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Dilemma

'Thus the sound of speech strives to "express" subjective and objective happening, the "inner" and the "outer" world; but what of this it can retain is not the life and individual fullness of existence, but only a dead abbreviation of it*.' Literature can transcend this dilemma only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication.

W. G. Sebald, "Strangeness, Integration and Crisis: On Peter Handke's Play Kaspar" Campo Santo, Anthea Bell (trad.), Sven Meyer (ed.), Penguin Books, 2005, p.67.

*Citação de Ernst Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos (Leipzig e Berlim, 1925, pp-6-7).

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.

Todo o paradoxo é desadequação?

He used to speak in oracular riddles about the three paradoxes of his life: he was a Gaul who spoke Greek, a eunuch who was prosecuted for adultery, a man who had quarreled with the emperor and was still alive.

Maud Gleason, Making Men, 'Chapter 1: Favorinus and his Statue', Princeton University Press, 1995.

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

Que palco para os clássicos?

Clássicos em performance.

Guardar

Episódio 3 de Forma de Vida.

I'm a fool, but

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.

Estado da coisa

Ouvir um idiota perorar sobre poesia. Dar-lhe o ouvido. Cortar a orelha e depositá-la nas suas mãos. Fixá-lo com um olhar inquisidor, torcidamente agradecido. (Estou sempre tão grata por um sistema que me ilumine, etc.). E acarinhar a intenção de lhe pregar esse susto. Demorar os olhos em cima deste homem. Tu continuas a carregar perguntas, tens cada vez menos respostas. E se andas, não aumentas, não evoluis. Mas como qualquer outro carregas contigo coisas. Uma hierarquia de desrazões. Quanto mais explicações, menos motivos. No coração de cada ideia há uma pedra, preta e compacta porque absorveu toda a luz em redor. Tu estendeste a mão e estavas à espera de que houvesse calor.

A fábula é sempre a mesma. Querias falar e estavas à espera de que alguém te ouvisse. Mas não há língua que chegue para este grito, ouvido em que ele encaixe completamente. Isto é sobre uma comunicação interrompida. A história de um erro. Esmurrar a parede com a chave e estar à espera que o que se abrisse fosse porta.

The sky at night

A belated excursion to
the stone collection
of our feelings

Little left here
worth showing
alas

Is there
from an anthropological perspective
a need for love

Or merely for
yearnings easy
to disappoint

Which stars
go down
as white dwarfs

What relation
does a heavy heart bear
to the art of comedy

Does the hunter
Orion have answers
to such questions

Or are they
too closely guarded
by the Dog star

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.

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
 From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

 From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another and die.*

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

W. H. Auden


* A varia lectio («We must love one another or die») foi recusada pelo próprio Auden.

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