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Empress Elisabeth wasn't a bad poet, by the way, if you have a taste for Heine and romantic escapism.
Tuesday 24 August 2010
Benitses in the 1890s
I haven't been to Benitses for a long time. The Mayor's done a good job, but I preferred it in Sisi's time and at the end of the nineteenth century (it's not so hard to imagine).
Empress Elisabeth wasn't a bad poet, by the way, if you have a taste for Heine and romantic escapism.
Empress Elisabeth wasn't a bad poet, by the way, if you have a taste for Heine and romantic escapism.
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Empress Elisabeth:
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Wenn mir des Lebens Sturm missfällt.
Was ich und meine Mőven suchten,
Hier find’ ich’s- Ruhe vor der Welt.”
(Abschied und Rűckfahrt, 15 November 1887)
“But I return home to your bays if life’s storm displeases me. I find it here, what I and my seagulls seek- Peace, well away from the world”.
She missed the island, her vision of the Garden of Eden, and the Ionian Sea with a fierce nostalgia when away. In Sehnsucht nach Corfu, October 1887, she yearns “for the cypress trees that stand high on the grey rocks, from which, gravely and forgotten by the world, they look dreamily towards Albania…I wish I could go walking and reflect once more in the aromotic orange grove, As I used to do once upon a time, all alone with my solitary dreams”.
In “Meeresfahrt”, October 1888, she sighs, “Longing will eat one’s heart out, it robs one of peace of mind and happiness; and night and day you will dream and think back to the blue seas of the Ionian”.