Vincent to Theo · 21 February 1888
Letters from Vincent · Chapter I The South · Arles
Listen to the first sentence (French)
The letter and its translation
Mon cher Théo, durant le voyage j'ai pour le moins autant pensé à toi, qu'au nouveau pays que je voyais.
My dear Theo, on the journey I thought about you at least as much as about the new country I was seeing.
Maintenant je te dirai que pour commencer il y a partout au moins 60 centimètres de neige de tombée, et il en tombe toujours.
Now I'll tell you that, to begin with, there's at least 60 centimetres of snow everywhere, and it's still falling.
J'ai aperçu de magnifiques terrains rouges plantés de vignes, avec des fonds de montagnes du plus fin lilas.
I glimpsed magnificent red fields planted with vines, with mountains behind them of the finest lilac.
Et les paysages dans la neige avec les cimes blanches contre un ciel aussi lumineux que la neige, étaient bien comme les paysages d'hiver qu'ont fait les Japonais.
And the landscapes in the snow, with white peaks against a sky as bright as the snow, were just like the winter landscapes the Japanese made.
Selected sentences from the letter. The translation is our own.
Vincent left Paris on 19 February 1888 and reached Arles on the 20th. He came south for the sunlight, but that year Arles lay under a rare heavy snowfall. The picture is a self-portrait painted in Paris a few months before he left.
In the app the letter arrives line by line like a message, with the meaning under each word, and you can talk with the writer. Chapter I is free.
Keep reading in the app · Google Play
Credits
- Picture: Vincent van Gogh · Autoportrait au chapeau de paille · 1887 (Paris) · The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · CC0 · Public domain · source
- Letter text: Brieven 1914, n° 463 · Brieven aan zijn broeder (J. van Gogh-Bonger, 1914), deel III, brief 463 · public domain · archive.org
- Narration: made with Supertonic 3 (Supertone Inc.), model licence OpenRAIL-M.
- All sources: Lingua Museum sources and licences