domingo, 22 de dezembro de 2013

Η Πόλις

Είπες· «Θα πάγω σ’ άλλη γη, θα πάγω σ’ άλλη θάλασσα.
Μια πόλις άλλη θα βρεθεί καλλίτερη από αυτή.
Κάθε προσπάθεια μου μια καταδίκη είναι γραφτή·
κ’ είν’ η καρδιά μου — σαν νεκρός — θαμένη.
Ο νους μου ως πότε μες στον μαρασμόν αυτόν θα μένει.
Όπου το μάτι μου γυρίσω, όπου κι αν δω
ερείπια μαύρα της ζωής μου βλέπω εδώ,
που τόσα χρόνια πέρασα και ρήμαξα και χάλασα.»

Καινούριους τόπους δεν θα βρεις, δεν θάβρεις άλλες θάλασσες.
Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί. Στους δρόμους θα γυρνάς
τους ίδιους. Και στες γειτονιές τες ίδιες θα γερνάς·
και μες στα ίδια σπίτια αυτά θ’ ασπρίζεις.
Πάντα στην πόλι αυτή θα φθάνεις. Για τα αλλού — μη ελπίζεις—
δεν έχει πλοίο για σε, δεν έχει οδό.
Έτσι που τη ζωή σου ρήμαξες εδώ
στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή, σ’ όλην την γη την χάλασες. 

Κ.Π. Καβάφης


The City

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
 
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world. 

Keeley and Sherrard (trad.)


terça-feira, 17 de dezembro de 2013

Livros do ano

Tudo o que não consta desta lista é oficialmente uma merda e pode ser guilhotinado (incluindo tudo o que se publicou no mundo inteiro e eu não li, inclusões na lista podem ser especialmente consideradas mediante o envio de um email com recensões obsequiosas a qualquer volume da minha obra completa que me sensibilizem singularmente para os vossos génios, learn, bitches, se eu estabeleço um sistema em que digo que é bom, estou a pontificar e isso é o que basta para ter kudos). 

The File on H, Kadaré
The Economy of the Unlost, Carson
A Death in the Family, Karl Ove Knausgaard
Os Cães de Tessalónica, Kjell Askildsen
Aimless Love, Billy Collins
Across the Land and the Water, W. G. Sebald
Servidões, Herberto Helder
Broken Hierarchies, Geoffrey Hill (não li, mas mal entrou em casa, desatou a empestar tudo com o cheiro de um dos dois únicos de ambos os tipos de poesia de qualidade que conheço: aquela que é grande e aquela que eu digo que presta).
Oração Fria, Antonio Gamoneda
Laços de Família, Clarice Lispector (desde 1920 livro do ano)
Os Grão-Capitães, Jorge de Sena (livro do ano desde 1919, o último parágrafo de "Homenagem ao Papagaio Verde" epitomiza todos os meus pensamentos sobre quanto é humanidade que para aí respira, alminhas).
The School Among the Ruins, Adrienne Rich
Estradas Secundárias: Doze Poetas Irlandeses, AAVV 
Men in The Off Hours, Carson (desconfio que também já tinha sido livro do ano em 2012) 
The Spirit Level, Heaney (tem um poema que começa assim: no such thing/ as innocent/ bystanding
Le Piccolle Virtù, Natalia Ginzburg (inclui: "Lui e io", "Il mio mistiere" e "I Rapporti Umani"e, se não incluísse também aquele ensaio em que com alguma injustiça diz muito mal de Inglaterra, também chegava).
& etc., Uma Editora no Subterrâneo (também não li, mas tem de constar da lista, a culpa fica com os gajos da Pó dos Livros, única livraria disposta a enviar livros para estrangeirados que conheço, que ainda não mo fez chegar).
Campo Santo, Sebald

Se as listas esperassem mais um pouco, desconfio que o Roots & Branches do Duncan ainda cabia aqui. 
Não me apeteceu fazer itálicos.

sábado, 26 de outubro de 2013

Dilemma

'Thus the sound of speech strives to "express" subjective and objective happening, the "inner" and the "outer" world; but what of this it can retain is not the life and individual fullness of existence, but only a dead abbreviation of it*.' Literature can transcend this dilemma only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication.

