Seeing that the fifth of the four reader comments that The Great Stage has elicited so far was spoken in praise of the Karl Kraus quote at the top of last month’s big VCA piece, here, mid-week, are some more Kraus translations, with the promise of reams more if someone can find me a publisher:
The aphorism never coves itself with truth, it is either half true, or one-and-a-half times true.
Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.
Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write.
Ethics is running up against the limits of language.
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
The world has been defeaned by deadly intonation. It is my conviction that events no longer come to pass, that instead clichés do the entire work of their own accord. Or if events are supposed to come to pass all the same, without being scared off by clichés, then they will cease once the clichés are shattered. The matter is befouled by the language. Our time stinks of its phraseology.
Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper, from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts of our machines.
Where will I find the time not to read so much? . . .
Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those that p*ss upon my ways and desecrate my language.
For the first time in the world SHE wants it all and HE wants nothing but her, the gulf between the sexes widens, making room for a whole lot of misery and moralism.
There are metaphors in the language of love too. Those who are illiterate call them perversions and abhor poetry.
Sex can be brought into connection with everything in heaven and earth, with holy religion and sweaty armpits, with the music of the spheres and hurdy-gurdies, with prohibitions and lumpy skin, with the soul and with corsetry. One gives these linkages the name perversions. They have this to be said for them – that they put you in possession of the whole thing when you only have part at your disposal.
The greatest ill in the world is the force impelling one to fritter away one’s inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.
If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.
If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested, nor to a psychoanalyst, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.
The egghead who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without re-stating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered a smartarse.
The report’s distortion of reality is the truly faithful report on reality.
Journalism, which has driven Spirit into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of its pastures. The hack would like to be a full-blown published author. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach; in its hands eternity itself becomes topical; if it weren’t that eternity just as easily becomes an anachronism too if you let a journalist near it. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. It ages confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.
Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.
The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together in the thought.
Woe betide an age in which art doesn’t make the earth less cocksure of itself, in which the artist and not mankind faints before the abyss separating the artist from mankind!
Culture comes to an end when barbarians erupt out of its midst.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment