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les collections aristophil
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LAWRENCE DAVID HERBERT (1885-1930)
Flowery Tuscany IV,
manuscrit autographe en anglais
S.d., [30 avril 1927]. 10 pages in-4 à l’encre avec quelques
ratures et corrections.
7 000 / 8 000 €
Il s’agit là d’un essai repris sous le titre
Flowery Tuscany IV
dans l’édi-
tion de Cambridge des œuvres de Lawrence et paru à titre posthume
sous le titre « Germans and Latins » ; il a été écrit au printemps 1927
lors de son séjour dans la villa Miranda, près de Florence, au moment
où Lawrence travaillait sur son ouvrage
L’Amant de Lady Chatterley
.
« It is already summer in Tuscany, the sun is hot, the earth is baked
hard, and the soul has changed her rhythm. The nightingales sing all
day and all night – not at all sadly, but brightly, vividly, impudently,
with a trilling power of assertion quite disproportionate to the size of
the shy bird […] Tomorrow, however, is the first of May, and already
summer is here. Yesterday, in the flood of sunshine on the Arno
at evening, I saw two German boys steering out of the Por Santa
Maria on to the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. They were dark-haired,
not blondes, but otherwise the true Wandervogel type, in shirts and
short-trousers and thick boots, hatless, coat slung in the Rucksack […]
When I am in Germany, then Germany seems to me very much like
anywhere else, especially England or America. But when I see the
Wandervögeln pushing at evening out of the Por Santa Maria, across
the blaze of sun and into the Ponte Vecchio, then Germany becomes
again to me what it was to the Romans : the mysterious, halfdark
land of the north, bristling with gloomy forests, resounding to the cry
of wild geese and of swans, the land of the stork and the bear and
the Drachen and the Greifen. I know it is not so. Yet the impression
comes back over me, as I see the youths pressing heedlessly past.
And I know it is the same with the Italians. They see, as their ances-
tors saw in the Goths and the Vandals, i barbari, the barbarians […] ».
Rare manuscrit de D. H. Lawrence.