W. G. Sebald, "Strangeness, Integration and Crisis: On Peter Handke's Play KasparCampo Santo, Anthea Bell (trad.), Sven Meyer (ed.), Penguin Books, 2005, p.67.

*Citação de Ernst Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos (Leipzig e Berlim, 1925, pp-6-7).

segunda-feira, 21 de outubro de 2013

Mycenae Lookout

Cities of grass. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace.
I'd come to with the night wind on my face,
Agog, alert again, but far, far less

Focused on victory than I should have been -
Still isolated in my old disdain
Of claques who always needed to be seen

And heard as the true Argives. Mouth athletes,
quoting the oracle and quoting dates,
Petioning, accusing, taking votes.

No element that should have carried weight
Out of the grievous distance would translate
Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.

The little violets' heads bowed on their stems,
The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim
And star-lace, it was more through them

I felt the beating of the huge time-wound
We lived inside. My soul wept in my hand
When I would touch them, my whole being rained

Down on myself, I saw cities of grass,
Valleys of longing, tombs, a wind-swept brightness,
And far-off, in a hilly, ominous place,

Small crowds of people watching as a man
Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran
Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.

Seamus Heaney, 'Mycenae Lookout', The Spirit Level, Faber & Faber, 1996.

domingo, 20 de outubro de 2013

Mycenae Lookout

The ox is on my tongue

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

2. Cassandra

No such thing
as innocent 
bystanding.

Her soiled vest,
her little breasts,
her clipped, devast-

ated, scabbed
punk head,
the char-eyed

famine gawk -
she looked
camp-fucked

and simple.
People
could feel

a missed
trueness in them
focus,

a homecoming
in her dropped-wing,
half-calculating

bewilderment.
No such thing
as innocent.

Old King Cock-
of-the-Walk
was back,

King Kill-
the-Child-
and-Take-

What Comes,
King Agamem-
non's drum-

balled, old buck's
stride was back.
And then her Greek

words came,
a lamb
at lambing time,

bleat of clair-
voyant dread,
the gene-hammer

and tread
of the roused god.
And a result-

ant shock desire
in bystanders
to do it to her

there and then.
Little rent 
cunt of their guilt:

in she went 
to the knife,
to the killer wife,

to the net over 
her and her slaver,
the Troy reaver,

saying, 'A wipe
of the sponge
that's it.

The shadow-hinge
swings unpredict-
ably and the light's

blanked out.'

Seamus Heaney, 'Mycenae Lookout', The Spirit Level, Faber & Faber, 1996.

quarta-feira, 16 de outubro de 2013

Todo o paradoxo é desadequação?

He used to speak in oracular riddles about the three paradoxes of his life: he was a Gaul who spoke Greek, a eunuch who was prosecuted for adultery, a man who had quarreled with the emperor and was still alive.

Maud Gleason, Making Men, 'Chapter 1: Favorinus and his Statue', Princeton University Press, 1995.

sábado, 12 de outubro de 2013

To a Dutch Potter in Ireland

Then I entered a strongroom of vocabulary
Where words like urns that had come through the fire
Stood in their bone-dry alcoves next a kiln

And came away changed, like the guard who'd seen
The stone move in a diamond-blaze of air
Or the gates of horn behind the gates of clay.

I

The soils I knew ran dirty. River sand
Was the one clean thing that stayed itself
In that slabberyclabbery, wintry, puddled ground

Until I found Bann clay. Like wet daylight
Or viscous satin under the felt and frieze
Of humus layers. The true diatomite

Discovered in a little sucky hole,
Grey-blue, dull-shining, scentless, touchable -
Like the earth's old ointment box, sticky and cool.

At that stage you were swimming in the sea
Or running from it, luminous with plankton,
A nymph of phosphor by the Norder Zee,

A vestal of the goddess Silica,
She who is under grass and glass and ash
In the fiery heartlands of Ceramica.

