Vivaldi Redivivus

Breve história da (re-)descoberta de Vivaldi no século XX (mais sobre a qual se pode ler também na página da Accademia Chigiana) a partir das suas óperas, com análises de várias delas assim como das respectivas gravações existentes.

Aqui.

Nelly vista por Vânia

        Tinha eu acabado de me interrogar desta maneira quando vi Nelly de repente, a poucos passos de mim, na Ponte V … Estava debaixo de um lampião e não me viu. Quis logo correr para junto dela, mas contive-me: «O que estará a fazer ali?», pensei, perplexo, e, com a certeza de que já não a perderia de vista, resolvi aguardar e observá-la. Durante dez minutos ela continuou ali parada, a olhar para os transeuntes. Por fim, passando um velho bem vestido perto dela, Nelly dirigiu-se a ele; o velho, sem parar, tirou qualquer coisa do bolso e deu-lha. Nelly fez-lhe uma vénia. Sou incapaz de exprimir o que senti nesse momento, a não ser um aperto doloroso no coração, a sensação de que tinha sido coberta de vergonha e profanada aos meus olhos qualquer coisa querida que eu amava e de que cuidava com ternura; e logo me jorraram as lágrimas dos olhos.        

        Sim, chorava pela pobre Nelly, embora sentisse também uma indignação incontrolável: não era por necessidade que a miúda mendigava; não tinha sido abandonada ao seu destino; não fugira de opressores cruéis mas sim de amigos que a amavam e que a tratavam bem. Nelly parecia querer provocar ou assustar alguém com a sua conduta, parecia fanfarronar! Porém, algo de oculto amadurecia na alma dela… Sim, o velho tinha razão: ela fora ofendida e insultada, a sua ferida não sarava, e ela, propositadamente, tentava avivá-la com este secretismo, com esta desconfiança em relação a todos nós; como se estivesse a deliciar-se com a sua dor, com o egoísmo do sofrimento, se me é permitida a expressão. Este desejo de avivar a dor e de se deliciar com ela era compreensível para mim: é o prazer de muitos ofendidos e humilhados, oprimidos pelo destino e com a consciência da sua injustiça.

Fiódor Dostoiévski, Humilhados e Ofendidos, Editorial Presença, 2008.

Fifty shades of something completely different

Provided it isn't conceived only as an exchange of mutual favors, or isn't calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potencial universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit. 

Alain Badiou (with Nicolas Truong), In Praise of Love, Serpents Tail, 2012.

Príncipe Valkóvski

Mas vou dizer-lhe o seguinte: se fosse possível a cada um de nós revelar todos os seus segredos (uma coisa, aliás, que a natureza humana torna impossível), enfim, se fosse possível uma coisa dessas, de maneira a que expressássemos não só aquilo de que temos medo e nunca diremos aos outros, não só aquilo que temos medo de confessar aos melhores amigos, mas também aquilo que por vezes temos medo de confessar a nós próprios, então o mundo encher-se-ia de um fedor tal que morreríamos todos sufocados. É por isso, falando entre parênteses, que o nosso convencionalismo e o nosso decoro mundanos são muito bons. Está contida neles uma ideia profunda, não diria moral, mas simplesmente protectora, confortável, o que é ainda melhor, obviamente, porque a moral, na sua essência, é o conforto, ou seja, foi inventada unicamente para o conforto. 

Fiódor Dostoiévski, Humilhados e Ofendidos, Editorial Presença, 2008. 

Sex, Lies and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh (1989)

Presenças Reais. Scholia.

The [Poetics of Aristotle] contains very few arguments, and the few it does contain are, on the face of them, incomplete and untenable. The celebrated doctrines of the Poetics are for the most part peremptoyy dicta of a few lines, and not theories that Aristotle tries to establish with care. The tone is as authoritative as the dicta are terse; and instead of contradicting Aristotle's claims it eventually became fashionable to reinterpret them, like Scripture. The existence of generations of commentators cows potential critics. At many points it is far easier to disagree with Aristotle; but the price of dissent is the understandable suspicion that one does not know the literature with all its recondite interpretations. The weight of tradition breeds scholasticism.

Walter Kaufmann.  Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton University Press (1968).

That's my notion

"I do not think getting married is worth while. I would rather you went on living with your father, so that I could walk over and see you once, or maybe twice a week, as people go to church, and then we should both be all the happier between whiles. That's my notion. But I'll marry you if you will," he added.

Stevenson, Will o' the Mill

Maslobóiev

– Agora, amigo, mais uma coisa – continuou ele. – Ouvi como, de início, a tua fama trovejou; depois, li várias críticas ao teu livro (palavra de honra que li, achas que já não leio nada?); depois já te encontrava de botas gastas, a andares pela lama sem galochas, com o chapéu partido… e adivinhei certas coisas. Agora ganhas o teu pão nos jornais?

