The last shelfie on this blog was in June 2017?! Get with the program, Randi. Yeesh.
This year has started off pretty well in terms of reading. I really enjoyed The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown, In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri (translated by Ann Goldstein), Strangers to the City by Michael Casey, and Standing Up by Kate Forest. I also read a few Russian folklore-based novels but was sorely disappointed (probably because I had high expectations).
As I gave up buying books for Lent, among other things, I’m now working through the pile I already have. These are just a couple of things on the shelf …
Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI
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Having read Part Two last Lent — and Part Three several years before — I’m finally getting to Part One for my Lenten reading. Working backwards, yes!
I love Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s work. It’s always deeply insightful, yet approachable. At times things just hop off the page and strike me with their beauty. I end up underlining or starring passage after passage, wishing I could broadcast it to everyone around me.
I also love how Pope Benedict XVI makes use of the historical-critical method but also transcends it, focusing on both the Christ of history and the Christ of faith. It should go without saying that they are one and the same, but in the modern “enlightened” world we seem to have separated them and forgotten the significance of the Incarnation. As the Pope himself (translated by Adrian Walker) wrote in the foreword,
[It] is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolizing suprahistorical truths, but is based on history, history that took place here on this earth. The factum historicum (historical fact) is not an interchangeable symbolic cipher for biblical faith, but the foundation on which it stands: Et incarnatus est — when we say these words, we acknowledge God’s actual entry into real history.
On top of that, I deeply appreciate the Pope’s insistence (across the series) that Christ’s mission was not to be a political figure, and indeed that the New Testament constantly warns against seeking security in worldly power. From p. 40:
This temptation to use power to secure the faith has arisen again and again in varied forms throughout the centuries, and again and again faith has risked being suffocated in the embrace of power. The struggle for the freedom of the Church, the struggle to avoid identifying Jesus’ Kingdom with any political structure, is one that has to be fought century after century. For the fusion of faith and political power always comes at a price: faith becomes the servant of power and must bend to its criteria.
Christians of America, take note!
Rilke’s Book of Hours (Bilingual edition)
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Rilke is one of my favorite German-language poets, if not indeed my absolute favorite. His images are stark, his language clear, sensitive, musical and just plain lovely. While he uses rhyme and meter like a traditional poet, his work has a somehow modern feel.
Having read a bilingual edition of The Book of Images, I was very excited to find a similar volume for The Book of Hours … especially because these are explicitly spiritual poems. As the book’s subtitle proclaims, they are “love poems to God.” (I have already written about one of them on this blog.) What great love poems they must be, in a poetic voice like Rilke’s!
So far, I have not been disappointed … at least not by the German originals. They get five stars, easily.
The translations, on the other hand, get three. Maybe four. I respect the translators’ choices (domestication: no rhymes, different visual layout), and I think the translations are lovely poems on their own. However, a translation is always a reflection of the translator’s interpretation — and Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy have a very particular interpretation they want to convey. I would rather have my own, so for the most part I’m ignoring the English side of the page.
What are you reading this month?
