Averno pointed both backward and forward in Glück’s work. Like many of her earlier poems, it regarded its subjects through the lens of classical myth. Where Meadowlands (1997) explored the break-up of a modern marriage through the figures of Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, and Vita Nova (1999) examined the grief of the abandoned or otherwise love-tormented woman in the Virgilian and Dantesque masks of Dido and Francesca, Averno took over the story of Persephone. Glück’s earlier self-destructive daughter-figures, driven by “the same need to perfect,/of which death is the mere by-product,” find their quintessence in the Persephone of Averno, and in the mysterious girl who burns a farmer’s field and disappears. Averno, a book of intricate, plural perspectives, views from many angles the daughter’s need to escape the Demeter-Mother—a mother who issues “a warning whose implicit message is:/what are you doing outside my body?” In Glück’s version, the daughter marries Death (Hades) in order to flee the formidable Mother.
This story helps to make sense of the recurrent figures of the starving girl in Glück’s work—the girl who finds her dangerous fulfillment in perfectionism, in separating soul from body: “I know what you want—” the speaker addresses the girl in “Fugue,” “you want Orpheus, you want death./Orpheus who said, ‘Help me find Eurydice.’/Then the music began, the lament of the soul/watching the body vanish.” Averno may be read as Glück’s finding her way back to life, on her own terms. The book’s triumph is the sequence “October,” an acerbic variation on Keats’s “To Autumn” in which Glück finds an autumnal music of her own: “I am/at work, though I am silent.”
This story helps to make sense of the recurrent figures of the starving girl in Glück’s work—the girl who finds her dangerous fulfillment in perfectionism, in separating soul from body: “I know what you want—” the speaker addresses the girl in “Fugue,” “you want Orpheus, you want death./Orpheus who said, ‘Help me find Eurydice.’/Then the music began, the lament of the soul/watching the body vanish.” Averno may be read as Glück’s finding her way back to life, on her own terms. The book’s triumph is the sequence “October,” an acerbic variation on Keats’s “To Autumn” in which Glück finds an autumnal music of her own: “I am/at work, though I am silent.”
Eu gosto muito da Louise Glück, mas desgostei bastante do Averno. Talvez precisamente por me ter caído tanto pelos fabulosos monólogos e mitologias dela estivesse à espera dum aproveitamento mais estranhizante se não mesmo mais derivativo -mais original, quer se ateasse à história quer não, menos banal: monólogos mitológicos estão tão gastos que escrevê-los é difícil: noutras ocasiões ela muito me fez apaixonar- tendo em conta o material em que ela pegou. Não me lembro desse "October", mas também na altura ainda não lera Keats portanto duvido que tivesse podido aproveitar o intertexto. O que pode querer dizer que o meu desgostar tenha sido por minha ignorância, e que possa ter falhado redondamente na minha apreciação do livro, mas penso que não.
ResponderEliminarEu pus o Averno a caminho há pcos dias, Miguel. Não posso falar com conhecimento de causa. Da Glück só li o que saiu traduzido num dos últimos números da Telhados de Vidro e gostei muito (tradução do Rui Pires Cabral?, salvo erro). But I'll give it a shot and then we can discuss it. Espero que esteja tudo bem contigo e que venhas em breve até cá abaixo para bebermos um café.
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