– Sim, Maslobóiev.

– Portanto, és cavalo da posta?

– Coisa do género.

– Pois então, digo-te o seguinte: beber é melhor! Eu, por exemplo, embebedo-me, deito-me nas calmas no divã (o meu divã é maravilhoso, é de molas) e imagino que sou, digamos, um Homero ou um Dante, ou ainda o Frederico Barba-Roxa… É que é possível imaginarmos tudo. Ora, para ti é impossível imaginares que és Dante ou Frederico Barba-Roxa, em primeiro lugar porque queres ser tu próprio, em segundo porque, como cavalo da posta, te está proibido teres desejos. Para mim, a imaginação; para ti, a realidade.

Fiódor Dostoiévski, Humilhados e Ofendidos, Editorial Presença, 2008.

Mais aqui.

he says it's the only kind, babe

Maria Bandini

     Beneath layers of linen and curtains that his mother was saving until 'we get a better house', beneath ribbons and baby clothes once worn by himself and his brothers, he found the picture. Ah, man! He held it up and stared at the wonder of that lovely face: here was the mother he had always dreamed about, this girl, no more than twenty, whose eyes he knew resembled his own. Not that weary woman in the other part of the house, she with the thin tortured face, the long bony hands. To have known her then, to have remembered everything from the beginning, to have felt the cradle of that beautiful womb, to have lived remembering from the beginning, and yet he remembered nothing of that time, and always she had been as she was now, weary and with that wistfulness of pain, the great eyes those of someone else, the mouth softer as if from much crying. He traced with his finger the line of her face, kissing it, sighing and murmuring of a past he had never known. 

Jonh Fante, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Ecco, 2002.

XVII

In your dream we are separated by war
and after untold business somehow make our way
to the café where they keep that bright Sancerre.

It has taken half a lifetime. You in a windows eat
writing a letter, me at the window unable to make out
who it's for. You smile and sip your wine: Pouilly Fumé.

I have fifty blacks to hand which are really black
with a bit of this, if you look, and a bit of that.
I am saving the darkest dark for such a day.

David Harsent, Marriage, Faber & Faber, 2002.

lugares habitados

Each fence post measured a dream, enclosing it for fulfillment with each new Spring. Beyond that pile of stones, between those two tall cottonwoods, was the graveyard of their dogs and Suzie, a cat who had hated the dogs but lay now beside them. Prince, killed by an automobile; Jerry, who ate the poison meat; Pancho the fighter, who crawled off and died after his last fight. Here they had killed snakes, shot birds, speared frogs, scalped Indians, robbed banks, completed wars, reveled in peace. But in that twilight their father rode with Effie Hildegarde, and the silent white sweep of the pasture land was only a place for walking on a strange road to home.

Jonh Fante, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Ecco, 2002.

Light is calling

L'indépendance et la fantaisie de leur pensée

Nous sommes deux races sur la terre. Ceux qui ont besoin des autres, que les autres distraient, occupent, reposent, et que la solicitude harasse, épuise, anéantit, comme l'ascension d'un terrible glacier ou la traversée du désert, et ceux que les autres, au contraire, lassent, ennuient, génent, courbaturent, tandis que l'isolement les calme, les baigne de repos dans l'indépendance et la fantaisie de leur pensée.

Guy de Maupassant, Qui sait?

Error-Rome

Although he was losing his sight, he spent many days in archives, making endless notes – on the events in Gunzenhausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets. What horrified Paul was not only the coarse offences and the violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Gunzenhausen, not only the death of seventy-five-year-old Ahron Rosenfeld, who was stabbed, or of thirty-five-year-old Siegfried Rosenau, who was hanged from a railing; it was not only these things, said Mme Landau, that horrified Paul, but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schaudenfreunde that the schoolchildren of Gunzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazar in the town the following morning, taking several week's supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz powder and many other things from the wrecked shops.

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, Michael Hulse (tr.), Vintage Books, London, 2002

The Supplicant

prays for birds
before an ancient icon—
a stray cat.
The inbred need
to pray
is what makes God
necessary,
and not, she says,
the other way
around;
beyond that
it’s all mystery,
so don’t question
why Man creates gods
that demand
sacrifice,
condemning mortals
to spend their lives
trying to praise
godhead into mercy.
Better instead
to ask the frog
to bless the fly,
and, once the cheese
is in the trap,
to beg forgiveness
from the rat.

Stuart Dybek in Poetry, Junho de 2012.

