Letter from the Editorial Office — Hermann Hesse
Eda Zari places Hermann Hesse’s “Letter from the Editorial Office” beside Lasgush Poradeci’s “To My Editors”, noting the shared frustrations two poets expressed toward literary gatekeepers.
Hermann Hesse English rendering based on Eda Zari’s Albanian translation
Note by Eda Zari
“Partners in crime” — even at a distance.
Reading Hermann Hesse’s “Letter from the Editorial Office” together with Llazar Gusho’s — Lasgush Poradeci’s — “To My Editors”, or what one might call “the factory of words”, I notice that both writers, across their literary lives, faced remarkably similar troubles.
That deserves a separate discussion in its own right.
Letter from the Editorial Office
“We thank you warmly for your moving poem, which left so deep an impression on us. We are sincerely sorry, however, that it does not seem quite suitable for our publication.”
Some editorial office writes to me like this almost every day. Sheet after sheet keeps accumulating.
Autumn is in the air, and the lost son sees clearly that nowhere does he have a home.
So I write for myself alone, without destination. I read my verses to the lamp on the bedside table.
Perhaps even the lamp does not lend me its ear.
But it gives light and remains silent.
That is already much.
— Hermann Hesse
______________________
The poet of the heart, Lasgush Poradeci
To My Editors
Editors with bone-hard heads edit the poets.
But tell me, then: who edits the editors?
Editors with hearts of ice, insulters of poetry, tar-black souls who scold me — they are dogs that do not bite me.
From Vepra I
© 2020 Eda Zari. All rights reserved. Photo: Hermann Hesse by Andy Warhol.
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