Berichten van 19 november 2014 tot 20 november 2014

De Iraanse dichteres, vertaalster en mensenrechten-advocate Sheema Kalbasi werd geboren op 20 november 1972 in Teheran. Zie ook alle tags voor Sheema Kalbasi op dit blog.

 

Middle East

I dreamt that I was innocent
my naked skin
in touch with reality
and my soul was in search
to hear your -worldly- murmur: Peace

I offered you my love
wrapped in honesty
(pure to catch up with you)
shrunk with disbelief

I -asking you: Know me

with your gorgeousness
as you played with the waves
breaking one after another
taking them into your hands
touching them one after another

I wanted to be called with your name: just

what color was Peace?
the one you chose to paint me?
the one you narrowed into my heart and nested in my grave,
what color was it?

I am longing in my grave
to receive the flowers
with your hand written note: rest-in-peace- Middle East

 

 

5.7

I don’t care if you are you and I am I. I am not some exotic flower. Whatever coat you have on, I will put it on to warm me… and the shoes however small… I will walk in them to balance our height difference. You don’t need to convert for me; I have already converted to you. You see I never had a religion to begin with. I was born naked from all religions but your love.

I know that was not the point. I know there is no conversion. There is no coat, no balance, no shoes but the naked truth of me finding you first, not you finding me. You, whom will never know who I was when I was sitting on the white sheets.

Y o u, not b e s i d e m e.

And the words that are already written. The words that are already said, are already felt, and are already gone.

And I try to take them back into my empty bowl of hands. To put my hands on the chest. The chest into rest. The rest in to the heart. The beat back to the soul. The soul, back to what it was before you.

Alas! I am 5.7

 

 
Sheema Kalbasi (Teheran, 20 november 1972)

 

 

De Zuidafrikaanse schrijfster Nadine Gordimer werd geboren op 20 november 1923 in Springs. Zie ook alle tags voor Nadine Gordimer op dit blog.

Uit: No Time Like the Present

“He can’t see far among the bodies pressed around him. There are white hands among those raised in the stomping, chanting, so he couldn’t be so noticeably there, the absorption in purpose is blindly fervent, he knows from political rallies. In the mass you have no direction of your own, he is carried along in a surge towards the main gates of the campus. Outside between the street and the gates, another gathering—a few pausing in curiosity before turning away, others, some black men and women literally throwing their yelling weight about. All cling to gates too wide, tall and strong to shake: they’ve joined the students’ action.
He tries to make a way to other parts of the campus but progress is against powerful currents as urge drives each limb of the great body to join that. He reaches only the science block from where he had set out.
Did any of his academic colleagues to whom he’d been advised to kick arse attempt to be along with the uprising against tuition fees most of their students couldn’t pay (so the cell phones worn like ear ornament, who pays for the serial calls). The faculty coffee room may say, factually, the university couldn’t exist without tuition fees to supplement the government’s inadequate grant; ‘funding free education is that government’s affair’. No dereliction of the university’s responsibility towards students?
Did he have a place down there (he’s back up at his window again). Claim it—claim on him—because of his part, his deci- sion to get mixed up in providing scientific know-how and ingredients to make bombs, his Jabu, his children gestated in a black womb. There are bonfires signalling here, there, like the Guy Fawkes ones of his childhood commemorating a revo- lutionary arson he and his siblings had never heard of. One of the bundles of whatever was being fed smoking to the flames was very near the archeological museum where tooled stones are the reminder that young men rioting are the descendants of peoples who had skills before invaders brought others; he had a sudden fear not for himself but for what is an extension of self, the work, research that was in progress in the science faculty. What if they burst into the laboratories where climate change is being studied for solutions that would save their own existence on this planet.”

 

 
Nadine Gordimer (20 november 1923 – 13 juli 2014)

 

 

De Russische schrijfster en scenariste Viktoria Tokareva werd geboren op 20 november 1937 in Leningrad (Sint Petersburg). Zie ook alle tags voor Viktoria Tokareva op dit blog.

