Boas notícias

De Isaac Babel, será publicada uma antologia de contos, igualmente no primeiro trimestre de 2011.

A habilidade mais simples

The village floated and bulged, crimson clay oozing from its gloomy wounds. The first star flashed above me and tumbled into the clouds. The rain whipped the willow trees and dwindled. The evening soared into the sky like a flock of birds and darkness laid its wet garland upon me. I was exhausted, and, crouching beneath the crown of death, walked on, begging fate for the simplest ability - the ability to kill a man.

Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, Nathalie Babel (ed.), Peter Constantine (trad.), Norton, 2003

O irmão gémeo

Apresento-vos o irmão gémeo da Ilíada e do Guerra e Paz, versão short-stories. Recomendo-a nesta edição da Norton, porque a tradução é muito boa, embora o projecto gráfico seja desastroso.

Contos que são poemas longos

And the image of southern Jews flares up in my memory - jovial, potbellied, sparkling like cheap wine. There is no comparasion between them and the bitter aloofness of these long bony backs, these tragic yellow beards. In their fervent features, carved by torture, there is no fat or warm pulse of blood. The movements of the Galician and the Volhynian Jew are abrupt, brusque, and offensive to good taste, but the power of their griff is filled with dark grandeur, and their secret contempt for the Polish masters is boundless. Looking at them I understood the fiery history of these faraway interlands, the stories of Talmudists who leased out taverns, of rabbis who dabbled in moneylending, of girls who were raped by polish mercenaries and for whom polish magnates shot themselves.

Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, Nathalie Babel (ed.), Peter Constantine (trad.), Norton, 2003

"... And you shoot because you are the Revolution. But revolution is happiness. And happiness does not like orphans in its house. A good man does good deeds. The Revolution is the good deed done by good men. But good men do not kill. Hence the Revolution is done by bad men. But the Poles are also bad men. Who is going to tell Gedali which is the revolution and which the counterrevolution? I have studied the Talmud. I love the commentaries of Rashi and the books of Maimonides. And there is also other people in Zhitomir who understand. And so all of us learned men fall to the floor and shout with a single voice, 'Woe unto us, where is the sweet revolution?'"

Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, Nathalie Babel (ed.), Peter Constantine (trad.), Norton, 2003

Um final que tão depressa não se esqueça

He held out a tattered photograph. In it was Timofey Kurdyukov, a wide shouldered police constable in a policeman's cap, his beard neatly combed. He was stiff, with wide cheekbones and sparkling, colorless, vacant eyes. Next to him, in a bamboo chair, sat a tiny peasant woman in a loose blouse, with small, bright, timid features. And against this provincial photographer's pitiful backdrop, with its flowers and doves, towered two boys, amazingly big, blunt, broad-faced, goggle-eyed, and frozen as if standing at attention: the Kurdyukov Brothers, Fyodor and Semyon.

Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, Nathalie Babel (ed.), Peter Constantine (trad.), Norton, 2003

She raises her thin legs and round belly from the floor and pulls the blanket of the sleeping man. An old man is lying there on his back, dead. His gullet has been ripped out, his face hacked in two, and dark blood is clinging to his beard like a clump of lead.
"Pan", the Jewess says, shaking out the eiderdown, "the Poles were hacking him to death and he kept begging them, 'kill me in the backyard so my daughter won't see me die!' But they wouldn't inconvenience themselves. He died in this room thinking of me... And now I want you to tell me," the woman suddenly said with terrible force, "I want you to tell me where one could find another father like my father in this world."

Isaac Babel, "Crossing the River Zbrucz", Red Cavalry, Nathalie Babel (ed.), Peter Constantine (trad.), Norton, 2003

Este Isaac Babel é um escritor com H grande. Podia dizer que é porque ele conta histórias com o exacto número de palavras necessárias para escrever o que pretende, não há uma única palavra a mais ou menos neste Red Cavalry, mas dizer que ele é um contador de histórias é reduzi-lo. Escritores como Isaac Babel são o motivo pelo qual os livros começaram a existir e pelo qual continuarão a existir sempre.