We might have know each other then, in that
Cold gleam-life under ground and off the water.
Weird twins of puddle, paddle, pit-a-pat,

And might have done the small forbidden things -
Worked at mud-pies or gone to high in swings,
Played 'secrets' in the hedge or 'touching tongues' -

But did not, in the terrible event.
Night after night instead, in the Netherlands,
You watched the bombers kill; then, heaven sent,

Came  backlit from the fire through war and wartime
And ever after, every blessed time,
Through glazes of fired quartz and iron and lime.

And if glazes, as you say, bring down the sun,
Your potter's wheel is bringing up the earth.
Hosannah ex infernis. Burning wells.

Hosannah in clean sand and kaolin
And, 'now that the rye crop waves beside the ruins',
In ash-pitts, oxides, shards and chlorophylls.

2 After liberation

i

Sheer, bright-shining spring, spring as it used to be,
Cold in the morning, but as broad daylight
Swings open, the everlasting sky
Is a marvel to survivors.

In a pearly clarity that bathes the fields
Things as they were come back; slow horses
Plough the fallow, war rumbles away
In the near distance

To have lived it through and now be free to give
Utterance, body and soul - to wake and know
Every time that it's gone and gone for good, the thing
That nearly broke you -

Is worth it all, the five years on the rack,
The fighting back, the being resigned, and not
One of the unborn will appreciate
Freedom like this ever.

from the Dutch of J.C. Bloem (1887-1966)

Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level, Faber & Faber, 1996.

sexta-feira, 11 de outubro de 2013


Mint

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the backyard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Morning when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.

Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level, Faber & Faber, 1996

quinta-feira, 26 de setembro de 2013

Guardar


Episódio 3 de Forma de Vida.

I'm a fool, but

Crossing the water

In early November 1980
walking across
the Bridge of Peace I almost
went out of my mind

*

Natural History

In Man it is
the Quadruped
in the Woman the Amphibian
who has the upper hand

*

Abandoned

like Kafka's essay
on Goethe's abominable
nature

*

Obscure Passage

Aristotle did not
apprehend at all
the word he found
in Archytas

W. G. SebaldAcross the Land and Water, Ian Galbraith (trad.) Everyman, New York, 2013.

quarta-feira, 25 de setembro de 2013

Estado da coisa

Ouvir um idiota perorar sobre poesia. Dar-lhe o ouvido. Cortar a orelha e depositá-la nas suas mãos. Fixá-lo com um olhar inquisidor, torcidamente agradecido. (Estou sempre tão grata por um sistema que me ilumine, etc.). E acarinhar a intenção de lhe pregar esse susto. Demorar os olhos em cima deste homem. Tu continuas a carregar perguntas, tens cada vez menos respostas. E se andas, não aumentas, não evoluis. Mas como qualquer outro carregas contigo coisas. Uma hierarquia de desrazões. Quanto mais explicações, menos motivos. No coração de cada ideia há uma pedra, preta e compacta porque absorveu toda a luz em redor. Tu estendeste a mão e estavas à espera de que houvesse calor.
A fábula é sempre a mesma. Querias falar e estavas à espera de que alguém te ouvisse. Mas não há língua que chegue para este grito, ouvido em que ele encaixe completamente. Isto é sobre uma comunicação interrompida. A história de um erro. Esmurrar a parede com a chave e estar à espera que o que se abrisse fosse porta.

The sky at night

A belated excursion to
the stone collection
of our feelings

Little left here
worth showing
alas

Is there
from an anthropological perspective
a need for love

Or merely for
yearnings easy
to disappoint

Which stars
go down
as white dwarfs

What relation
does a heavy heart bear
to the art of comedy

Does the hunter
Orion have answers
to such questions

Or are they
too closely guarded
by the Dog star

W. G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water, Ian Galbraith (trad.) Everyman, New York, 2013.

quarta-feira, 4 de setembro de 2013

Alguns desenhos

Alguém, algures antes de mim, esboçou na parede
em linhas hesitantes que só um labor meticuloso
firmou e robusteceu, alguns desenhos toscos.
O espaço não define o céu e o mar, antes

o determinam o movimento das embarcações e o grito
silencioso que das enxárcias o cruza de lés a lés.
De perfil apruma a proa contra a corrente a nave azul
como que furtando-se à que, cor de sangue coagulado,

se lhe aferra à popa, adernando hostil. Toda a lisa
superfície do muro se encrespa no que parece
um entrechocar de ondas ou frémito de combate.

