. . . der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk . . . Felsen waren da und wesenlose Wälder. Brücken über Leeres . . .
. . . the strange mine workings of souls . . . Cliffs were there and spectral forests. Bridges over vacancies . . .
'"Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes" (...) has the quality of an uneasy dream, in which you gain something extremely valuable, only to lose it the very next moment. Within the limitation of one's sleeping time, and perhaps precisely because of that, such dreams are excruciatingly convincing in their details; a poem is also limited by definition. Both imply compression, except that a poem, being a conscious act, is not a paraphrase or a metaphor for reality but a reality itself. (...) a poem generates rather than reflects. So if a poem addresses a mythological subject, this amounts to a reality scrutinising its own history.'
Joseph Brodsky, 'Ninety Years Later' (Torö, Sweden, 1994), On Grief and Reason: Essays (1995)
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