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Jun. 10th, 2008 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
polutropeHugo von Hofmannsthal is amazing. Not necessarily for the conclusions of his stories: sometimes they let you down, but only because the atmosphere that he builds up leads you to expect something great. And even when the climax is unsatisfying, there is something worthwhile in all of them.
My favorite first sentence, for example: "The sparrow hawk which the boys had nailed to the barn door was twisting horribly toward the the oncoming night." Or the last sentence of a fragmentary story: "And I touched the hand of the woman who was no longer my lover to wake her up and take her down to the dead woman who lay downstairs, her pale face heavy with beauty and mystery."
I end this with a quotation from "The Lord Chandos Letter":
It is that the language in which I might have been granted the oppurtunity not only to write but also to think is not Latin, or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language of which I know not one word, a language in which mute things speak to me and in which I will perhaps have something to say for myself someday when I am dead and standing before an unknown judge."
My favorite first sentence, for example: "The sparrow hawk which the boys had nailed to the barn door was twisting horribly toward the the oncoming night." Or the last sentence of a fragmentary story: "And I touched the hand of the woman who was no longer my lover to wake her up and take her down to the dead woman who lay downstairs, her pale face heavy with beauty and mystery."
I end this with a quotation from "The Lord Chandos Letter":
It is that the language in which I might have been granted the oppurtunity not only to write but also to think is not Latin, or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language of which I know not one word, a language in which mute things speak to me and in which I will perhaps have something to say for myself someday when I am dead and standing before an unknown judge."
