Speaking to the Rose by Robert Walser

Author:Robert Walser [Middleton, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNP - Bison Books
Published: 2016-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

O how in this not large

O how in this not large, not too spacious but stylishly maintained, discreet, somehow imposing palace on the lake, on the seashore, the river, or the brook, intellectually eminent men, monks, one would like to say, brotherly cloistral cohabitants, relished baked fish and demolished it with a propriety most exquisite. The house, or the mansion, was a kind of pleasance or convalescent home for medieval devotees of culture. The proceedings were once, so it seems, in equal measure lordly and thin-blooded, festive and solemn. Up the slope ran the vines, and the one thing these knew was benignly to dispense the wine that later, at appropriate intervals, bubbled and shone in the glass, and flowed down through the veins into the being of the drinkers. By skiff or gondola or rowboat they rowed across the calm, golden lake-surface to an island not far distant, which appeared to some of them perhaps like a paradise, because it was so large, so beautiful, so inviting and welcoming, like a lady’s hat, green in summer, yellow and red in the autumn, with its elegant brim spread to the water, which seemed to touch it, kissing it with its lips, and to moisten it, this hat. On the island there was another cloistral abode of art and morals, and on the shore of the lake there smiled, pastoral, farmerly and agriculturally, the separate villages, and everything in those days went along so merrily. The lake was known far and wide as a waterway, a trade route. Deeply buried Byzantine coins were found here recently, proof of earlier mercantile endeavors and fiscal conditions and far wanderings from the Orient to the Western world. Perhaps Greek empresses trailed, at repose on splendid ships, their glorious imperial hands in the delicate, subtle, indulgent water, letting themselves be caressed by its soft, sweet, cooling mouth, as they traveled over this prettily yet grandly shaped lake, which, for any who go there, seems to lead to a land of the sagas, the domain of fairytales. For here there did exist, full of brisk activity and aspiration, towns that have meanwhile entirely disappeared, as if they had never sparkled with towers and battlements and windowpanes and greeted and flapped with pennons and standards and never from the city hall steps proclaimed peace and other treaties and trumpeted their ordinances. Then came a time when the lakeside palace was used for the purpose of overlordship, as a family took possession of it. Many a good, readable book, composed and written perhaps by Wildenbruch or some other fertile writer, was read undisturbed in the garden, the quiet garden, which extends from the façade down to the inland water, of which we think enough has been said. Evenings, no doubt, the daughters would practice études on the piano, a thing, I ask, not to be understood ironically, since voyagers, gypsying folks, wanderers, as they walked by on the road, would certainly have been rejoiced by the sensitive figures

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