|
De Russische dichter en schrijver Ivan Aleksejevitsj Boenin werd geboren in Voronezj op 10 oktober 1870. Vanaf 1889 woonde hij in Charkov waar hij o.m. werkzaam is als ambtenaar, bibliothecaris en assistent-redacteur van Orlovskiy Vestnik. Daarna woonde hij afwisselend in Moskou en Sint-Petersburg. In 1891 publiceerde hij zijn eerste korte verhaal in Russkoye Bogatstvo, het literaire tijdschrift van N.K. Michailovskij. Tien jaar later, in 1901 publiceerde hij zijn eerste bundel gedichten onder de titel Listopad, die zeer gunstig werd ontvangen door de Russische critici. Hij raakte bevriend met Anton Tsjechov met wie hij een correspondentie voerde. Daarnaast onderhield hij vriendschappelijke contacten met Lev Tolstoj en Maxim Gorki. Voor het uitbreken van WO I maakte Boenin enkele reizen naar o.m. Ceylon, Palestina, Turkije en Egypte. Boenin stond uiterst vijandig tegenover de machtsgreep van de Bolsjewieken in 1917, die hij een "bloedige waanzin" noemde. In 1918 verliet hij Moskou en reise hij af naar Odessa, waar hij later de "rode terreur" van de Bosjewieken van dichtbij meemaakte. Boenin heeft over de wederwaardigheden van deze periode "Vervloekte dagen" geschreven, dat in 1925 gepubliceerd werd in het Westen. In 1920 vluchtte Boenin op een schip naar Frankrijk. Boenin verwierf de meeste roem met zijn korte verhalen, waarvan Het Einde van de Wereld, Mitja's liefde, Antonov appels De Zonnesteek wellicht de bekendste zijn. Daarnaast schreef hij dagboeken, reisverslagen en gedichten, en maakte hij vertalingen van o.m. de poëzie van Byron, Tennyson, Musset, Coppé en Longfellow ('The Song of Hiawatha'). Voor deze laatste vertaling ontving hij de prestigieuze Poesjkin-prijs.
xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
A Farewell
Blasting the malachites beneath the rudder,
The seething sea spews pearly blobs of foam.
The shore sails nearer as we move from under
The ship's smooth, towering shape and make for home.
The pier is empty. Pigeons coo and chatter
And peck at corn and scraps of food... At sea,
The ship's stern sways, the bowsprit draws a pattern
Upon the dimming sky's dark canopy.
Where now? March. Dusk. In port, the church bells ringing.
Of spring and sadness full this soul of mine.
Lights at the inn... No, home I'll go, I'm thinking!
For I am drunk - drunk though I've touched no wine.
Istanbul
Starved, mangy dogs with mournful, pleading eyes,
Descendants of the ones that in a bygone
Age from the steppeland came, and, stung by flies,
Dragged in the wake of dusty, creaking wagons.
The conqueror was rich and powerful,
And with his hordes, proud city, he invaded
Your palaces, and named you Istanbul,
And then sought rest, a lion gorged and sated.
But faster move the days than birds in flight!
Black loom the trees in Scutari; unnumbered
The tombs they shade, their marble shapes as white
As bones bleached by the rays of many summers.
Upon the dust of shrines and temples falls
The dust of ages, and the plaintive howling
Of dogs the gloom of desert sands recalls
Beneath Byzantium's walls and arches crumbling.
Bare the Serail, its glory spent and past,
Its trees, now dry, bent low in desolation...
O Istanbul! Dead nomad camp, the last
Great relic of a last and great migration!
Vertaald door Natasha Bulashova en Greg Cole
Ivan Boenin (10 oktober 1870 - 8 november 1953)
De Amerikaanse schrijver Frederick Barthelme werd geboren op 10 oktober 1943 in Houston, texas. Hij is een broer van de schrijvers Donald enSteve Barthelme. Van 1961 tot 1967 studeerde hij in New Orleans en Houston. Eigenlijk wilde hij beeldend kunstenaar worden en in het begin verdiende hij zijn geld o.a in een reclamebureau. In 1977 studeerde hij af aan de Magister an der Johns Hopkins University en werd hij docent creatief schrijven aan de University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. Barthelme schrijft korte verhalen en romans en wordt tot het minimalisme gerekend. Iets wat hij zelf niet op ptijs stelt.
Uit: Driver
RITA SAYS the living-room lights keep her awake when she goes to bed before I do, which is most of the time. The light comes down the hall and under the bedroom door, she says, and in the dark it's like a laser. So on Sunday, after she'd gone to bed, I started to read Money in semidarkness, tilting the pages to get the light from a book lamp clipped onto the magazine. That didn't work, so I gave it up and watched a TV program about low riders in San Diego. They put special suspensions in their cars so they can bounce them up and down. That's not all they do, but it's sort of the center of things for them. I'd seen the cars before, seen pictures of them jumping - a wonderful thing, just on its own merits. I watched the whole show. It lasted half an hour, and ended with a parade of these wobbling, hopping, jerking cars creeping down a tree-lined California street with a tinkly Mexican love song in the background, and when it was done I had tears in my eyes because I wasn't driving one of the cars. I muted the sound, sat in the dark, and imagined flirting with a pretty Latin girl in a short, tight, shiny dress with a red belt slung waist to hip, her cleavage perfect and brown, on a hot summer night with a breeze, on a glittering street, with the smell of gasoline and Armor All in the air, oak leaves rattling over the thump of the car engine, and me slouched at the wheel of a violet Mercury, ready to pop the front end for a smile.
