De Mexicaanse dichter en schrijver Jaime Sabines Gutiérrez werd geboren op 25 maart 1926 in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas. Zie ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2007 en ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2008 en ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2009. xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

You Have What I Look For

You have what I look for, what I long for, what I love,

you have it.

The fist of my heart is beating, calling.

I thank the stories for you,

I thank your mother and father

and death who has not seen you.

I thank the air for you.

You are elegant as wheat,

delicate as the outline of your body.

I have never loved a slender woman

but you have made my hands fall in love,

you moored my desire,

you caught my eyes like two fish.

And for this I am at your door, waiting.

Vertaald door W. S. Merwin

(Prose poem)

  Reading Tagore I thought of this: the lamp, the path, the jug in the
spring, the bare feet, they are a lost world. Here are the electric light
bulbs, the automobiles, the water faucet, the jet airliners. No one tells
stories. Television and movies have replaced the grandparents, and all of
technology approaches the miraculous in order to tell of soaps and tooth
pastes.
  I don't know why I walk, but I must come to this tenderness of Tagore, of
all oriental poetry that substitutes the girl with the jug on her shoulder
for our efficient and impoverished typist. After all, we have the same
clouds, the same stars, and if we only look, the same sea.
  This office girl too likes love. And in this chaos of papers that dirty
the days, there are pages of white dreams that she guards with care,
clippings of tendernesses with which she challenges the solitude.
  I want to sing some day this immense poverty of our life, this nostalgia
for simple things, this luxurious trip that we have undertaken for tomorrow
without having loved enough our yesterday.

Vertaald door Athena Kildegaard

Jaime Sabines (25 maart 1926 – 19 maart 1999)

De Amerikaanse schrijfster Flannery O'Connor werd geboren op 25 maart 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. Zie ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2007 en ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2008 en ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2009. 

Uit: Spiritual Writings

„About bad taste, I don't know, because taste is a relative thing. There are some who will find almost everything in bad taste, from spitting in the street to Christ's associations with Mary Magdalen. Fiction is supposed to represent life and the fiction writer has to use as many aspects of life as are necessary to make his total picture convincing. The fiction writer doesn't state, he shows, renders. It's the nature of fiction and it can't be helped. If you're writing about the vulgar, you have to prove they're vulgar by showing them at it. The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment. You have to have enough of either to prove your point but no more. . . .

What offends my taste in fiction is when right is held up as wrong, or wrong as right. Fiction is the concrete expression of mystery — mystery that is lived. Catholics believe that all creation is good and that is evil is the wrong use of good and that without Grace we use it wrong most of the time. It's almost impossible to write about supernatural Grace in fiction. We almost have to approach it negatively. As to natural Grace, we have to take it the way it comes — through nature. In any case, it operates surrounded by evil."

Flannery O'Connor (25 maart 1925 – 3 augustus 1964)

Boekillustratie door Christine Marie Larsen

De Franse dichter en schrijver Jacques Bens werd geboren op 25 maart 1931 in Cadolive (Bouches-du-Rhône). Zie ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2007 en ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2008 en en ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2009. 

Poème irrationnel

Le presbytère n'a rien perdu de son charme,

Ni le jardin de cet éclat qui vous désarme

Rendant la main aux chiens, la bride à l'étalon.

Mais cette explication ne vaut pas ce mystère.

Foin des lumières qui vous brisent le talon,

Des raisonnements qui, dissipant votre alarme,

Se coiffent bêtement d'un chapeau de gendarme,

Désignant là, le juste, et ici, le félon.

Aucune explication ne rachète un mystère.

J'aime mieux les charmes passés du presbytère

Et l'éclat emprunté d'un célèbre jardin ;

J'aime mieux les frissons (c'est dans mon caractère)

De tel petit larron que la crainte oblitère,

Qu'évidentes et sues les lampes d'Aladin.

Jacques Bens (25 maart 1931 – 26 juli 2001)

De Nederlandse cartoonist en striptekenaar Peter van Straaten werd geboren in Arnhem op 25 maart 1935. Zie ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2007 en ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2008 en en ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2009.  Peter van Straaten is vandaag 75 jaar geworden.

Peter Van Straaten (Arnhem, 25 maart 1935)

De Amerikaanse schrijfster en sociale activiste Toni Cade Bambara werd als Miltona Mirkin Cade geboren op 25 maart 1939 in New York. Zie ook mijn blog van 25 maart 2009. 

Uit: Those Bones Are Not My Child

„The terror is over, the authorities say. The horror is past, they repeat every day. There've been no new cases of kidnap and murder since the arrest back in June. You've good reason to know that the official line is a lie. But you sweep the walk briskly all the way to the hedge, as though in clearingthe leaves you can clear from your mind all that you know. You'd truly like to know less. You want to believe. It's 3:23 on your
Mother's Day watch. And your child is nowhere in sight.
You lean the broom against the hedges and stretch up on tiptoe. Big boys, junior high age, are on the other side of the avenue, wrassling each other into complicated choke holds. You holler over, trying not to sound batty. Maybe they know something. A bus chuffs by, drowning you out and masking the boys in smeary gray smoke. When it clears, they've moved on. The hedge holds you up while you play magic with traffic, making bargains with God: if one of the next four cars passing by sports the old bumper sticker HELP KEEP OUR CHILDREN SAFE, then you will know all is well, you'll calm down, pile up the leaves, make a burnt sacrifice, then get dinner on. Two cars go by, a mail truck, an out-of-state camper, then a diesel semi rumbles along. You can feel it thrumming up through your feet. Your porch windows rattle, so do your teeth. An exterminator truck pulls up and double-parks by the cleaner's. The familiar sticker is plastered on the side of the door, the word "children" under the word "pest." Your scalp prickles, ice cold. A stab of panic drives you onto the porch and straight through your door.“

Toni Cade Bambara (25 maart 1939 – 9 december 1995)