Gradiva —— A Pompeiian Fancy

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ISBN: 9781333261498 出版年：2016 页码：125 Wilhelm Jensen Forgotten Books

Where had she walked thus and whither was she going? Doctor Norbert Hanold, docent of archaeology, really found in the relief nothing noteworthy for his science. It was not a plastic production of great art of the antique times, but was essentially a Roman genre production and he could not explain what quality in it had aroused his attention; he knew only that he had been attracted by something and this effect of the first view had remained unchanged since then. In order to bestow a name upon the piece of sculpture, he had called it to himself Gradiva, the girl splendid in walking. That was an epithet applied by the ancient poets solely to Mars Gradivus, the war-god going out to battle, yet to Norbert it seemed the most appropriate designation for the bearing and movement of the young girl, or, according to the expression of our day, of the young lady, for obviously she did not belong to a lower class but was the daughter of a nobleman, or at any rate was of honorable family. Perhaps — her appearance brought the idea to his mind involuntarily — she might be of the family of a patrician asdile whose office was connected with the worship of Ceres, and she was on her way to the temple of the goddess on some errand. Yet it was contrary to the young archaeologist's feeling to put her in the frame of great, noisy, cosmopolitan Rome. To his mind, her calm, quiet manner did not belong in this complex ma chine where no one heeded another, but she be longed rather in a smaller place where every one knew her, and, stopping to glance after her, said to a companion, That is Gradiva — her real name Norbert could not supply — the daughter of she walks more beautifully than any other girl in our city.