为西方音乐史上重要的浪漫派音乐家。丰富和革新钢琴演奏技术，首创“交响诗”体裁，创作大量标题乐曲，从而扩大了钢琴和管弦... (展开全部)
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关于作者 英译者前言 正文
Richard Wagner / Karikatur nach Gaul Wagner, Richard, Komponist, Leipzig 22.5.1813 - Venedig 13.2.1883. - 'Richard Wagner'. - (Karikatur: Wagner als Dirigent). Kreidelithographie von Ernest Bailey nach Zeichnung, 1886, von Gustav Gaul ( 1836-1888), spaetere Kolorierung. Berlin, Slg.Archiv f.Kunst & Geschichte.文化人生音樂巨匠瓦格納誕辰200年——天才還是鬼才？他是一名作曲家，同時也是詩人、導演、作家、指揮家。兩百年前1813年5月22日，理查德·瓦格納出生於德國萊比錫。然而這位音樂巨匠究竟是天才還是鬼才，這對於很多人一直是個謎。（德國之聲中文網）關於他的描述和傳說數不勝數，很多人說，他是除耶穌、拿破崙之外出現在作家筆下最多的人物。在誕辰兩百年之際，瓦格納的歌劇在世界上空前地受歡迎。理查德·瓦格納出生於一個中產階級家庭。父親卡爾·弗里德里希·瓦格納是一名警察局職員，在瓦格納出生六個月時感染傷寒去世。母親喬安娜•羅西娜·瓦格納不久後改嫁演員、詩人、劇作家路德維希·蓋爾。繼父蓋爾對幼年瓦格納有很大影響，瓦格納很小就和幾個姐姐們一樣對戲劇產生了濃厚興趣。不拘一格的音樂少年瓦格納最初夢想成為一名詩人。不過在他16歲時參加貝多芬歌劇"費德里奧"的演出後，作曲家就成為了他的終生職業。 1831年在大學修音樂時，他就開始寫第一部歌劇。瓦格納喜歡自己為歌劇寫詞，這個習慣他也保持到了最後。German actress Christine Wilhelmine 'Minna' Planer (1809 - 1866), first wife of German composer Richard Wagner, circa 1830. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) 瓦格納的第一任妻子明娜·普蘭娜20歲起瓦格納開始在馬格德堡劇院演出，在那裡他與女演員明娜·普蘭娜墜入愛河，並於1836年結婚。然而婚後的瓦格納受債務困擾，不得不輾轉於馬格德堡、裡加和巴黎之間。瓦格納在巴黎的生活非常窘迫，不過他在這個時期完成了早期作品《黎恩濟》和《漂泊的荷蘭人》。此時他思想也開始左傾，熱衷於左派政治運動。 瓦格納在1842年搬回了德累斯頓，在皇家薩克森宮廷樂隊任指揮。同年十月，他迎來了其音樂生涯上的大突破：歌劇《黎恩濟》的首演。此時的瓦格納同時創作幾部作品，將詩歌、音樂和舞台表演融於一體，表達的主旨是"對人性最赤裸的展現"。殺出重圍1849年5月瓦格納在德累斯頓參加起義，失敗後被迫流亡。他在1864年才再次重返德國，此時的瓦格納精神沮喪、經濟窘迫，處於崩潰自殺的邊緣。關鍵時刻，他收到了18歲的巴伐利亞國王路德維希二世的信，國王的賞識挽救了瓦格納的餘生。1-L55-G1870-1 (171725) Lizst und Wagner/Karikatur v. Bithorn Liszt, Franz; Pianist und Komponist; Raiding 22.10.1811 - Bayreuth 31.7.1886. - Franz Liszt und Richard Wagner. - Karikatur in Scherenschnittmanier, 1910, von Willi Bithorn. F: Lizst et Wagner / Caricature de Bithorn Liszt, Franz ; pianiste et compositeur allemand ; Raiding 22 .10.1811 - Bayreuth 31.7.1886. - Franz Liszt et Richard Wagner. - Caricatures façon silhouettes, 1910, de Willi Bithorn.瓦格納和李斯特早在第一任妻子明娜去世前，瓦格納已經在琉森與鋼琴家李斯特的女兒、指揮家漢斯·馮·彪羅的妻子柯西瑪同居，而彪羅曾是瓦格納的好朋友和支持者。後來瓦格納和柯西瑪育有三子，並最終結婚。瓦格納在巴伐利亞小鎮拜羅伊特開始了他的視覺藝術工作。遠離城市喧囂，這裡的觀眾能更好地專注於音樂和舞台表演的融會貫通。 1876年8月，瓦格納四大歌劇之一的《尼伯龍根的指環》在這里首演。不過拜羅伊特的首演無論在經濟上還是藝術上都遭遇了滑鐵盧。 1882年，瓦格納組織了第二次演出，演出的唯一作品--也是他的最後一部作品《帕西法爾》。 1883年2月，瓦格納死於意大利威尼斯。