リルケの書簡集の冒頭におかれた「断片日記」のなかに、つぎの情景がみいだされる。| Sebastián Arancibia

This book is a Japanese translation of the work “El ensueño poético, al contrario…” (“The poetic reverie, to the contrary…”) by Sebastián Arancibia, originally published in Spanish in 2021 utilizing a copy of the book “La poética del espacio” (“The poetics of space”) by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard.

In this work, the author searches in public archives for digital photographs that can endow visuality to a passage in which Rainer Maria Rilke – cited by Bachelard in “La poética del espacio” – remembers the profound impression that a solitary cabin provoked in him, in the middle of the night, illuminated solely by the light of a lamp. This fact, which Rilke witnesses with two friends, makes him contemplate the night as if for the first time.

In a world filled with images, can we find preexisting visualities that bring us closer to that which Rilke saw? This is the origin of the process used in this book, that in a first version in Spanish utilized the Photography Collection of the National Library of Chile. In this version in Japanese, the search for images was done in local institutions. And just like in the original edition, the page that describes the encounter and his further reflections, is constantly repeated until it constructs a grand parentheses in which the photographs are assembled.

All of the images used in the present book were obtained through the platform JapanSearch and pertain to the historical Archive of photographs and postcards of the Prefecture of Aomori, Japan.