"Somebody up there likes me" de Robert Wise, 1956

Of Beauty and Consolation

Online aqui, god dammit!

To a standstill

Like that slow-motion moment

When a woman weighs the wool

Her poor old spider hands

Work all night spinning a living for her children

And then she stops

She soothes the scales to a standstill

Alice Oswald, Memorial, Faber & Faber, 2011

Like when the rainy fog

Brave Hypsenor the stump of whose hand

Lies somewhere on the battlefield

He was the son of Dolopion the river-priest

Now he belongs to a great red emptiness

Like when the rainy fog pulls down its hood on the mountains

Misery for the herdsmen better than night for the thief

You can see no further than you can throw a stone

Alice Oswald, Memorial, Faber & Faber, 2011

He became every book that he was reading

Sarpedon

Sarpedon the son of Zeus

Came to this ungreen ungrowing ground

Came from his cornfields from his leafy river

From his kingdom of paths and apple groves

And was killed by a spear

Then for a long a time he lay crumpled as linen

Until two soft-voiced servants Sleep and Death

Carried him home again they left him

Folded on the grass and a breeze from heaven

Almost lifted him up almost shook him out

And set him sighing and whispering but no one

Not even a great man not even a son of Zeus

Can buy or steal or borrow back his own last breath

Once he has hissed it out

Through the shutter of his teeth

Like the blue flower of the sea

Being bruised by the wind

Like when the rain-wind

Bullies the warm wind

Battering the great soft sunlit clouds

Deep scoops of wind

Work the sea into a wave

And foam follow wandering gusts

A thousand feet high

Alice Oswald, Memorial, Faber & Faber, 2011

Rapariga de olhar vivo

Da sagrada Tebas, da Plácia de fontes perenes, Heitor

e os seus homens trazem, nas suas naus pelo mar salgado,

Andrómaca, rapariga de olhar vivo e delicada. Trazem muitas

pulseiras de ouro e perfumadas vestes cor de púrpura,

brinquedos vários, numerosas taças de prata e marfim.

Excerto do fragmento 44 de Safo.

Versão minha a partir da edição crítica de Eva-Maria Voigt (Amsterdão 1971).

So look at my face, Marie Claire

Glass Flowers

I

I would bring the glass flowers to the broken marriages

Because of their flowering time, the once and for all

Hard petals, cups and saucers from a doll's house,

The imaginary roots that grow into the table.

II

The glass iron cooling in your hand will double as

A darning last, a curve of light beneath the holes:

Let me rock along the seams with it before your

Breath condenses on heels and elbows made of glass.

Michael Longley, Gorse Fires, Cape Poetry, 2009.

Bêbado na Lua

Gorse Fires

Cattle out of their byres are dungy still, lambs
Have stepped from last year as from an enclosure.
Five or six men stand gazing at a rusty tractor
Before carrying implements to separate fields.

I am travelling from one April to another.

It is the same train between the same embankments.

Gorse fires are smoking, but pimroses burn

And celandines and white may and gorse flowers.

Michael Longley, Gorse Fires, Cape Poetry, 2009.

"Viaggio in Italia" de Roberto Rossellini, 1954

Fragmento 39 de Safo

<...> variegadas faixas

cobrem os pés,
o belo trabalho lídio <...>

.. πόδας δὲ
ποίκιλος μάσλης ἐκάλυπτε,
Λύδιον κάλον ἔργον.

Tradução minha, a partir da edição crítica de Eva-Maria Voigt (Amsterdão, 1971).

***

Este fragmento conservou-se porque - se não me falha a memória - é mencionado num escólio a Aristófanes, como exemplo de que os Lídios eram artesãos famosos já no tempo de Safo. Uma imagem de sandálias bonitas, sinal talvez de uma condição elevada, escolha de calçado feita talvez por uma mulher elegante ou ponderada, tudo o que de um poema se salvou.

Assinar

Isto.

"Lost In Translation" de Sofia Coppola, 2003