如何解讀瓦格納？為什麼瓦格納的魅力延續至今？他是歷史上最有影響力的作曲家，他的浪漫主義曲風直達人心。很少有人會對他的作品無動於衷，人們或者狂熱地追捧，或者極端地厭惡。瓦格納的音樂有很強的感染力，他主張歌劇革命，卻更多地被捲入政治革命中。他本人也在晚年支持德意志民族主義思想。 Im Mittelpunkt der Richard-Wagner-Festspiele in Bayreuth steht die Neuinszenierung von Wagners vierteiligem Hauptwerk Der Ring des Nibelungen: Götterdämmerung - Siegfried (l, Stephen Gould), Brünnhilde (M, Linda Watson) und Hagen (r, Hans-Peter König) - Probenfoto vom 10.07.2006. Die Premiere ist am Montag (31.07.2006). Foto: Marcus Führer dpa/lby +++(c) dpa - Report+++ 歌劇《尼伯龍根的指環》的演出然而瓦格納到底是一個社會主義者？還是一個民族主義者？究竟該如何解讀他的作品？他歌詞的字裡行間充滿了矛盾和對比。那麼他音樂想要表達的是什麼？其中是否也包含反猶主義內容？針對這些問題的爭論一直無休。事實上瓦格納真正熱衷的只有"自我"。無論是否被這個世界接納，瓦格納都在藝術史上寫下了濃重的一筆。他的劇目也在聽眾中繾綣低迴、綿延至今。作者：Rick Fulke 編譯：萬方
"I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says." --from THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
David Hume pointed out long ago in his essay "Of suicide"– if it's wrong to end a life because that is a way of playing God, then by the same reasoning it should also be wrong to take precautions to extend it in any way.
The History of England (原先的標題The History of Great Britain)—《大不列顛史》 (1754–62) 可以在自由圖書館閱讀全文[3]
比較像是一套叢書而不只是一本書。休謨討論的歷史範圍「包含了從凱薩大帝入侵到1688年的革命」，這套書後來再版了超過100個版本。許多人將其視為是英格蘭歷史學的標準著作，直到Thomas Macaulay的History of England一書出現為止。
The Life of David Hume by Ernest Campbell Mossner
1954, Thomas Nelson & Sons 出版 / 1970, OUP牛津大學出版社/2001 paperback 平裝
扉頁 引Hume :Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man
Description
Mossner's Life of David Hume remains the standard biography of this great thinker and writer. First published in 1954, and updated in 1980, this excellent life story is now reissued in paperback, in response to an overwhelming interest in Hume's brilliant ideas. Containing more than a simple biography, this exemplary work is also a study of intellectual reaction in the eighteenth century. In this new edition are a detailed bibliography, index, and textual supplements, making it the perfect text for scholars and advanced students of Hume, epistemology, and the history of philosophy. It is also ideal for historians and literary scholars working on the eighteenth century, and for anyone with an interest in philosophy.