Aqui, algures antes de mim, alguém esgarçou
no negrume desta clausura um rasgão de luz
para que, imóvel e jacente, eu viaje na memória da pedra.

Rui Knopfli, A Ilha de Próspero: Roteiro Poético da Ilha de Moçambique, s.d.

domingo, 1 de setembro de 2013

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
 From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

 From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another and die.*

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

W. H. Auden


* A varia lectio («We must love one another or die») foi recusada pelo próprio Auden.

sexta-feira, 23 de agosto de 2013

"Shotgun stories" de Jeff Nichols, 2007


Legacy

Our memories are quite similar
but pickled alive
in a poison which

accompanies objects too
as a part of this emptiness

The heartning message
that Pythagoras once
would listen to the stars
barely comes down to us now

Then let us hope
our children are learning
to dance in the dark

W. G. Sebaldde "School Latin", Across the Land and Water, Ian Galbraith (trad.) Everyman, New York, 2013.

V. Perdu dans ces filaments

But the certitude nonetheless
That a human heart
Can be crushed - Eli Eli
The choice between Talmud and Torah
Is hard and there is no relying
On Bleston's libraries
Where for years now I have sought
With my hands and eyes the displaced
Books which so they say Mr. Dewey's
International classification system
With all its numbers still cannot record
A World Bibliography of Bibliographies
On ne doit plus dormir says Pascal
A revision of all books at the core
Of the volcano has been long overdue
In this cave within a cave
No glance back to the future survives
Reading star-signs in winter one must
Cut from pollard willows on snowless fields
Flutes of death for Bleston

W. G. Sebald, de "Poemtrees", Across the Land and Water, Ian Galbraith (trad.) Everyman, New York, 2013

quinta-feira, 15 de agosto de 2013

Timetable

Grown sheepish
by morning I study
the grounds of my coffee

At midday I cut
a slice for myself
from the hollow pumpkin of summer

And not until dark do I risk again
the Cretan trick
of leaping between the horns

W. G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001, Ian Galbraith (trad.), Modern Library, New York, 2013.

segunda-feira, 12 de agosto de 2013

"Wittgenstein" de Derek Jarman, 1993

O Angelopoulos Faz Filmes Parados


I've always been irritated by the way that montage is such an artificial process, dictated by a cinema of efficacy. For example, a man enters, stops, and waits. In the cinema of efficacy this waiting is conveyed through montage, whereas in my work there is no montage — the scene exists in a time scale which is not reduced for the sake of efficacy. There is a material, concrete sense of time; real time, not evoked time. In my films "dead time" is built in, scripted, intended. Just as music is a conjunction of sound and silence, "dead time" in my films is musical, rhythmic — but not the rhythm of American films, where time is always cinematic time. In my films the spectator is not drawn in by artificial means, he remains inside and outside at the same time, with the opportunity of passing judgement. The pauses, the "dead time," give him the chance not only to assess the film rationally, but also to create, or complete, the different meanings of a sequence.

Theo Angelopoulos. in Theo Angelopoulos: Interviews (Entrevista de 1980 por Tony Mitchell). Dan Fainaru (ed.) University Press of Mississippi (2001)

terça-feira, 30 de julho de 2013

Mortes e Motores

Descemos por sobre as casas
Numa curva apertada e,
Num extremo do aeroporto de Paris,
Vimos um túnel vazio
– A metade traseira de um avião, negra
Sobre a neve, ninguém à volta,
Tubular, queimado, glacial.

Quando enfrentámos de novo
No escuro as pistas brancas com a neve,
Nem um som se sobrepôs
Aos altifalantes, excepto os suspiros
Solitários do piloto.

O frio das asas de metal é contagioso:
Em breve precisarás das tuas próprias asas,
Encurralado na encruzilhada onde
Tempo e vida, como faca e garfo,
Se cruzam, a linha da vida na tua palma da mão
Se parte, e a curva deixada pela passagem de um avião
Se encontra com a linha rasa do horizonte.

