The Lord Chandos Letter by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal

Author:Hugo Von Hofmannsthal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-543-9
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

II

THEY MARK out their rectangular tennis courts on the meadows and enclose them in high, gray nets. From a distance they look like monstrous spiderwebs.

To someone inside, the landscape resembles those on Japanese pitchers whose glaze is crisscrossed by regular fine cracks: the blue-green lake, the white band of the shore, the spruce forest, over it the cliffs, and above everything the sky, delicately colored like pale heather blossoms, it all has the fine gray squares of the net over it.

The rolling hills on the other side of the road are being plowed. Just as often as the players move in order to get on the right side of the sun and the wind, the plowmen turn the heavy team and with a strong stroke heave the plowshare into the beginning of a new furrow. The plowmen plow at an even pace, the plow cleaves the rich soil like a heavy ship, and the big hands, etched by wind and work, lie heavily and steadily on the plow handles. The four players’ game varies. Now and then one of them is very strong. The whole game is carried by his shots, which are calm and finished like swipes of a young lion’s paw. The balls flying through the air, the other players, indeed the lawn and the nets in which the image of the woods and clouds is caught, everything follows his wrist, mysteriously bound to it as though by a powerful magnet.

One of the others is weak, very weak. Thinking comes between him and each of his shots. He has to observe himself. His movements are deeply false: sometimes they are the movements of a fencer, sometimes those of someone who wants to ward off stones.

A third is indifferent to the game. He feels a woman’s gaze on him, on his hands, on his cheeks, on his temples. From time to time he closes his eyes in order to feel it on his eyelids too. His mind is on the previous evening: for the woman whose gaze he feels upon him is not here. Sometimes he quite absentmindedly takes a few steps toward a ball that does not exist. Nevertheless he does not play too badly. Every so often he makes a shot with a great composed movement, as a sleeper might reach into the air for fruit seen in a dream. And the ball with which he makes contact flies back as though hit with the greater force of the stronger player. It drills into the lawn and does not come up again.

The four players’ game is variable: tomorrow, perhaps, the indifferent player will take the place of the strong one. Perhaps, too, memories of showing off and daring and lungfuls of the morning breeze will turn the one who is today quite weak into the strongest.

But the plowmen plow steadily, and the fine dark furrows run straight through the rich soil.

(1896)

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