Features
the standard biography of Hume
unavailable for some time, now reissued in paperback
detailed bibliography, index, and textual supplements
In 1924 John Maynard Keynes wrote an obituary for a prominent economist Alfred Marshall , one of the founders of the English neoclassical economics and Keynes' former tutor and academic patron. In this fascinating piece of work Keynes astoundingly mulls over Marshall's economic scholarship and intellectual life. Joseph Schumpeter , in his obit of Keynes, called this obituary “the most brilliant life of a man of science I have ever read.” (2003: 271). At the beginning of this essay, Keynes sketches the “ideal type” of an economist, outlining his preferable professional features and personal characteristics. So, who is an economist according to Keynes? Here is his abundant answer:
“The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject at which few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.” ( Keynes 1924: 321-322)
Schumpeter, Joseph. 2003. Ten Great Economists . Simo
A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall 1842-1924 [Paperback] Peter Groenewegen (Author)
Abstract
Since Keynes's masterful obituary, knowledge of Marshall's life has greatly increased. Family and social background, early philosophical and economic writings, and involvement with educational reforms are subjects on which readers now enjoy the benefits of better and more reliable information. By itself, this would have made an extensive biography worth its while Groenewegen's book goes much further, adding new discoveries, discussing Marshall's heritage, and endeavoring to provide a coherent whole in order to preserve "Marshall's social philosophy." Though digressions make it somewhat difficult to concentrate attention on any one connecting thread, the book offers a balanced and informed treatment of Marshall's life and activities. This article examines the book's merits and limitations and points out some hidden aspects of Marshall's character and research programs.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
'. . . Groenewegen's prose is gripping yet lucid and analytical. Without exaggeration it can be stated that any future work on Marshall has to start from this book.' - CJ Talele, Choice, November 1995, Vol. 33 No. 3 -- CJ Talele, Choice , November 1995, Vol. 33 No. 3
'A scholarly and comprehensive study of Marshall's life and work, particularly interesting on his early background.' - John K. Whitaker, Bankard Professor of Economics, University of Virginia -- John K. Whitaker, Bankard Professor of Economics, University of Virginia
'Given his worldwide reputation and immense influence on 20th century economics, the absence of a scholarly biography of Alfred Marshall is shocking. Now, at last, Peter Groenewegen has filled this yawning gap, and his book is a major event for economists, intellectual historians and students of the social sciences. Groenewegen's research, extending over many years, has been exhaustive; his contribution to our knowledge of the man and his works is immense; his analysis of Marshall's writings is comprehensive; and throughout his judgment is balanced and insightful. This is truly a landmark achievement.' - AW Coats, Duke University and University of Nottingham, UK -- AW Coats, Duke University and University of Nottingham, UK
'Scholars will find themselves well rewarded for their time reading Peter Groenewegen's substantial contribution to scholarship. No good library can afford to be without this book. It is a wonderful achievement that has been long awaited.' - Robert W. Butler, The Historian, Spring 1997, Vol. 59 No. 3 -- Robert W. Butler, The Historian , Spring 1997, Vol. 59 No. 3
