"La Meglio Gioventù" de Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003

Alguns filmes vistos em 2010

M de Fritz Lang, 1931.
In a Lonely Place de Nicholas Ray, 1950.
The Night of the Hunter de Charles Laughton, 1955.
La Notte de Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961.
Ieri, Oggi, Domani, de Vittorio De Sica, 1963.
I Fidanzati de Ermanno Olmi, 1963. 
Nattvardsgästerna de Ingmar Bergman, 1963.
Matrimonio all'italiana de Vittorio De Sica, 1964.
Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini de Vittorio De Sica, 1970.
Scener ur ett äktenskap  de Ingmar Bergman, 1973. 
Network  de Sidney Lumet, 1976.
Una Giornata Particolare de Ettore Scola, 1977.
Fanny Och Alexander de Ingmar Bergman, 1982.
Ran de Akira Kurosawa, 1985.
Oci Ciornie de Nikita Mikhalkov, 1987.
Running on Empty de Sidney Lumet, 1988. 
O Brother Where Art Thou dos irmãos Coen, 2000.

Volta ao mundo

1.

Voltemos a isto, à contagem dos erros
na soma do mundo, à impotência do riso
contra tudo o que não sabemos mudar:
a morte, o egoísmo, o levadiço coração
humano. Porque não há mais nada (ok
há o amor - vai-te foder) e no mercado
do juízo a catequese está em alta.
Regressemos à toada desta fábrica de luz
defeituosa, intermitente como a vida.
Se não há melhor emprego para a culpa
e os domingos custam dias a passar.

José Miguel Silva, Erros Individuais, Relógio d'Água, 2010.

"Ran" de Akira Kurosawa, 1985

sobre a leitura

Para uma relação viva do leitor com a literatura universal é, sobretudo, importante que ele se conheça a si próprio e, consequentemente, que conheça as obras que agem sobre ele num modo particular, evitando seguir um qualquer esquema ou programa cultural. A via que ele tem de percorrer é aquela do amor, não aquela do dever. O facto de nos obrigarmos a ler uma obra-prima só porque é celebérrima e nos envergonhamos de ainda não a conhecermos seria um grave erro.

Herman Hesse, «Uma Biblioteca da Literatura Universal», Uma Biblioteca da Literatura Universal, trad. de Virgílio Tenreiro Viseu, Cavalo de Ferro Editores, 2010

Caryatids

Sylvia and I met because she was curious about my group of friends at university and I was curious about her. I was working in London but I used to go back up to Cambridge at weekends. Half a dozen or so of us made a poetic gang. Our main cooperative activity was drinking in the Anchor and our main common interest, apart from fellow feeling and mutual attraction, was Irish, Scottish, and Welsh traditional songs—folk songs and broadsheet ballads. We sang a lot. Recorded folk songs were rare in those days. Our poetic interests were more mutually understood than talked about. But we did print a broadsheet of literary comment. In one issue, one of our group, our Welshman, Dan Huws, demolished a poem that Sylvia had published, “Caryatids.”

Ted Hughes, in Paris Review, n.º 134, Primavera de 1995.

"Mr. Klein" de Joseph Losey, 1976

Literatura

Inventada no Ocidente muito provavelmente por um grego cego, cujo nome, Homero, pode significar O que não vê ou, dependendo de como se dividir a palavra, qualquer coisa como A Parte (o que em parte ajuda a que muita gente pense que ele nunca existiu ou que fazia parte de um grupo), por volta do séc. IX a.C., e difundida por uma escola de aedos, homens que cantavam, talvez cegos como o primeiro, foi trazida para Roma e tornada definitivamente objecto de veneração e estudo nesta cidade (então ainda a uns séculos de atingir o seu apogeu como capital de um império e do mundo) quando um tipo chamado Crates de Malo partiu a perna na cloaca maxima (expressão latina que designa aquilo que em português parece designar) e, não tendo mais nada para fazer, resolveu dar umas aulas de literatura e retórica aos rústicos Romanos, através dos quais viríamos nós  a herdar aquilo a que hoje chamamos mais sistematicamente a tradição literária do ocidente e talvez o próprio hábito dos livros e da literatura, o  de escrever e contar histórias, se é que isso não seria sempre intrínseco tivessem existido ou não os Gregos e os Romanos. 

