What Tony is reading

I enjoyed Great Expectations, and I am now reading Jane Austen’s Emma. This is my home reading. On the train into work I am still brushing up my German. Actually, “brushing up” suggests that I have retained some level of German and just need to remind myself. I’m afraid my situation is more desperate than that: I’m just trying to cram as much German as I can prior to my trip in the fall--which might get pushed back to winter.

To that end, I am reading Ranier Maria Rilka’s Letters to a Young Poet. I found a decent translation on the Web and what seems to be a reliable copy in German. I copied these both onto a Word document so that I have English on the left and German on the right. (O.K., I barely know German at all. I just hope that when they find me I can get out the words “Essen, bitte!” before losing consciousness.) Anyway, on the subway I am both reading this marvelous insight on writing and art and studying German. Here is a little of what I read this morning:

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Mit nichts kann man ein Kunst-Werk so wenig berühren als mit kritischen Worten: es kommt dabei immer auf mehr oder minder glückliche Mißverständnisse heraus. Die Dinge sind alle nicht so faßbar und sagbar, als man uns meistens glauben machen möchte; die meisten Ereignisse sind unsagbar, vollziehen sich in einem Raume, den nie ein Wort betreten hat, und unsagbarer als alle sind die Kunst-Werke, geheimnisvolle Existenzen, deren Leben neben dem unseren, das vergeht, dauert.