Friday, October 30, 2009

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin... book cover & poems...




Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) was a symbolist poet, prose writer, and playwright. Openly gay, he wrote the first celebrations of
gay themes in Russian literature, and the first Russian coming-out novel, Wings (1907), in which a young man learns to accept his sexuality, which makes him feel as if he has grown wings. Kuzmin too was a poet who mined his own biography,incorporating its associations
and events in his poem-cycles.
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Wings.Story in Three Parts(Krylya) cover by Nikolai Petrovich Feofilaktov




~Poems~


Sun, Sun

Sun, sun,
divine Ra-Helios,you delight
the hearts of kings and heroes,
sacred horses neigh to you,
in Heliopolis they sing hymns to you;
when you shine,
lizards crawl out onto rocks
and boys go laughing
to swim in the Nile.
Sun, sun,
I am a pale scribbler,
a library recluse,
but I love you, sun, no less
than a tanned sailor
smelling of fish and salt water,
and no less
than his accustomed heart
rejoices
at your royal rising
from the ocean,
my heart trembles,
when your dusty, but flaming ray
slips
through the narrow window by the ceiling
onto my filled page
and my thin, yellowish hand,
writing out in vermilion
the first letter of a hymn to you,
O Ra-Helios sun!




The Sense Of Your Bidding

The sense of your bidding is unclear:
to pray, to curse, is it, to fight
you bid me, inscrutable genius?
The spring slackens, niggard, meager,
and Benozzo Gozzoli's courier
dozes in the drowsy thickets.

Hills are dark with honeyed cloud.
Look: I do not touch lithe strings.
Your gaze, prophetically flying,
is clenched, gushes no winged streams,
and beckons by no May road, trying
to outstrip Hermes in his flight.

Hobbled horses do not neigh,
Aging warriors sprawl in disarray...
Hold your palms open wide!
Risen spring is bright,
but groves of darkness are not given
to leap for joy having leapt from dreams.

The groom names not the hour,
be not guiled to tarry,
hark through ice the clarion voice,
your flax is drenched with chrism,
and, bidding goodbye to numb laze,
free, in love, you will rise.

Cizhou ware ceramic pillow...1368-1644...



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The term 'Cizhou ware' refers to a type of sturdy stoneware produced at many kilns throughout the northern Chinese provinces of Hebei, Henan and Shaanxi. These wares
were produced during the Northern Song(960-1127),Jin(1127-1279)and Yuan(1279-1368) dynasties.Cizhou wares are heavily potted and boldly decorated with freely drawn designs.They are called 'popular' ceramics (as opposed to the types produced for the imperial court).
Ceramic pillows were used by the living, but were also buried in tombs for the next
life, along with other items for daily use
.

Ex libris...





Thursday, October 29, 2009

Fritz Eichenberg... beastium fabulosium...prints



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Jorge Luis BORGES... drawing... Self Portrait




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Poignantly relating to self-portraits, Borges wrote in his The Art of Poetry:


To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water …

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.