Product Description
This biography of Alfred Marshall places the major features of the subject's life and work within the rich institutional setting of late 19th-century and early 20th-century Britain. It reveals why he decided to study economics and the background to his important books.
麻省理工學院經濟學博士。曾任哈佛學會( Harvard Society of Fellows)年輕學者，現任芝加哥大學經濟學系Alvin H. Baum 講座教授，以及「芝加哥價格理論中心」(Initiative on Chicago Price Theory)執行長。獲獎無數，其中包括「美國國家科學基金會總統青年學者獎」(National Science Foundation Presidential Early Career Award)、「美國藝術及科學院院士」(Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences)，以及所有經濟學者第二夢寐以求、學術界譽為諾貝爾經濟學獎搖籃的克拉克獎（John Bates Clark Medal）。很少人像李維特一樣，四十歲不到的年紀就能成為芝加哥大學經濟系的講座教授。芝大經濟係是經濟學的重鎮、諾貝爾獎的搖籃，能在此任教都是頂尖的學術菁英。讓人稱奇的不只是他的年紀與學術成就，而是他對於經濟學的詮釋方式。他對經濟學的研究絕非謹守正統方式。他看待事物的角度更像是一個聰明而好奇的探險家。
杜伯納Stephen J. Dubner
居住於美國紐約市，定期為《紐約時報》﹝New York Times﹞和《紐約客》﹝New York Yorker﹞等知名刊物撰寫文章，另著有暢銷作品Turbulent Souls和Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper。
李維特（Steven D. Levitt），芝加哥大學經濟學系講座教授，被認為是「全美國最有趣的腦袋」。他四十歲不到就當上了芝加哥大學講座教授。讓人稱奇的不只是他的年紀與學術成就，而是他對於經濟學的詮釋方式。他絕不謹守正統。他看待事物的角度更像是一個聰明而好奇的探險家。
怎麼看一九九○年代犯罪大幅下跌呢？李維特說可以從當時往前推二十多年，由德州達拉斯一名叫做諾瑪‧麥柯維（Norma McCorvey）的年輕女子說起。這位二十一歲的貧窮女性未受教育，無一技之長，又有酗酒與濫藥的惡習，先前生過兩個小孩送人收養。一九七○年，她發現自己再度懷孕。不過當時墮胎並未合法化。一些支持合法化的有力人士，讓她成為爭取墮胎合法化的原告，被告則是達拉斯郡地區檢察官。這場官司一直上訴到美國最高法院，一九七三年法院判她勝訴，於是全國墮胎合法化。這個墮胎合法化的判例，與犯罪率大幅下跌有何關係？數十年的研究資料顯示，出生於劣勢家庭的小孩，日後變成罪犯的機率比平均數高得多。麥柯維案後，許多處於劣勢環境的女性，得以合法墮胎。如果她們的孩子生出來，未來就有許多人會成為罪犯。由於墮胎合法化，這些有可能成為未來罪犯的孩子沒有生下來。受這項強大的因素影響，多年之後犯罪率開始加速下降。扼止美國犯罪浪潮的功臣不是別的，而是潛在犯罪者大幅縮減。那些專家向媒體解釋犯罪率的下降時，他們推銷的理論中從沒有提到墮胎合法化的影響。這是李維特的書《蘋果橘子經濟學》（Freakonomics:A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything）其中一個故事。
杜伯納當時正在為撰寫一本金錢心理學的書蒐集資料，剛拜訪過多位經濟學者，結果發現他們他們講話用的似乎是另一種語言。至於當時剛獲得約翰‧貝茲‧克拉克獎（John Bates Clark Medal，每兩年頒發給美國四十歲以下最優秀的經濟學者）的賴維特，才接受過不少記者的採訪，結果發現他們的思考似乎不太……靈光。
賴維特強烈的好奇心打動了成千上萬的《紐約時報雜誌》的讀者，各方的詢問、謎團、請求紛至沓來——包括通用汽車、紐約洋基隊、美國參議員，還有囚犯、家長，以及一位保存自己二十年來貝果銷售數據的人士。有個環法自行車賽（Tour de France）冠軍選手請求賴維特協助，證明目前的賽事中服用禁藥的狀況充斥。美國中央情報局則希望知道賴維特是否可利用相關資料找出洗錢者與恐怖份子。
一九九五年，犯罪學者福克斯（James Alan Fox）在一份呈送司法部長的報告中，嚴肅地詳述即將到來的青少年殺人潮。福克斯提出樂觀與悲觀的版本。在樂觀版本中，他預估青少年殺人案件在未來十年會增加百分之十五；而在悲觀版本中，更是會增加一倍。他指出：「下一波的犯罪潮十分嚴重，相較之下，一九九五年還算是美好的年代呢。」
別忘了，古典經濟學之父亞當‧斯密（Adam Smith）原本是位哲學家，而在致力成為道德家的過程中變成了經濟學家。他於一七五九年出版《道德情操論》（The Theory of Morale Sentiments）時，現代資本主義才剛萌芽。斯密深感於這股新興力量襲捲而來的變革，不過他關注的不僅是客觀數字，還有人類受到的影響，因為個人在特定環境中的所思所行，都會受經濟力量所左右。為什麼有人欺騙、偷竊，有些人就不會？為何某人看似無害的選擇，卻影響到一連串的人？在斯密的年代，因果作用開始急遽加速，各項誘因也擴大好幾倍。這些改變給當時民眾帶來的衝擊與震撼，不遜於現代生活加諸我們的衝擊與震撼。
「《蘋果橘子經濟學》很爛嗎？」 我們的出版社一直很賣力地推銷《蘋果橘子經濟學》——當然，這是他們的工作，而我們也給予肯定，這並不奇怪。當有好事出現時——例如，《華爾街日報》上的一篇好評，或是上了《喬恩每日秀新聞》（The Daily Show With Jon Stewart）節目——出版社會勤快地到處宣揚。不過我們認為，把一些不同的看法納進來也很重要。畢竟，那正是《蘋果橘子經濟學》的精神——檢驗資料，不論那是什麼資料；仔細探索，不論會導出什麼結果。因此，這裡列出一些人，他們認為《蘋果橘子經濟學》，整篇或是部分內容，是顆大臭彈：
幾年前，我年休時到史丹佛的行為科學尖端研究中心（Center for Advanced Study of Behavior Sciences），對其他的研究人員演講我的研究。當時有些聽眾很生氣，問我說，從我所做的研究來看，憑什麼自稱是個經濟學家。他們說我其實是個社會學家。你只要看看在場社會學家的驚恐表情，就知道我也不是社會學家。但從自認所知有限的態度開始，我有足夠開放的心胸，和人種誌學者（凡卡德希）、計量經濟學家（波特〔Jack Porter〕）、政治科學家（葛若斯克洛斯〔 Tim Groseclose〕）、以及現在和新聞記者（杜伯納）共同寫作。也許，我除了讓有些人將來在出版一本沒有主題的書時可以安心之外，還讓來自所有社會科學領域的學者，在採用我這種「無領域」（和跨領域相反）路線時，變得更為容易。
It may be dismal but economics flies off the shelves
