Legacy
There’s a George Orwell quote that I haven’t been able to get out of my head:
[Literature] is… the only art that cannot cross frontiers. Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group.”
It’s kind of true. It struck me as true immediately. A lot gets lost in translation. And poetry relies so much on the rhythm of its words—its near-impossible to translate it without losing either the music or the meaning. Thinking about this has sometimes made me sad to be a writer. What’s the point, if the field has no staying power? No reach? Visual arts transcend language barriers, cultural barriers, time barriers. Beauty is beauty—whether it is the beauty of a landscape or an object or a face. While it’s subjective, to an extent, we know it when we see it.