Locks and Keys

Editor’s Notes
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The Greeks said everything, and then the Romans repeated the same for better retention. All that is left for the following generations is to explore the sophisticated constructions of mythological castles, fashion new keys or utilize picklocks. The music also becomes a key. After all, myth has primarily bitter taste for there are very few merry plots with happy endings. Only the harmony of music and poetry makes the myth acceptable for perception. But in order to achieve this, one needs to look at the face of the Gorgon Medusa of communism or fascism, for example, and then escape with one’s life like composer Dmitry Shostakovich. An excellent example! The music which itself was born by mythical past saved T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, Søren Kierkegaard, and all those for whom creative work was inseparable from music.

Someone can claim that modern, full-fledged reality leaves no place for myths, tales and legends. Indeed, it becomes more and more difficult every year to clean the Augean stables of stupidity and arrogance. While some poets succeeded in this (Joseph Brodsky, for example), others perished in the incessantly growing dunghills of public opinion. After all, Vladimir Mayakovsky at first tried to imitate Heracles only to finish with an ordinary melodrama (“The love boat has crashed against everyday routine…”). But myth is occasionally rewarding. Then poetry and music obtain the apples from the inaccessible garden of the Hesperides. Then the poets not only participate in myths but often create their own or become myths themselves. And this happens not only in the mythical past but also today; not only listening to the thrumming strings of Apollo’s lyre but also to the Louis Armstrong’s cornet.
In the end, anything, both great and small, can become a myth which will require the right key for its understanding. Let us hope that the current issue of our journal will provide its readers with the whole bunch of keys.

A. D.

Horace, Gunnar Harding, James Lasdun, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alessandro Baricco, Ruth Fainlight, Tomas Venclova, Mimi Khalvati, Gerrit Achterberg, Diane di Prima, Lars Forssell, Regina Derieva, Roger Greenwald, Hölderlin

Publicerad: 2006-09-18

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