Funambulismo

The more the poet comes to believe in the heroes and gods whose images fill his mind, the nearer he approaches the priest. However, he totally succumbs to the enchantment only when he either makes sacrifices, or indeed sacrifices himself, to the god who is the subject of his poetry. 

 Edgar Wind. The Eloquence of Symbols. OUP (1983).

Whisky

Poder e interesse

Onde estão o poder e o interesse dos poetas? Têm a sua origem em estados oníricos. E estes surgem porque o poeta é o que é em si mesmo, porque soa uma voz na alma dele que tem uma força equiparável à das sociedades, do Estado e dos regimes. Ninguém se torna interessante com a loucura, a excentricidade ou outras coisas do género, mas em virtude do poder de cancelar a distracção, a actividade e o ruído do mundo e porque se mostra capaz de ouvir a essência das coisas.

Saul Bellow, O Legado de Humboldt, Salvato Telles de Menezes (trad.), Quetzal, 2012.

Dirty Women

"The sleepy city is dreaming the night time away 
Out on the streets I watch tomorrow becoming today 
I see a man, he's got take away women for sale, yes for sale 
Guess that's the answer 
'Cos take away women don't fail"

Habemus Catullum!

Já está disponível na livraria da Cotovia (Trindade, Lisboa) a primeira edição portuguesa (integral e não censurada) dos Carmina de Catulo (tradução e notas de André Simões e José Pedro Moreira, introdução de Ana Alexandra Alves de Sousa). 

P.S. Isto é de verdade uma alegria.

Entrevista a Paulo Morais, vice-presidente da ONG Transparência e Integridade

Strindberg and Helium [não percam isto]

E o site dos génios criadores é este.

En Passion, Ingmar Bergman (1969)

Svevo

He came along, kicking the deep snow. Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardboard from a macaroni box. The macaroni in that box was not paid for. He had thought of that as he placed the cardboard inside of his shoes. 

Jonh Fante, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Ecco, 2002.

Aquiles lamenta a morte de Pátroclo

«Porquê lágrimas?» disse a mãe. «Fui até Deus.

E Ele fez o que pediste.

Foi a tua voz que Ele ouviu, suplicando-lhe “Senhor,

Até que sintam a minha falta, deixai os Gregos arder.”»

E ouviu-o, entre os soluços dele, dizer:

«Verdade. Mostrai-Lhe a minha gratidão.

Não esqueças de guardar para ti uma pequena parte.

Eu matei Pátroclo.

Eu matei-o. Matei-o. Matei-o.»

«Eee… eee… eee… eee… eee…» um som aterrador.

Algo como eu ou tu nunca ouvimos.

«Ele era o melhor. Melhor do que eu. Mais corajoso do que eu.

Mais honrado do que eu. Valia duas vezes a minha vida.

Ele escutava. Ele aconselhava. Para todos tinha tempo.

Para homens e mulheres em quem eu nem reparei.

E eu matei-o. Matei-o.»

Aquele som aterrador. Aquelas pancadas.

«Não estava lá para o ajudar quando morreu.

Não estava lá para o ajudar quando morreu.

Aquiles não estava lá. Ele não estava lá

para ajudar o seu próximo, o seu coração, o seu companheiro amado

quando Heitor o matou.

Sei que Deus disse que eu morrerei

pouco depois de matar Heitor – se for capaz.

E, mãe, podes estar certa de que sou capaz.»

‘Why tears?’ his mother said. ‘I went to God.

And He has done all that you asked.

It was your voice He heard, begging Him: ‘Lord,

Until they feel my lack, let the Greeks burn.’”

And heard him, in between his sobs, say:

‘True. Give Him my thanks.

Be sure to keep a little for yourself.

I have killed Patroclus.

I have killed him. I have killed him. I have killed him.’

‘Eee … eee … eee … eee … eee…’ a terrifying noise.

The like of which, the likes of you and me, have never heard.

‘He was my best. Better than me. Braver than me.

More honorable than me. Worth twice my life.

He listened. He advised. Had time for everyone.

For men and women that I failed to see.

And I have killed him. I have killed him.’

That terrifying noise. Those slaps.

‘I was not there to help him when he died.

Achilles was not there. He was not there

To help his next, his heart, his dear companion

When Hector killed him.

I know that God has said that I shall die

Soon after killing Hector – if I can.

And, mother, yes, be certain that I can.’

Christopher Logue, Logue’s Homer: War Music, Faber & Faber, 2001

The Blue Flannel Suit

I had let it all grow. I had supposed
It was all OK. Your life
Was a liner I voyaged in.
Costly education had fitted you out.
Financiers and committees and consultants
Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.
You trembled with the new life of those engines.

