#25 Sat (7/16/22) - Velázquez’s Las meninas, on how to see the world and how the world really is

From Wikipedia:

The elusiveness of Las Meninas, according to Dawson Carr, "suggests that art, and life, are an illusion". The relationship between illusion and reality were central concerns in Spanish culture during the 17th century, figuring largely in Don Quixote, the best-known work of Spanish Baroque literature. More recently, it has been described as "Velázquez's supreme achievement, a highly self-conscious, calculated demonstration of what painting could achieve, and perhaps the most searching comment ever made on the possibilities of the easel painting".

In this respect, Calderón de la Barca's play Life is a Dream is commonly seen as the literary equivalent of Velázquez's painting:

What is a life? A frenzy. What is life?
A shadow, an illusion, and a sham.
The greatest good is small; all life, it seems
Is just a dream, and even dreams are dreams.*

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/...

It is also discussed in Egginton's The Man Who Invented Fiction:

Velázquez’s painting occupies such an essential place in the history of European art
because it revealed a new way of organizing and understanding knowledge
that was taking hold at the time.22 But the other great example of this
change is Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

Both Cervantes in his writings and Velázquez on his canvases play out
the drama of a world that was discovering the distinction between how I see
the world and how that world really is, how it is for God or for some other
human being.

By incorporating the world into their frame they
necessarily incorporate that frame, too, as well as the person performing the
framing.24

 =====================================================

* A Dream Within a Dream
By Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

 

 
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#48 Mon (8/8/22) - Los cuatro ciclos (The Four Cycles) by Jorge Luis Borges (El oro de los tigres, 1972)

Found this piece in the usual place and proceeded to translate and examine it.  It was not in any of my previous translated editions, although it has a familiar feel, touching as it does upon so many of the favored topics and references; Illiad and Odyssey, myths of Ragnarök , Anglo-Saxon poetry, Sir Gawain, Jason and the Golden Fleece, the Simurgh, Captain Ahab and Kafka, Odin and Christ.  In so doing I followed (forged?) the links to Rosetti's Troy Town and Yeats' Leda and the Swan.  I found out about the Game of the Gods (tafl) recounted in the Voluspa (which also has a long roll call of familiar dwarfs, including Gandalf), and the castrated Phrygian fertility god, Attis.  I veered then back into Beckford's Vathek, and found out about the Sultan Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif of Morocco , one of the true inspirations for the cruel Caliph Vathek.  In the same edition, Beckford wrote about his dream and described some of his travels in letters (hilarious!).  I ...
Read more

Borges - VIÑETAS CARDINALES DE BUENOS AIRES (1927)

  VIÑETAS CARDINALES DE BUENOS AIRES NORTE Almacén rosadito de los que a mí me gustan . La luna entera, encima . La luna oronda, dura . El almacén — de tierno — una mejilla . SUR Ésta, que no es mi tierra , porque no quiere darme ni un querer ni otra pena , cuida en los verdes patios, cedrón y caña de ámbar… ¡Lo bien que yo sabría merecerla! ESTE El viento zamarrea las esquinas tembleques del Paseo de Julio . En la noche rotosa, los compadritos muertos le apuntalan los muros . OESTE El callejón final con su poniente . Inauguración de la pampa . Inauguración de la muerte .   * Inicial , Buenos Aires, Año 3, Nº 11, febrero de 1927.   ======================================== CARDINAL VIGNETTES OF BUENOS AIRES NORTH A pinkish store of the kind I like. The full moon, above. The plump, hard moon. The store - so tender - a cheek. SOUTH This land, which is not mine, because it refuses to give me either love or another sorrow, tends in the green patios, lemon verbena and amber can...
Read more

#45 Fri (8/5/22) - [OW] The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol

"La palabra habría sido en el principio un símbolo mágico, que la usura del tiempo desgastaría. La misión del poeta sería restituir a la palabra, siquiera de un modo parcial, su primitiva y ahora oculta virtud. Dos deberes tendría todo verso: comunicar un hecho preciso y tocarnos físicamente, como la cercanía del mar" J.L.Borges en Prólogo a "La Rosa Profunda" (1975)   “The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of time wore out. The mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force. All verse should have two obligations: to communicate a precise instance and to touch us physically, as the presence of the sea does." J.L. Borges in Prologue to "La rosa profunda" (1975) (SP, 343-345, A.R.)   The passage continues in the next line; I have here an example from Virgil:   sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt   After providing two more examples, he ...
Read more