(for Llewelyn)
This side of the truth,
You may not see, my son,
King of your blue eyes
In the blinding country of youth,
That all is undone,
Under the unminding skies,
Of innocence and guilt
Before you move to make
One gesture of the heart or head,
Is gathered and spilt
Into the winding dark
Like the dust of the dead.
Good and bad, two ways
Of moving about your death
By the grinding sea,
King of your heart in the blind days,
Blow away like breath,
Go crying through you and me
And the souls of all men
Into the innocent
Dark, and the guilty dark, and good
Death, and bad death, and then
In the last element
Fly like the stars' blood
Like the sun's tears,
Like the moon's seed, rubbish
And fire, the flying rant
Of the sky, king of your six years.
And the wicked wish,
Down the beginning of plants
And animals and birds,
Water and Light, the earth and sky,
Is cast before you move,
And all your deeds and words,
Each truth, each lie,
Die in unjudging love.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
sexta-feira, 30 de abril de 2010
Poem in October
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
Os Dioscuros, Castor e Pólux
Na versão mais corrente do mito dos Dioscuros, que é que surge atestada na Nemeia X de Píndaro, Castor é filho de Leda e de Tíndaro e Pólux de Leda e Zeus. Tíndaro é mortal e Castor assimila a mortalidade do pai. Sendo Zeus imortal, Pólux ganha deste a imortalidade.
Leda teve quatro filhos, estes dois gémeos, Clitemnestra e Helena. Estas duas ficaram conhecidas pelas razões que se sabe. A última, raptada por Páris, é causa da guerra de Tróia. A segunda mata o marido, Agamémnon, quando este regressa da guerra, e acaba por perecer às mãos do próprio filho, Orestes, que, pagando este preço, acaba por pôr fim à maldição que pesava sobre a casa dos Tantálidas.
A história dos dois irmãos acaba por contrastar radicalmente com a das irmãs. Eu prefiro a versão do mito em que, porque Pólux se recusa a separar-se do irmão, e Zeus não consegue convencer Hades a trazer Castor de volta à vida, Pólux abdica de uma parte da sua imortalidade para a ceder ao irmão e estabelece-se que ambos passariam metade do ano no Hades e a outra metade no Olimpo.
O nome de Pólux tem uma forma dupla. Os antigos chamavam-lhe também Polideuces, que significa muito doce. Justamente o que a sua história de dedicação ao irmão é.
Leda teve quatro filhos, estes dois gémeos, Clitemnestra e Helena. Estas duas ficaram conhecidas pelas razões que se sabe. A última, raptada por Páris, é causa da guerra de Tróia. A segunda mata o marido, Agamémnon, quando este regressa da guerra, e acaba por perecer às mãos do próprio filho, Orestes, que, pagando este preço, acaba por pôr fim à maldição que pesava sobre a casa dos Tantálidas.
A história dos dois irmãos acaba por contrastar radicalmente com a das irmãs. Eu prefiro a versão do mito em que, porque Pólux se recusa a separar-se do irmão, e Zeus não consegue convencer Hades a trazer Castor de volta à vida, Pólux abdica de uma parte da sua imortalidade para a ceder ao irmão e estabelece-se que ambos passariam metade do ano no Hades e a outra metade no Olimpo.
O nome de Pólux tem uma forma dupla. Os antigos chamavam-lhe também Polideuces, que significa muito doce. Justamente o que a sua história de dedicação ao irmão é.
On no work of words
On no work of words now for three lean months in the
bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:
To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.
To lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.
To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's
work.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:
To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.
To lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.
To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's
work.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
quinta-feira, 29 de abril de 2010
"I am at work, though I am silent" (sobre Louise Glück)
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.”
Sacanices
Durante a mocidade, as mais áridas indiferenças, as mais cínicas grosserias chegam a ser desculpadas como extravagâncias passionais e como indícios sei lá de que inexperiente romantismo. Mais tarde, porém, quando a vida nos mostrou tudo quanto pode exigir de cautela, crueldade, malícia, para podermos mantê-la melhor ou pior a trinta e sete graus, repara-se que estamos esclarecidos, bem colocados para compreender todas as sacanices que um passado encerra. Basta que a respeito de tudo e em tudo nos contemplemos escrupulosamente a nós próprios e àquilo a que chegámos quanto a imundície. Acabou-se o mistério, acabou-se a tolice, devorámos toda a nossa poesia uma vez que vivemos até esse momento. É nada de nada, a vida.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Viagem ao Fim da Noite, Ulisseia, 2010
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Viagem ao Fim da Noite, Ulisseia, 2010
I have longed to move away
I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night's ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death's feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night's ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death's feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
Ontem aconteceu-me o impensável (comprar um[a espécie de] guia turístico e ter intenções de o ler de uma ponta a outra)
Yes, other islands off Dubrovnik are just as beautiful, but they seem to hold nothing. Here you live in a flower bed of Greek mithology and poetry, to which sooner or later you sucumb because you realize that all these fruits of the brilliant human imagination are not fanciful chimeras but simply facts - the facts os greek life and nature. And it comes with quite a shock to realize that the roots of our own cultures are buried in this rocky soil. There is no help for it, we are all Greeks, as Shelley once said.