That first morning,
Before your first class at College, you sat there
Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessores
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the proprieties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. An the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny.
                                   You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judged you, and I saw
The flayed-nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,
Were terrors that killed you once already.
Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die. 
                                         That blue suit,
A mad, execution uniform,
Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,
Unable to fathom what stilled you
As I looked at you, as I am stilled
Permanently now, permanently
Bending so briefly at your open coffin.

Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters.

Aborrecimento

     - Diz lá - perguntou de repente o animado Avdéev a Panov -, acontece-te alguma vez ficares aborrecido? 

     - Que aborrecimento pode haver? - respondeu Panov a contragosto.

     - Comigo, às vezes o enfado é tanto que nem sei o que sou capaz de fazer comigo.

     - Não me digas! - disse Panov.

    - Daquela vez, lembras-te? Derreti o dinheiro todo na bebedeira, só por causa desta chatice. Tomou conta de mim, e pensei: vou emborrachar-me até cair.

     - Às vezes ainda se fica pior com os copos.

     - Mas também, o que se pode fazer?

     - E é porquê, esse teu aborrecimento?

     - Porquê? Porque tenho saudades de casa!

     - E como era a tua vida, a tua família é rica?

     - Ricos não, mas vivíamos bem. Nada mal, até.

     E Avdéev pôs-se a contar o que já tinha contado muitas vezes a Panov.

     - Alistei-me por minha própria vontade, na vez do meu irmão. Ele já tinha cinco filhos, e eu não, tinha acabado de me casar. E a minha mãe pediu-me tanto. Pensei: não me importo! Mais tarde talvez me agradeçam o bem que lhes fiz. Fui falar com o meu senhor. O nosso senhor é bom, disse: «Fazes bem, rapaz, vai!» E vim, em vez do meu irmão.

     - Fizeste bem - disse Panov. 

     - Mas agora é um tédio, acredita. E aborreço-me sobretudo porque vim na vez do meu irmão. Penso: ele agira está a viver como um rei, e eu aqui a sofrer. Quanto mais penso, pior me sinto. É uma tentação, acho eu. 

 

Lev Tolstói, Hadji-Murat, Relógio d'Água, 2009. 

    

C'est très bête. Nous sommes des gamins.

     Il murmura, tout bas:

     "Je t'aimerai bien, ma petite Made."

     La douceur de cette voix émut la jeune femme, lui fit passer sur la chair un frémissement rapide, et elle offrit sa bouche, en se penchant sur lui, car il avait posé sa joue sur le tiède appui des seins.

     Ce fut un très long baiser, muet et profond, puis un sursaut, une brusque et folle étreinte, une courte lutte essoufflée, un accouplement violent et maladroit. Puis ils restèrent aux bras l'un de l'autre, un peu déçus tous deux, las et tendres encore, jusqu'à ce quele sifflet du train annonçât une gare prochaine.

     Elle déclara, en tapotant du bout des doigts les cheveux ébouriffés de ses tempes:

     "C'est très bête. Nous sommes des gamins."

     Mais il lui baisait les mains, allant de l'une à l'autre avec une rapidité fiévreuse et il répondit:

     "Je t'adore, ma petite Made."

Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami

The Dreamers (2003), Bernardo Bertolucci

From "Punch's Day Book: Her Answered Letters"

Mornings are worse. Do you
find that? I wake as light arrives
at every crevice in the house. The birds
are a chorus of women
thrilled by new possessions. I might hear
the church bell, an aeroplane
descending in steps... The world
is close, but outside:
beyond the window-sill, beyond the gate,
a guileless cryptogram.

I shall die of my thoughts. I've become
my story's heroine
saturated by disease, the last
of the beautiful tuberculars.

All this would be solved
if I had you between the pulses of my wrists.

David Harsent, do livro Mr Punch in Selected Poems:1969-2005, Faber & Faber.

Saying Whitman in a Meth Lab

não canto porque sonho

A Blessing in Disguise

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,
But I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you
For a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs turned to the light
Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.
If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day
On the wings of the secret you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you”
You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.

John Ashbery, retirado daqui.

o destino incendeia-se

Much wisdom she knows, I see further ahead
to the terrible doom of the fighting gods.

Brother will fight brother and be his slayer,
brother and his sister will violate the bond of kinship;
hard it is in the world, there is much adultery,
axe-age, sword-age, shields are cleft asunder,
wind-age, wolf-age, before the world plunges headlong;
no man will spare another.

The sons of Mim are at play and fate catches fire
at the ancient Giallar-horn;
Heimdall blows loudly, his horn is in the air,
Odin speaks with Mim's head.

Poetic Edda. Voluspa [A Prophecia da Vidente] 44.3-4, 45, 46. Carolyne Larrington (trad). Oxford World's Classics (1999).