Jun 13 2008
Trefusis revisited
I have been meaning to write a posting on this for quite some time, but have kept postponing it unnecessarily. Yesterday, as I finished watching the second part of Portrait of a Marriage, a magnificent BBC miniseries first broadcast in 1990 depicting the tumultuous relationship and ill-fated elopement of Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis in the 1920s, I decided to materialize my intention. The story is a peculiar one. Both Vita and Violet were married to loving husbands, but bound by the tempest of a love for each other that completed them and destroyed them with equal force.
One day, I may discuss Woolf’s Orlando on these pages at length, and attest to its literary value as much more than the “longest love letter in literature” from Potto to charming Donkey. However, tonight I would like to give some room on this screen for Violet to express her feelings, those of a sixteen-year-old child in love. She originally wrote the text of the letter quoted below in French, but Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage reveals it to us in an English translation. Even despite (or because of) the English, her words resound to me as a manifest of bold, relentless, full and passionate love. Let’s read it for Miss Keppel:
I love you, Vita, because I have had to fight for you so hard. I love you because you never gave me back the ring I lent you. I love you because you will never capitulate. I love you for your fine intelligence, for your literary ambition, for your innocent flirtatiousness. And I love you because you never seem to doubt my love. I love in you what I know is also in me, that is, imagination, a gift for languages, taste, intuition, and a mass of other things. I love you, Vita, because I have seen your soul.
He visto la serie tb. Ha producido en mi cierto impacto, quizas esperaba demasiado poco dada la admiracion que tengo por Vita y VIolet.
I will be waittiing for your discuss of Orlando…..
Indeed, the series is very well made, isn’t it?
Sería muy interesante hablar de Orlando en algún momento. Tendré que retomar la lectura con el sesgo que siempre tuvo para mí, el del “roman à clef”. Con gusto debatiremos el tema. Bienvenida, EMI y gracias por comentar.
Yes It is very well made! .
Siempre es interesante la obra de Virgina y Orlando es, como decirlo, fundamental a mi entender como Tres Guineas..dado que muestran un lado más ¿Salvaje? ¿Aguerrido en la metafora?..
Debatiremos y si acaso deviene esto imposible sencillamente releeremos en silencio….
Saludos.