Imagens de alívio:
Pijamas de hospital, ecrãs à volta de uma cama,
Um homem de cara ensanguentada,
Sentado no catre, conversa animado
Por entre lábios cheios de cortes:
Vão acabar por te deixar ficar mal.

Vais dar por ti sozinho,
A acelerar em direcção a um beco
Sem saída, tarde de mais para parar,
E vais saber como é leve a morte;
Ficarás espalhado como destroços,
Pedaços de ti, cada um de formato diferente,
Hão-de projectar-se, ficarão alojados no coração
Daqueles que te amam.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, in Estradas Secundárias: Doze Poetas Irlandeses, Hugo Pinto Santos (Tradução, Selecção e Posfácio), Ítaca, Artefacto, 2013.

terça-feira, 23 de julho de 2013

A kite is a victim

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame in your drawer.

A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won't give up,
or the wind die down.

A kite is the last poem you have written,
so you give it to the wind,
but you don't let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.

A kite is a contract of glory
that must be made with the sun,
so you make friends with the field
the river and the wind,
then you pray the whole cold night before,
under the traveling cordless moon,
to make you worthy and lyric and pure.

Leonard Cohen in The Spice-Box of Earth, Strange Music, Jonathan Cape, 1993

Herberto

Com tanta coisa que vale a pena dizer sobre o último livro do Herberto (nem que seja pela estúpida alegria masturbatória de poder dizer versos daquilo no repeat), a conversa ser sobre tiragens e número de exemplares e alfarrabistas especuladores, de resto a mesma conversa há anos. 

segunda-feira, 22 de julho de 2013

3 Poemas de «Deixa-nos Comparar Mitologias» de Leonard Cohen


Fotografia de Lindsay Bottos-Sewell

POEMA

Falaram-me de um homem
que diz palavras tão belamente
que basta pronunciar-lhes o nome
para as mulheres se lhe entregarem.

Se é mudo que estou ao lado do teu corpo
enquanto como tumores o silêncio floresce nos nossos lábios
é porque oiço um homem subir as escadas
e aclarar a garganta à nossa porta.

sexta-feira, 19 de julho de 2013

Documentário

Ladies & Gentleman... Mr Leonard Cohen

Poem Unlimited

δούπησεν δὲ πεσών, ἀράβησε δὲ τεύχε’ ἐπ’ αὐτῷ.
αἵματί οἱ δεύοντο κόμαι Χαρίτεσσιν ὁμοῖαι
πλοχμοί θ’, οἳ χρυσῷ τε καὶ ἀργύρῳ ἐσφήκωντο.
οἷον δὲ τρέφει ἔρνος ἀνὴρ ἐριθηλὲς ἐλαίης
χώρῳ ἐν οἰοπόλῳ, ὅθ’ ἅλις ἀναβέβροχεν ὕδωρ,
καλὸν τηλεθάον· τὸ δέ τε πνοιαὶ δονέουσι
παντοίων ἀνέμων, καί τε βρύει ἄνθεϊ λευκῷ·
ἐλθὼν δ’ ἐξαπίνης ἄνεμος σὺν λαίλαπι πολλῇ
βόθρου τ’ ἐξέστρεψε καὶ ἐξετάνυσσ’ ἐπὶ γαίῃ·
τοῖον Πάνθου υἱὸν ἐϋμμελίην Εὔφορβον
Ἀτρεΐδης Μενέλαος ἐπεὶ κτάνε...

Ilíada 17

And he fell with a thud, and over him his armor clanged. In blood was his hair drenched that was like the hair of the Graces, and his tresses that were braided with gold and silver. And as a man rears a lusty sapling of an olive in a lonely place where water wells up abundantly, a noble sapling and fair-growing; and the breezes of all the winds make it quiver, and it burgeons out with white blossoms; but suddendly the wind coming with a mighty tempest tears it out of its hollow, and lays it low on the earth, even so did Menelaus, son of Atreus, slay Panthous' son, Euphorbus of the good ashen spear...

Tradução de A. Murray (Loeb, 1925).