A Dog in Dürer’s Etching
“The Knight, Death and the Devil”
by Marco Denevi (1966), translated by Alberto Manguel
A brilliant, haunting response to the famous etching by Albrecht Durer. I first heard it read back in 1988, and was pleased to remember it, and to actually find at least one reading on UTube.
What is so extraordinary about this short story is that it is composed as one long sentence, that runs, like the stream of the writer's mind, as if he himself was riding along in the procession of the knight and his horse. And a dog. As if the thoughts of the observing writer clip clop along, imagining and intersecting with the thoughts of the knight himself, who is returning weary and changed to what was once his home, his youth, and his dreams from many years of war.
"THE KNIGHT (AS WE all know) is back from the war, the Seven Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the War of the Roses, the War of the Three Henrys, a dynastic or religious war, or a gallant war, in the Palatinate, in the Netherlands, in Bohemia, no matter where, no matter when, all wars are fragments of a single war, all wars make up the nameless war, simply the war, the War, so that although the knight returns from travelling through a fragment of the war, it is as if he had journeyed through all wars and all the war, because all wars, even if they seem different when seen from close to, seen from a distance
only repeat ....."
https://youtu.be/RlxcS4G0-W4?si=zoMPGGf4rSnjnOvA
