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Thrown out in a glittering arc
as clear as the winterbourne,
the jug of Murphy's I threw back
goes hissing of the stone.

Whatever I do with all the black
is my business alone.

Don Paterson, Nil Nil

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.)

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.

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.

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 slabbery, clabbery, 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The Shield of Achilles

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

W. H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles, Faber & Faber, 1955.

13

metal, the ore in the mountain, exists,

darkness in mine shafts, milk not let down
from mother's breasts, an ingrown dread where

whisperings exist, whisperings exist
the cell's oldest, fondest collusion

consider this market, consider this import
and export of fathers, half bullies
half tortured soldiers, consider

their barren last vanishing, metal
to metal, as the amount of unsown maize
grows and the water shortage grows

speak now of mildness, now of the mystery
of salt; speak now of mediation, of mankind, of
courage; tell me that the marble of banks
can be eaten; tell me that the moon is lovely,
that the extinct moa easts green melon,

that merriment exists, is thriving,
that moss animals and mackerel shoals exist, that
means of giving up, of descent, exist, and
physical portioning out, as in poems, of matchless
earthly goods, that pity exists

Inger Christensen, Alphabet, Susanna Nied, 2000

12

life, the air we inhale exists
a lightness in it all, a likeness in it all,
an equation, an open and transferable expression
in it all, and as tree after tree foams up in
early summer, a passion, passion in it all,
as if in the air's play with elm keys falling
like manna there existed a simply sketched design,
simple as happiness having plenty of food
and unhappiness none, simple as longing
having plenty of options and suffering none,
simple as the holy lotus is simple
because it is edible, a design as simple as laughter
sketching your face in the air

Inger Christensen, Alphabet, Susan Nied (trad.), New Directions Paperbook, 2001

Wants

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff -
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the table of fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death -
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived, Faber & Faber, 1955.

Deceptions

'Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain consciousness until the next morning. I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt.'

-Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day,
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived, Faber & Faber, 1955 (1st edn.).

súbito

até cada objecto se encher de luz e ser apanhado
por todos os lados hábeis, e ser ímpar,
ser escolhido,
e lampejando do ar à volta,
na ordem do mundo aquela fracção real dos dedos juntos
como para escrever cada palavra:
pegar ao alto numa coisa em estado de milagre: seja:
um copo de água,
tudo pronto para que a luz estremeça:
o terror da beleza, isso, o terror da beleza delicadíssima
tão súbito e implacável na vida administrativa

Herberto Helder, Servidões, Assírio & Alvim, 2013

não é um

a noite que no corpo eu tanto trouxe, setembro, o estio,
pálpebras seladas, unhas, e o sangue por baixo e em cima a faca
com que se talha a mão e a frase um pouco longa sangra,
e consta que no verso e reverso da língua se está mais vivo,
assim o súbito nos abra,
nos puxe, digo eu, ao sorvedouros do sono,
e seus estados e obras,
eu que sou isento, digo, que me devore um buraco ou fora ou dentro,
ou galáctico, ou uma pontada no coração tão de repente,
se alguém se vai embora não sei de onde para onde,
se se murmura: que toda a gente morre de si: ou agora ou
um pouco mais tarde, o que está certo
como qualquer mistério:
água quebrando os dedos até às pontas quando se escreve
de uma ponta à outra sobre as riscas do papel cantante,
mais coisa menos coisa, pequena coisa, ou: riacho frio, sorve-o a areia
e acaba ali, como esta curta ária aqui tão perto do comêço
de seu esperançoso esperanto tanto quanto
já sabe alguém que aqui se capitula,
e abre este capítulo:
que tudo acaba: canção, talento, alento, papel, esfereográfica,
alguma coisa movida a estrangeiro longíquo,
coisa fora do sistema, e mete medo,
e não é a beleza,
não é um rosto que estremeça junto ao nosso rosto,
e o pretexto é sempre este:
orvalho

Herberto Helder, Servidões, Assírio & Alvim, 2013

Uma amiga mo traficou para terras de, muito muito obrigada obrigada.