黑塞-narcissus_and_goldmund.doc

Narcissus and Goldmund NARCISSUS an ascetic monk; a rigorous intellectual remains in the monastery to become an abbot; the epitome of the masculine, analytical mind. GOLDMUND romantic, dreamy, flaxen-haired boy; celebrates the lush, lyrical, rapturous, sensuous quality of women; leaves the monastery to find his true nature; he epitomizes the feminine mind. NARCISSUS AND GOLDMUND two antithetical natures, the best of friends, who understand and assist each other. Translated by Ursule Molinaro 1 Outside the entrance of the Mariabronn cloister, whose rounded arch rested on slim double columns, a chestnut tree stood close to the road. It was a sweet chestnut, with a sturdy trunk and a full round crown that swayed gently in the wind, brought from Italy many years earlier by a monk who had made a pilgrimage to Rome. In the spring it waited until all the surrounding trees were green, and even the hazel and walnut trees were wearing ruddy foliage, before sprouting its own first leaves; then, during the shortest nights of the year, it drove the delicate white-green rays of its exotic blossoms out through tufts of leaves, filling the air with an admonishing and pungent fragrance. In October, after the grape and apple harvests, the autumn wind shook the prickly chestnuts out of the trees burnished gold crown; the cloister students would scramble and fight for the nuts, and Prior Gregory, who came from the south, roasted them in the fireplace in his room. The beautiful treetop—secret kin to the portals slender sandstone columns and the stone ornaments of the window vaults and pillars, loved by the Savoyards and Latins—swayed above the cloister entrance, a conspicuous outsider in the eyes of the natives. Generations of cloister boys passed beneath the foreign tree, carrying their writing tablets, chatting, laughing, clowning, and squabbling, barefoot or shod according to the season, a flower or a nut between their teeth or a snowball in their fists. There were