By John Kay 2009-08-26 When I tried to market a “popular book on economics” to publishers a few years ago, it was a hard sell. They thought such a book was an oxymoron. Economics was perhaps worthy, certainly boring. Economists, they thought, were people who talked about whether interest rates would go up or down even though they did not know. Television producers, desperate to make the subject visual, made presenters stand dejectedly in the rain outside the Bank of England. Not for nothing did Thomas Carlyle label the subject the dismal science. In vain did I argue that the people who bought works by Simon Schama and Richard Dawkins would also buy books on economics if the subject were presented in the right way. In less than a decade, all this has changed. If you want a book on economics to take to the beach, you are spoiled for choice at the airport bookstall. What you will find falls into three categories. Two books inaugurated the revolution. Malcolm Gladwell invented the category I label “Thump”. Thump books take a single, quirky idea and ram it home through a disparate range of examples. Gladwell's first work, The Tipping Point, was – well, the tipping point – and he has since followed it with Blink and Outliers. In The Tipping Point, the idea was that discontinuities arise from network effects. In Blink the idea was that immediate judgments are sometimes more soundly based than considered ones. In Outliers, it is harder to work out the unifying theme. But never mind – Gladwell writes superbly and he parades his examples across the stage with the virtuosity of a choreographer. The title is key to the appeal of these books to readers – and publishers. The author or his agent looks for a word or phrase that can be made a staple of office banter and dinner table conversation. If The Tipping Point had been called Some Illustrations of Instability in Non-linear Dynamic Systems, it would not have made the bestseller list. Everyone can get their mouth around tipping points. “Nudges”, “black swans” and “the wisdom of crowds” have become clichés. The seminal work of the second category is Freakonomics by Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen Dubner, a New York-based journalist. In such books, microeconomics is back, macroeconomics is ignored. Nothing about post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the natural rate of unemployment. Authors write instead about issues that interest people, such as abortion and children's names, even if neither the topic nor the discussion have much to do with economics. A curious feature of Freakonomics is that there is little economics in it.
Freakonomics allowed other writers such as the FT's Tim Harford to tap the same vein; while Stephen Landsburg, who now writes a column for Slate magazine, had been writing that way for years. After Freakonomicstheir books began to fly off the shelves. Publishers raced to commission them. Tell us stories, they begged. And then a particularly good macroeconomic story happened in real life. The credit crunch produced the worst depression in half a century – and a third category of economic bestseller. Larger bookshops today have whole tables devoted to books about how it happened, who caused it, what should be done about it. Jaundiced or reluctant gardeners from Wall Street and the City of London have an opportunity to describe My Role in the Credit Crunch. Since I wrote a books essay for the Weekend FT (August 1) on credit crunch books, I will refer you there for advice on which to read and which to avoid. But I am an economist and you would expect me not only to have learnt lessons from the market but to take advantage of them for shameless self-promotion. I did find a publisher for my popular book about economics – Penguin produced The Truth about Markets in 2003. I wrote my own book on how to survive the credit crunch, The Long and the Short of It, published this year. And next year you can read my Thump book. The title is Obliquity.
