Showing posts with label naiveté. Show all posts
Showing posts with label naiveté. Show all posts

12.27.2012

necessary influence

The young poet worried that if he read too much of X, his work would become overly influenced by X. He should be so lucky.

3.22.2010

proper names

Now, I am a person who likes simple words. It is true, I had realised before this journey that there was much evil and injustice in the world that I had now left, but I had believed I could shake the foundations if I called things by their proper name. I knew such an enterprise meant returning to absolute naiveté. This naiveté I considered as a primal vision purified of the slag of centuries of hoary lies about the world.

—Paul Celan, "Edgar Jené and The Dream About The Dream," Collected Prose (Carcanet, 1986), translated by Rosmarie Waldrop