O étimo latino da palavra literatura, a sua origem, será litterae, palavra que no singular significa letra e que no plural tem por acepção mais relevante qualquer coisa como acção escrita, o que deixa a literatura a meio caminho entre o abstracto e o concreto. É esta palavra, litterae, que depois redunda em litteratura, e que entre os Romanos significa escrito, gramática, filologia, ensino elementar, ciência, erudição, etc. A origem da palavra talvez tenha obscura raiz no grego, διφθέρα, diftera, que significará esconderijo preparado. 

A verdade é que, tanto quanto sei, os Gregos, que entre os ocidentais inventaram a literatura e sobre ela primeiro pensaram, nunca tiveram um nome que lhe chamassem, ou talvez lhe chamassem genericamente ποίησις, poiêsis, que tem raiz no verbo ποιέω, fazer. Poesia é em primeiro lugar algo feito, não  tanto fabricação mas talvez craft ou criação, acção escrita, e mais tarde poesia, texto poético, composição poética. Esta última expressão também podia ser dita, de forma mais precisa, ποίημα, poiêma, poema.

Entre os Romanos o melhor contador de histórias talvez tenha sido esse homem com um nome que traduzido para português é completamente bárbaro: Públio Ovídio Nasão. Se ainda não leram isto, vale muito a pena. Mesmo muito.

What did you make of it

What did you make of it
When you sat at your elm table alone
Staring at the blank sheet of paper,
Silent at your typewriter, listening
To the leaking thatch drip, the murmur of rain,
And staring at the sunken church, and the black
Slate roofs in the mist of rain, low tide,
Gleaming awash.

Ted Hughes, in "Error", Birthday Letters, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. 

Uma tempestade em Havana

Olhou e tornou a olhar

olhou e tornou a olhar, o universo murmura sob a chuva, meu Deus, que doce e suave tristeza, e que não nos falte nunca, nem mesmo nas horas de alegria.

José Saramago, História do Cerco de Lisboa, Caminho, 2008 (8ª edição).

Irlanda

Herbert segundo Herling

Herbert was more or less my contemporary, though he’s dead now. He was writing as a poet during the Communist regime in Poland. He was not only a great and esteemed poet, but a fierce anti-Communist. He didn’t make concessions; he had no use for Ketman and so forth—so relations between Herbert and Milosz were always rather cool. He was one of the few writers in Poland who was, shall we say, Conradian in his refusal to compromise with the regime. He was a very great poet. As much as I like Szymborska personally—she’s an extremely nice woman—I was very sorry that she, rather than Herbert, got the Nobel prize.

Gustav Herling, in Paris Review, n.º156, Outono de 2000

Ted Hughes (III)

There is a sense in which every poem that comes off is a description or a dramatization of its own creation. Within the poem, I sometimes think, is all the evidence you need for explaining how the poem came to be and why it is as it is. Then again, every poem that works is like a metaphor of the whole mind writing, the solution of all the oppositions and imbalances going on at that time. When the mind finds the balance of all those things and projects it, that’s a poem. It’s a kind of hologram of the mental condition at that moment, which then immediately changes and moves on to some other sort of balance and rearrangement. What counts is that it be a symbol of that momentary wholeness. That’s how I see it.
*
After university I lived in London, did various jobs, but I was removed from friends and from constant Beethoven, and for the first time in years I thought about nothing but the poem I was trying to write. Then one night up came “The Thought Fox” and, soon after, the other pieces I mentioned. But I had less a sense of bursting out, I think, more a sense of tuning in to my own transmission. Tuning out the influences, the static and interference. I didn’t get there by explosives. My whole understanding of it was that I could get it only by concentration.

Ted Hughes, in Paris Review, n.º 134, Primavera de 1995.

ʿÎsâ ibn Maryam

A Anunciação no Alcorão (Sura al-ʿImrân 3:41-45), em tradução versificada a partir do árabe, de F. Abu Iúçuf.