第二類書中的精華之作是《魔鬼經濟學》(Freakonomics)。本書作者是芝加哥大學(University of Chicago)經濟學家史蒂文•萊維特(Stephen Dubner)和駐紐約記者斯蒂芬•杜布納(Stephen Dubner)。在這類書中，微觀經濟學重新回歸，而宏觀經濟學則被忽略——無論是後新古典內生增長理論還是自然失業率，都已無跡可尋。作者轉而寫一些令人們感興趣的問題，比如墮胎和兒童的姓名，儘管話題本身及相關討論都與經濟學沒有太大關係。《魔鬼經濟學》的一個奇怪特點是，書中的經濟學知識少之又少。
接著，一個特別精彩的 宏觀經濟學故事在現實生活中發生了。信貸緊縮造成了半個世紀以來最嚴重的一場衰退，也促使經濟類暢銷書的第三大類問世。在目前規模較大的書店裡，有滿滿幾桌是專門用來展示這第三類書籍的，其主題包括危機是如何發生的，是由誰引起的，以及應該採取何種措施。那些帶著偏見不情願地當起園丁的華爾街或倫敦金融城(City of London)人士，現在有機會寫一寫《我在信貸緊縮中所扮演的角色》了。我曾在8月1日的《金融時報週末版》(Weekend FT)上寫過一篇關於信貸緊縮類書籍的書評文章，讀者若想獲得關於哪些書可讀、哪些書應迴避的建議，請參考那篇文章。
但我同時也是一名經濟學家，因此你會料到，我不僅從市場中汲取了教訓，還利用這些教訓進行了不知羞恥的自我推銷。我確實為自己的那本經濟學暢銷書找到了出版商——《市場的真相》(The Truth about Markets)於2003年由企鵝(Penguin)出版。圍繞如何在信貸緊縮中倖存下來這個問題，我撰寫了自己的《金融投資學入門指導》( The Long and the Short of It )，該書已於今年出版。而在明年，你將可以讀到我寫的一本“重磅”型圖書，書名是《傾斜》(Obliquity )。
未讀過「Freakonomics」系列的讀者，我認為應考慮這句十分有力的推薦： “An afternoon with Levitt and Dubner's book will transform you into the most interesting person in the room that evening.”//
胡主席這一唯物主義的宣稱明快而爽利，誰都知道，他的馬列主義行話只是層稀薄的面紗。當主持人告訴胡主席聽眾一共提了七十多個問題時，他有點羞澀地微笑了一下，接著撒嬌地說，那他就來回答所有的問題，今天就不走了。幽了這唯一的一默，胡主席隨即跟車隊疾馳而去，把他從來也沒打算回答的問題統統留給了耶魯人莫可名狀的疑惑。因此，在列舉出中國人權狀況繼續惡化的事例後，曾擔任克林頓人權助理，現任法學院院長的Harold Koh措詞強烈地說道：“我們不得不問這位中國領導人一個問題：Who are you ？我們確實很想知道。” Harold Koh的問題不由得令人聯想到歷史系名牌教授史景遷那本題為The Question of Hu的著作。是的，胡的問題的確是很嚴重的，史學家史景遷和法學家Harold Koh都解決不了。但Harold Koh想要弄清的問題，有一部分，雷文校長已對記者講得十分清楚。校長說他知道人權惡化的情況，但他認為中國政府會加以改善。他也希望實現表達的自由，但發展經濟應該優先。校長的思路顯然代表了美國朝野相當大一批“唯物主義者”官民的思路。正是在這一交點上，極權政府和民主共和政府取得了物質利益上的互惠。而來耶魯舉行這場告別的文化儀式，不過演一幕曲終奏雅的典禮罷了。胡主席最後宣布今年夏天邀請一百名耶魯師生訪問中國，全場響起熱烈的掌聲，很多人躍躍欲試，說不定連校狗bulldog都可能隨團而行。
1960年代初期，許多黑人仍遭到不平等對待，也沒有投票權，許多白人學生志願為他們爭取權益，組成了「學生民主社會聯盟」（SDS），是當時最重要的學運組織。該組織的領袖，密執安大學研究生湯姆‧海登（Tom Hayden）於1962 年6月發表了《休倫港宣言：一個世代的議程》（Port Huron Statement: Agenda for a Generation）。
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (March 20, 1770 - June 6, 1843) was a major German lyric poet. His work bridges the Classical and Romantic schools.
