Tag: literature

It is incredible to see how poetry, from the middle of the last century onwards, has become practically unreadable. Unreadable and bad, with very few exceptions that seem to belong to another time. It is no use, not even with the utmost goodwill can the problem be overcome: contemporary poetry, at best, looks interesting, it deceives when endowed with an obscurity that seems to hold some treasure. In short, the effort to understand it never pays off. It is a shame.

Even though they border on the unreal and inconceivable, mystical texts are undoubtedly more enjoyable reading than the petty literature of the banal. Because the former, like legends and fantastic literature, has a much more stimulating suggestive content than this commonplace realism, which makes reading seem like a tremendous waste of time. If it is to immerse oneself in letters, let it be so that the mind expands, and not so that it becomes trapped in what requires neither letters nor imagination.

The best literature is always that which is most connected to direct experience, on which the author’s individuality rests. No matter how much or how well he idealizes, his spirit will be most intense when describing not what he imagines, but what he knows. This is why, in many cases, it is the biography that supports the author.

Hindu literature, whose real exuberance existing translations have not yet been able to reveal to the West, can no longer inspire anything but awe in the Westerner who investigates it. The truth is that, sometimes, an imaginatively poor and precariously translated Hindu text is already capable of evoking a reality so impressive that only by using all his imaginative capacity can the Westerner conceive of it. It is therefore worth admiring it, even if grasping it may seem unfeasible or inconvenient.