In the morning I left a note attached to the refrigerator with the tiny TV-dinner magnet, telling Rita what time I'd be home from the office, then got in the Celica and headed for the freeway. I'd been in traffic for half an hour, most of it behind a bald, architect-looking guy in a BMW 2002, when I saw a sign for Kleindienst Highway Auto Sales. This was a hand-painted sign, one quarter billboard size, in a vacant lot alongside the freeway - a rendering of a customized 1947 Ford. I got off at the next exit and went back up the feeder to get to this place, which was a shell-paved lot with a house trailer at the rear, strings of silver and gold decorations above, and a ten-foot Cyclone fence topped with knife wire.
Frederick Barthelme (Houston, 10 oktober 1943)
De Indiase schrijver Rasipuran Krishnaswami Narayan werd geboren op 10 oktober 1906 in Madras. Hij wordt beschouwd als de pionier van de Engelstalige literatuur in India. Vanaf zijn debuut Swami and Friends (1937) situeerde hij bijna al zijn romans en verhalen in een fictief stadje (Malgudi, gemodelleerd naar zijn woonplaats Madras)- als een Indiase Faulkner, maar dan schrijvend in een eenvoudiger stijl en met een Tsjechoviaans oog voor tragikomische zedensatire. Narayans korte verhalen over Malgudi zijn verzameld in Malgudi Landscapes. Zijn bekendste romans zijn The English Teacher (1945), waarin een leraar de dood van zijn vrouw probeert te verwerken, The Guide (1958) en The Vendor of Sweets (1967), waarin het rustige leven van een vrome hindoe wordt verstoord door de komst van zijn nietsnuttige zoon uit Delhi.
Uit: My Days: A Memoir
"Ours was a Lutheran Mission School - mostly for boarders who were Christian converts. The teachers were all converts, and, towards the few non-Christian students like me, they displayed a lot of hatred. Most of the Christian students also detested us. The scripture classes were mostly devoted to attacking and lampooning the Hindu gods, and violent abuses were heaped on idol-worshippers as a preclude to glorifying Jesus. Among the non-Christians in our class I was the only Brahmin boy, and received special attention; the whole class would turn in my direction when the teacher said that Brahmins claiming to be vegetarians ate fish and meat in secret, in a sneaking way, and were responsible for the soaring price of those commodities. In spite of the uneasy time during the lessons, the Biblical stories themselves enchanted me. Especially the Old Testament seemed to be full of fascinating characters....
What I suffered in the class as a non-Christian was nothing compared to what Christian missionary suffered when he came to preach at our street corner. If Christian salvation came out of suffering, here was one who must have attained it. A European missionary with a long beard, escorted by a group of Indian converts carrying violins and harmoniums, would station himself modestly at the junction between Vellala Street and Purasawalkam High Road. A gentle concert would begin unobstrusively. A few onlookers stopped by, the priest nodded to everyone in a friendly manner, casting a genial look around, while the musicians rendered a full-throated Biblical hymn over the babble of the street, with its hawkers' cries and the jutka-drivers' urging of their lean horses. Urchins sat down in the front row on the ground, and all sorts of men and women assembled. When the preacher was satisfied that he had gathered a good audience, he made a sign to the musicians to stop. His speech, breaking into the abrupt silence that ensued, was delivered in an absolutely literary Tamil, stiff and formal, culled out of a dictionary, as far away from normal speech as it could be."
R. K. Narayan (10 oktober 1906 13 mei 2001)
De Brits - Amerikaanse schrijver en regisseur James Clavell (pseudoniem van Charles Edmund DuMaresq de Clavelle) werd geboren op 10 oktober 1924 in Sydney. Zie ook mijn blog van 10 oktober 2008.
Uit: Noble House
:45 p.m.:
The police officer was leaning against one corner of the information counter watching the tall Eurasian without watching him. He wore a light tropical suit and a police tie and white shirt, and it was hot within the brightly lit terminal building, the air humid and smell-laden, milling noisy Chinese as always. Men, women, children, babes. An abundance of Cantonese, some Asians, a few Europeans.
"Superintendent?"
One of the information girls was offering him a phone. "It's for you, sir," she said and smiled prettily, white teeth, dark hair, dark sloe eyes, lovely golden skin.
"Thanks," he said, noticing that she was Cantonese and new, and did not mind that the reality of her smile was empty, with nothing behind it but a Cantonese obscenity. "Yes?" he said into the phone.
"Superintendent Armstrong? This is the towerYankee 2's just landed. On time."
"Still Gate 16?"
"Yes. She'll be there in six minutes."
"Thanks." Robert Armstrong was a big man and he leaned across the counter and replaced the phone. He noticed her long legs and the curve of her rump in the sleek, just too tight, uniformed chong-sam and he wondered briefly what she would be like in bed. "What's your name?" he asked, knowing that any Chinese hated to be named to any policeman, let alone a European.
James Clavell (10 oktober 1924 6 september 1994)
|