Lawrence Durrel, The Greek Islands, Faber & Faber, 2002
Lawrence Durrel, The Greek Islands, Faber & Faber, 2002
Pareceu-me engraçada a ideia
de João Gomes de Almeida de levar livros para a casa-de-banho. Vou começar com o dele.
quarta-feira, 28 de abril de 2010
Especially when the October wind
Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.
Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.
Behind a post of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.
Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make of you the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.
Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.
Behind a post of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.
Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make of you the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
Vladimir Khlebnikov por Brodsky
Russian is a highly inflected language. A word in Russian gets changed not only by gender, number, and its grammatical function in the sentence; it is also modified by prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. This is what everyone does, but Khlebnikov went to town with it. At times his verse sounds like what birds presumably heard from St. Francis. Under his pen, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions undergo mutations as mind-boggling as those of a cell hit by immense radiation. Beautiful or grotesque, the results are often memorable, if only because the trophy of a word's meaning is paid for with the casualties of his mutilated grammar.
About 80 percent of Khlebnikov's verse and prose are utterly unpalatable and incomprehensible. The remaining 20 percent are diamonds of an unparalleled splendor, although the trouble of extracting them from the mud heap of the rest is formidable. For that reason, and not because of Khlebnikov's anarchic cosmic worldview, the above-mentioned six volumes were never reprinted in the course of the last 40 years. He is to be represented by a selection, and this is what Nicholai Stepanov, one of the most authoritative Khlebnikov scholars, produced in Russia in 1960. This edition contained approximately 80 pieces of poetry, of various lengths, put in chronological order. A similar attempt is made now by Paul Schmidt, in English, apparently in a far more haphazard manner.
About 80 percent of Khlebnikov's verse and prose are utterly unpalatable and incomprehensible. The remaining 20 percent are diamonds of an unparalleled splendor, although the trouble of extracting them from the mud heap of the rest is formidable. For that reason, and not because of Khlebnikov's anarchic cosmic worldview, the above-mentioned six volumes were never reprinted in the course of the last 40 years. He is to be represented by a selection, and this is what Nicholai Stepanov, one of the most authoritative Khlebnikov scholars, produced in Russia in 1960. This edition contained approximately 80 pieces of poetry, of various lengths, put in chronological order. A similar attempt is made now by Paul Schmidt, in English, apparently in a far more haphazard manner.
Ler mais aqui.
Light breaks where no sun shines
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.
Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.
Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.
Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.
Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934 - 1952, New Directions Books, 1971
terça-feira, 27 de abril de 2010
no Pavilhão Hermann
Os doentes estavam deitados nas camas com trinta graus à sombra e, na verdade, todos eles, como eu também, ansiavam pela morte e todos foram também, como já disse, morrendo um após outro, de acordo com os seus desejos, entre eles também o antigo polícia Immervoll, que estava no quarto contíguo e que, enquanto lhe foi possível, todos os dias ia para o meu quarto para jogar comigo dezassete e quatro, ele ganhava e eu perdia, durante semanas ele ganhou e eu perdi, até que ele morreu e eu não. Nós éramos ambos jogadores apaixonados de dezassete e quatro e jogávamos dezassete e quatro, para matar o tempo, até que ele morreu. Ele morreu apenas três horas depois de ter jogado comigo e ter ganho a última partida. Na cama ao lado da minha estava um estudante de Teologia, que eu em poucas semanas entre a vida e a morte tornei um céptico e, portanto, um bom católico, segundo creio, para sempre.
Thomas Bernhard, Os Meus Prémios, Quetzal, Lisboa, 2009 (trad. de José A. Palma Caetano)
Thomas Bernhard, Os Meus Prémios, Quetzal, Lisboa, 2009 (trad. de José A. Palma Caetano)
______to stand(alone)in some
____ autumnal afternoon:
___ breathing a fatal
__ stillness;while
_ enormous this how
_patient creature(who's
never by never robbed of
_day)puts always on by always
_ dream,is to
___taste
____not(beyond
_____death and
______life)imaginable mysteries
e. e. cummings, 95 poems
Liveright, 2002
____ autumnal afternoon:
___ breathing a fatal
__ stillness;while
_ enormous this how
_patient creature(who's
never by never robbed of
_day)puts always on by always
_ dream,is to
___taste
____not(beyond
_____death and
______life)imaginable mysteries
e. e. cummings, 95 poems
Liveright, 2002
Pode vir quando quiser e partilhar o meu pão e o meu destino incerto
Neste momento a Casa está fechada. Foi tudo quanto consegui apurar. Boa e admirável Molly, no caso de ela ainda poder ler-me num lugar que eu não conheça, saiba que nada mudei no que lhe diz respeito, que ainda a amo e sempre a meu modo, que pode vir quando quiser e partilhar o meu pão e o meu destino incerto. Se já não for bela, paciência! Cá nos arranjaremos! Conservei em mim tanto da sua beleza, tão viva, tão quente, que chega para nós dois e pelo menos para vinte anos, o tempo de acabarmos.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Viagem ao Fim da Noite, Ulisseia, 2010
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Viagem ao Fim da Noite, Ulisseia, 2010
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