De Argentijnse dichter, essayist en literatuurwetenschapper Roberto Juarroz werd geboren in Coronel Dorrego op 5 oktober 1925. Zie ook mijn blog van 5 oktober 2009 en ook mijn blog van 5 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Roberto Juarroz op dit blog.

Interior deserts

Interior deserts,

vague litanies for someone who died

leaving all the doors open.

A gray cloak over another cloak of no color.

Excessive densities.

Even the wind casts a shadow.

Mockery of the landscape.

Nothing left to call to

but a flat dark sun

or an endless rain.

Or wipe out the landscape

with the wind and its shadow.

And there is one further resort:

drive the desert mad

until it turns into water

and drinks itself.

It it better to madden the desert

than to live there.

Crack of imminence in the heart

Crack of imminence in the heart,

while the foot of hope

dances its blue dance,

in love with its own shadow.

There is an expectant hymn

that cannot begin

as long as the dance has not finished

its cultivation of time.

It is a hymn backward,

and inverted imminence,

the last thread to tie the fountain

before its flow carries it away.

There are songs that sing,

there are others that are silent,

the deepest of all go backward

from the first letter.

Vertaald door W.S. Merwin

Roberto Juarroz (5 oktober 1925 – 31 maart 1995)

De Tsjechische schrijver en politicus Václav Havel werd op 5 oktober 1936 in Praag geboren. Zie ook mijn blog van 5 oktober 2009 en ook mijn blog van 5 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Václav Havel op dit blog.

Uit: The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World

“There are thinkers who claim that, if the modern age began with the discovery of America, it also ended in America. This is said to have occurred in the year 1969, when America sent the first men to the moon. From this historical moment, they say, a new age in the life of humanity can be dated.

I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going thorough a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.

Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.

Today, this state of mind or of the human world is called postmodernism. For me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel's back. I am not ridiculing this, nor am I shedding an intellectual tear over the commercial expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures.”

Václav Havel (5 oktober 1936 – 18 december 2011)

Hier met de Dalai Lama

De Zweedse schrijver en journalist Stig Dagerman werd geboren op 5 oktober 1923 in Älvkarleby. Zie ook alle tags voor Stig Dagerman op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 5 oktober 2010.

One day a year

One day a year let’s all pretend

that death is tucked up, fast asleep.

That no lives meet a tragic end,

no dreams are shattered on the cheap.

The world’s at peace, there are no wars,

we hug our friend, our former foe.

No beggars die outside locked doors,

all cells are empty on death row.

Nobody’s stabbed, nobody’s shot,

no car runs over someone’s friend.

This can’t be true! – Well, maybe not.

All I’m saying is: let’s pretend.

The Big Match

After the latest round England is top of the nuclear league.

The match gets more melodramatic,

we’re all on the edge of our seats.

Reactions get more problematic

as a team first attacks, then retreats.

The Yankees were leading for ages,

but then England scored a great goal.

The pitch is on fire, chaos rages

and the ref’s disappeared down a hole.

The teams are most entertaining,

but whispers are going the rounds:

the Russians are said to be training

in secret, somewhere out of bounds.

In the streets outside the location

paramedics are standing around

with stretchers and strong medication

as the fans stagger out of the ground.

Vertaald door Laurie Thompson

Stig Dagerman (5 oktober 1923 - 5 november 1954)

Met zijn zoontje René in 1946 

De Ierse schrijver Flann O’Brien werd geboren op 5 oktober 1911 in Strabane, County Tyrone. Zie ook mijn blog van 5 oktober 2009 en ook mijn blog van 5 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Flann O’Brien op dit blog.

Uit: Drink and Time in Dublin

“—What do you think happened? What could happen? I get meself into a quiet corner and I start lowering them good-o. I don’t know what happened to me, of course. I met a few pals and there is some business about a greyhound out in Cloghran. It was either being bought or being sold and I go along in the taxi and where we were and where we weren’t I couldn’t tell you. I fall asleep on a chair in some house in town and next thing I wake up perished with the cold and as sick as I ever was in me life. Next thing I know I’m above in the markets. Taxis everywhere of course, no food only the plate of soup in the hotel, and be this time the cheque-book is in and out of the pocket three or four times a day, standing drinks all round, kicking up a barney in the lavatory with other drunks, looking for me “rights” when I was refused drink—O, blotto, there’s no other word for it. I seen some of the cheques since. The writing! A pal carts me home in a taxi. How long this goes on I don’t know. I’m all right in the middle of the day but in the mornings I’m nearly too weak to walk and the shakes getting worse every day. Be this time I’m getting frightened of meself. Lookat here, mister-me-man, I say to meself, this’ll have to stop. I was afraid the heart might give out, that was the only thing I was afraid of. Then I meet a pal of mine that’s a doctor. This is inside the hotel. There’s only one man for you, he says, and that’s sleep. Will you go home and go to bed if I get you something that’ll make you sleep? Certainly, I said. I suppose this was about four or half four. Very well, says he, I’ll write you out a prescription. He writes one out on hotel notepaper. I send for a porter. Go across with this, says I, to the nearest chemist shop and get this stuff for me and here’s two bob for yourself. Of course I’m at the whiskey all the time. Your man comes back with a box of long-shaped green pills. You’ll want to be careful with that stuff, the doctor says, that stuff’s very dangerous. If you take one now and take another when you get home, you’ll get a very good sleep but don’t take any more till to-morrow night because that stuff’s very dangerous.”

Flann O’Brien (5 oktober 1911 – 1 april 1966)

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 5e oktober ook mijn vorige blog van vandaag.