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De Amerikaanse dichteres en schrijfster Grace Andreacchi werd geboren op 3 december 1954 in New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Grace Andreacchi op dit blog.
ITHAKA
If you’re going to Ithaka
setting out empty handed
from your own bright darkness
Fear not for
the gentle gods already know
the exact moment of your arrival
In her high palace
faithful Penelope has pulled taut
the threads of your life
Upon her loom
your blood stained histories woven into
her golden web and torn
Out again with deft fingers
Yes, Ithaka has waited
a long time for you
Ageless eyes scanning the horizon
examining each white sail
upon the wine dark sea
Now you are here at last
as morning flushes
the last small dreaming birds
The gods spread
dishes of olives blue sea
water white stones
for your bed
Lie still and the gods will dance for you
the stars by night will dance for you
When you go forth from Ithaka
lighter than light
the dance goes with you
The Heart Doctor
I enjoy my life
I enjoy my children now
particularly they’re grown up and
not squawking
I love being with them all
perhaps not at the same time
I’m fairly hopeless grandmother
I like them when they grow up
You don’t leave small children with me!
I’d always got, as my oldest son said, ‘staff’
someone who looked after their nonsenses
I don’t like this repetitive
‘Please do this’
‘Please don’t be rude’
I can’t be dealing with all that!
Actually I tell them
I like the dog best
In de Gouden Kamer van Sint Ursula
Botten kronkelen naar buiten
doordrenkt met goud
klein en dun, kip of kind
Gouden chrysalis van pijn
een stilte ongebroken
door donderslagen
Die laatste nacht van Maria’s maand
druppelde de lucht vuur
en elfduizend
Sterren brandden in de grillige straten
mannen veranderden
fosforescerend in kleine klompjes klei
In ons uur van nood, o Prinses
heb je je hermelijnen mantel
wijd uitgespreid?
Vertaald door Frans Roumen
Grace Andreacchi (New York, 3 december 1954)
De Brits-Poolse schrijver Joseph Conrad werd geboren op 3 december 1857 in Berdichev, Rusland in een gezin met Poolse ouders. Zie ook alle tags voor Joseph Conrad op dit blog.
Uit: Lord Jim
To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships he was just Jim–nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact. When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave suddenly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to another–generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is good for no other work but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia–and in each of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say–Lord Jim.
Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim’s father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through a ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, but the trees around probably remembered the laying of the first stone. Below, the red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an orchard at the back, a paved stable-yard to the left, and the sloping glass of greenhouses tacked along a wall of bricks. The living had belonged to the family for generations; but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a “training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine.”
Joseph Conrad (3 december 1857 – 3 augustus 1924)
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 3e september ook mijn blog van 3 december 2024 en ook mijn blog van 3 december 2021 en ook mijn blog van 3 december 2018 en eveneens mijn blog van 3 december 2017 deel 3.
03-12-2025 om 17:14
geschreven door Romenu 
Tags:Frans Roumen, Grace Andreacchi, Joseph Conrad, Romenu
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