Life
Hölderlin was born in Lauffen am Neckar in the kingdom of Württemberg. He studied Theology at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), where he was friends and roommates with the future philosophers Georg Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. They mutually influenced one another, and it has been speculated that it was probably Hölderlin who brought to Hegel's attention the ideas of Heraclitus about the union of opposites, which the philosopher would develop into his concept of dialectics.
Being from a family of limited means (his mother was twice a widow), and having little inclination for an ecclesiastical career, Hölderlin had to earn his living as a tutor of children of well-to-do families. While working as the tutor of the sons of Jakob Gontard, a Frankfurt banker, he fell in love with his employer's wife Susette, who would become his great love. Susette Gontard is the model for the Diotima of his epistolary novel, Hyperion.
Having been publicly insulted by Gontard, Hölderlin felt forced to quit his job in the banker's household and found himself again in a difficult financial situation (even as some of his poems were already being published through the influence of his occasional protector, the poet Friedrich Schiller), having to accept a small allowance from his mother. Already at this time he was diagnosed as suffering from a severe "hypochondria", a condition that would worsen after his last meeting with Susette Gontard in 1800. In early 1802 he found a job as tutor of the children of the Hamburg consul in Bordeaux, France, and traveled by foot to that city. His travel and stay there are celebrated in Andenken (Remembrance), one of his greatest poems. In a few months, however, he would be back in Germany showing signs of mental disorder, which was aggravated by the news of Susette's death.
In 1807, having become largely insane, he was brought into the home of Ernst Zimmer, a Tübingen carpenter with literary leanings, who was an admirer of his Hyperion. For the next 36 years, Hölderlin would live in Zimmer's house, in a tower room overlooking the beautiful Neckar valley, being cared for by the Zimmer family until his death in 1843. Wilhelm Waiblinger, a young poet and admirer, has left a poignant account of Hölderlin's day-to-day life during these long, empty years.
Work
The poetry of Hölderlin, widely recognized today as one of the highest points of German literature, slipped into obscurity shortly after his death; his illness and reclusion made him fade from his contemporaries' consciousness and, even though selections of his work were being published by his friends already during his lifetime, it was largely ignored for the rest of the 19th century, Hölderlin being classified as a mere imitator of Schiller, a romantic and melancholy youth. He was rediscovered only slowly, and only in the 20th century was the first complete edition of his writings put together by Norbert von Hellingrath, a member of the circle around poet Stefan George.
In fact, Hölderlin was a man of his time, an early supporter of the French Revolution - in his youth at the Seminary of Tübingen, he and some colleagues from a "republican club" planted a "Tree of Freedom" in the market square, prompting the Grand-Duke himself to admonish the students at the seminary. He was at first carried away by Napoleon, whom he honors in one of his couplets (it should be noted that his exact contemporary Beethoven also initially dedicated his Eroica to the Corsican general).
Like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Schiller, his older contemporaries, Hölderlin was a fervent admirer of ancient Greek culture, but had a very personal understanding of it. Much later, Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers would recognize in him the poet who first acknowledged the orphic and dionysiac Greece of the mysteries, which he would fuse with the Pietism of his native Swabia in a highly original religious experience. For Hölderlin, the Greek gods were not the plaster figures of conventional classicism, but living, actual presences, wonderfully life-giving and, at the same time, terrifying. He understood and sympathized with the Greek idea of the tragic fall, which he expressed movingly in the last stanza of his Hyperions Schicksalslied "Hyperion's Song of Destiny".