Recordemos agora quando o Anjo a Maria
Levou mensagem divinal:

Ave, Maria! Em verdade
Deus te elegeu
E fez pura
E escolheu
Acima das mulheres deste mundo!
Maria, sê tal
Que a piedade
Manifestes sem cessar ao teu Senhor!
Prostra-te, e em uníssono
Co'os demais louva, curvando-te, o Altíssimo!

(Estas recordações do que não vistes -
Porque não vos acháveis entre quantos
Sortes com canas deitam, p'ra saberem
A quem cabia a sorte de guardar
Maria para sempre, e disputaram,
Entre si, - são aquelas que de mim agora ouvistes).

... E, quando o Anjo disse:

Ave, Maria!
Anunciou-te, em verdade,
O Verbo que d'Ele vem!
Chamar-se-á o Messias,
Jesus filho de Maria,
Neste mundo assinalado
E assinalado no outro
Entre aqueles que mais perto
Estarão junto de Deus.
Sua voz será ouvida
Já por toda a humanidade,
Quer os que saiam do berço,
Quer os que sejam adultos.
E ele será contado
Entre o número dos justos!

Sura al-ʿImrân 3:41-45
trad.F. Abu Iúçuf
Poesia Alcorânica, ed. Rei dos Livros, Porto, 2002

Ted Hughes (II)

Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic—makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. We think we’re writing something to amuse, but we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can’t we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem—don’t even have a story. Don’t have a writer. If most poetry doesn’t seem to be in any sense confessional, it’s because the strategy of concealment, of obliquity, can be so compulsive that it’s almost entirely successful. The smuggling analogy is loaded with interesting cargo that seems to be there for its own sake—subject matter of general interest—but at the bottom of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, for instance, Milton tells us what nearly got him executed. The novelty of some of Robert Lowell’s most affecting pieces in Life Studies, some of Anne Sexton’s poems, and some of Sylvia’s was the way they tried to throw off that luggage, the deliberate way they stripped off the veiling analogies. Sylvia went furthest in the sense that her secret was most dangerous to her. She desperately needed to reveal it. You can’t overestimate her compulsion to write like that. She had to write those things—even against her most vital interests. She died before she knew what The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems were going to do to her life, but she had to get them out.

Ted Hughes, in Paris Review, n.º 134, Primavera de 1995.

Why madness sometimes works

I’ve sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t be a good idea to write under a few pseudonyms. Keep several quite different lines of writing going. Like Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet who tried four different poetic personalities. They all worked simultaneously. He simply lived with the four. What does Eliot say? “Dance, dance, / Like a dancing bear, / Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape, / To find expression.” It’s certainly limiting to confine your writing to one public persona, because the moment you publish your own name you lose freedom. It’s like being in a close-knit family. The moment you do anything new, the whole family jumps on it, comments, teases, advises against, does everything to make you self-conscious. There’s a unanimous reaction to keep you as you were. You’d suppose any writer worth his salt could be bold and fearless and not give a damn. But in fact very few can. We’re at the mercy of the groups that shaped our early days. We’re so helplessly social—like cells in an organ. Maybe that’s why madness sometimes works—it knocks out the oversensitive connection. And maybe that’s why exile is good.

Ted Hughes, in Paris Review, n.º 134, Primavera de 1995

A Man in His Life

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

Yehuda Amichai

"Johnny Guitar" de Nicholas Ray, 1954

Estar doido

Devo estar doido, murmurou, repetindo palavras de há treze dias. Gostaria de encontrar, nesta confusão, um sentimento que prevalecesse sobre os outros, de modo a poder responder, mais tarde, se lho vierem a perguntar, E como é que você se sentiu na terrível situação, Senti-me preocupado, ou indiferente, ou divertido, ou temeroso, ou envergonhado, em verdade não sabe o que sente, só deseja que as quatro horas cheguem depressa, o encontro fatal com o leão que o espera de boca aberta enquanto os romanos aplaudem, são assim os minutos, ainda que em geral se afastam para nos deixarem passar depois de nos rasparem a pele, mas sempre haverá um para devorar-nos. Todas as metáforas sobre o tempo e a fatalidade são trágicas e ao mesmo tempo inúteis, pensou

José Saramago, História do Cerco de Lisboa, Caminho, 2008 (8ª edição).