Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934. He is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, the national bestseller Book of Longing, and has released seventeen albums.

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Published in 1956 when he was twenty-two years old, Let Us Compare Mythologies is Leonard Cohen's first book. Long out of print, it is now available exactly as it appeared fifty years ago as one of the four hundred copies published by the McGill Poetry Series in Canada, with its original cover and illustrations by Canadian artist Freda Guttman.

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Let Us Compare Mythologies

Ecco

Chapter One

for wilf and his house


When young the Christians told me
how we pinned Jesus
like a lovely butterfly against the wood,
and I wept beside paintings of Calvary
at velvet wounds
and delicate twisted feet.

But he could not hang softly long,
your fighters so proud with bugles,
bending flowers with their silver stain,
and when I faced the Ark for counting,
trembling underneath the burning oil,
the meadow of running flesh turned sour
and I kissed away my gentle teachers,
warned my younger brothers.

Among the young and turning-­great
of the large nations, innocent
of the spiked wish and the bright crusade,
there I could sing my heathen tears
between the summersaults and chestnut battles,
love the distant saint
who fed his arm to flies,
mourn the crushed ant
and despise the reason of the heel.

Excerpted from Let Us Compare Mythologiesby Leonard Cohen Copyright © 2007 by Leonard Cohen. Excerpted by permission.
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