In the great poems of his maturity, Hölderlin would generally adopt a large-scale, expansive and unrhymed style. Together with these long hymns and elegies which included Der Archipelagus "The Archipelago", Brot und Wein "Bread and Wine" and Patmos- he also cultivated a crisper, more concise manner in epigrams and couplets, and in short poems like the famous Hälfte des Lebens "The Middle of life". In his years of madness, he would occasionally pen ingenuous rhymed quatrains, sometimes of a childlike beauty, which he would sign with fantastic names (such as "Scardanelli". Some went so far as to claim that his late poems written in the asylum the so-called "tower poems", full of "Homeric beauty", were the crystallization of his thoughts, and thus the greatest part of his works; and that his madness was indeed a voluntary one. Such claims are generally dismissed as romantic exaggeration today.
Influence
Though Hölderlin's hymnic style - dependent as it is on a genuine belief in the divinity can hardly be transposed without sounding parodistic, his shorter and more fragmentary lyric has exerted its influence in German poetry, from Georg Trakl onwards, and his elegiac mode has found an apt successor in Rainer Maria Rilke. He also had an influence on the poetry of Herman Hesse.
Hölderlin earned some negative notoriety during his lifetime by his translations of Sophocles, which were considered awkward and contrived. In the 20th century, theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin have vindicated them, showing their importance as a new and greatly influential model of poetic translation.
Hölderlin was a poet-thinker who wrote, fragmentarily, on poetic theory and philosophical matters. His theoretical works, such as the essays Das Werden im Vergehen "Becoming in Dissolution" and Urteil und Sein "Judgement and Being" are insightful and important if somewhat tortuous and difficult to parse. They raise many of the key problems also addressed by his Tübingen roommates Hegel and Schelling. And, though his poetry was never "theory-driven", the interpretation and exegesis of some of his more difficult poems has given rise to profound philosophical speculation by such divergent thinkers as Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno.
Music
Hölderlin's poetry has inspired many composers, perhaps the most famous example being the Schicksalslied by Brahms, a setting of Hyperions Schicksalslied. Other composers to have made settings of his poems include Peter Cornelius, Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss (Drei Hymnen), Max Reger (An die Hoffnung), Richard Wetz (Hyperion), Josef Matthias Hauer, Stefan Wolpe, Paul Hindemith whose First Piano Sonata is inspired by Hölderlin's poem 'Der Main', Benjamin Britten, Hans Werner Henze whose Seventh Symphony is also partly inspired by Hölderlin, Bruno Maderna (Hyperion, Stele an Diotima),Heinz Holliger (the Scardanelli-Zyklus), Hans Zender (Hölderlin lesen I-IV), Hanns Eisler (Hollywood Liederbuch), Viktor Ullmann, Hans Zender, Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Wolfgang Rihm. Robert Schumann's late piano suite Gesänge der Fruhe was inspired by Hölderlin, as was Luigi Nono's string quartet Stille, an Diotima.
Ihr wandelt droben im Licht Auf weichem Boden, selige Genien! Glänzende Götterlüfte Rühren euch leicht, Wie die Finger der Künstlerin Heilige Saiten.
Schicksallos, wie der schlafende Säugling, atmen die Himmlischen; Keusch bewahrt In bescheidener Knospe, Blühet ewig Ihnen der Geist, Und die seligen Augen Blicken in stiller Ewiger Klarheit.
Doch uns ist gegeben, Auf keiner Stätte zu ruhn, Es schwinden, es fallen Die leidenden Menschen Blindlings von einer Stunde zur andern, Wie Wasser von Klippe Zu Klippe geworfen, Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab.
Hyperion's Song of Destiny by Fr. Hölderlin
Holy spirits, you walk up there in the light, on soft earth. Shining god-like breezes touch upon you gently, as a woman's fingers play music on holy strings.
Like sleeping infants the gods breathe without any plan; the spirit flourishes continually in them, chastely kept, as in a small bud, and their holy eyes look out in still eternal clearness.
A place to rest isn't given to us. Suffering humans decline and blindly fall from one hour to the next, like water thrown from cliff to cliff, year after year, down into the Unknown.