Uit: Korrida

“- How much does a she-goat weigh? Sixty kolograms? asked Anikee.
- I don’t know, answered Lil’ka.
- No. You weigh sixty. That’s like a pig, but a goat weighs less. About thirty kilograms. I’ll have to ask Granny Panya about that. Granny Panya! – Anikeev called out.
(...)

When he came back, he saw that Lilka was standing in jeans and wearing a coat. She was pushing the puncho “fieruchello” into a denim backpack. She also shoved the terri-cloth robe and slippers into it.
- Where are you going? –Anikeev was surprised. –To the sauna?
- I am leaving you.
- Where are you going?
- I am leaving you and never coming back.
(..)

Anikeev put his arms around Lilka’s knees and under her arms. Picked her up and grunted.
-Don’t... --Lilka became frightened. –I am heavy. Like a pig. Fifty kilograms."

 

 
Viktoria Tokareva (Leningrad, 20 november 1937)

 

 

De Engelse dichter en schrijver Thomas Chatterton werd geboren op 20 november 1752 in Bristol als zoon van een koster. Zie ook alle tags voor Thomas Chatterton op dit blog.

 

February (Fragment)

Whilst Envy, on a tripod seated nigh,
In form a shoe-boy, daubs the valu'd fruit,
And darting lightnings from his vengeful eye,
Raves about Wilkes, and politics, and Bute.

Now Barry, taller than a grenadier,
Dwindles into a stripling of eighteen;
Or sabled in Othello breaks the ear,
Exerts his voice, and totters to the scene.

Now Foote, a looking-glass for all mankind,
Applies his wax to personal defects;
But leaves untouch'd the image of the mind,
His art no mental quality reflects.

Now Drury's potent kind extorts applause,
And pit, box, gallery, echo, "how divine!"
Whilst vers'd in all the drama's mystic laws,
His graceful action saves the wooden line.

Now-- but what further can the muses sing?
Now dropping particles of water fall;
Now vapours riding on the north wind's wing,
With transitory darkness shadow all.

Alas! how joyless the descriptive theme,
When sorrow on the writer's quiet preys
And like a mouse in Cheshire cheese supreme,
Devours the substance of the less'ning bays.

 

 
Thomas Chatterton (20 november 1752 - 5 augustus 1770)
Thomas Chatterton door Henrietta Mary Ada Ward, 1873

 

 

De Amerikaanse schrijver Don DeLillo werd op 20 november 1936 geboren in New York City als zoon van Italiaanse immigranten. Zie ook alle tags voor Don DeLillo op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 20 november 2010.

Uit: Cosmopolis

“Steam came venting from a manhole through a tall blue stack, the most common sight, he thought, but beautiful now, carrying the strangeness, the indecipherability of a thing seen new, steam heaving from the urban earth, nearly apparitional. An old industrial loft building stood on the southeast corner, 10 storeys, blocklike, a late medieval sweatshop and firetrap. There were scaled windows and scaffolding and the sidewalk was boarded off. Ibrahim nosed the car farther right, keeping a distance from closed-off areas. A vehicle pulled out in front of them, a lunch van, un- likely at this hour, one, two, three in the morning.
Then lights came on, dead ahead, flaring with a crack and whoosh, great carbon-arc floodlights that were set on tripods and rigged to lampposts. A woman in jeans appeared, flagging down the car. The intersection was soaked in vibrant light, the night abruptly alive.
People crisscrossed the streets, calling to each other or speaking into handsets, and teamsters unloaded equipment from long trucks parked on both sides of the avenue. Trailers sat in the petrol station across the street. The man in the van ahead lowered the fold-over side, for meals, and it was only now that Eric saw the heavy trolley with movable boom attached, rolling slowly into place. Installed at the high end of the boom was a platform that held a movie camera and a couple of seated men.
The crane wasn't the only thing he'd missed. When he got out of the car and moved to a spot that wasn't blocked by the lunch truck, he saw the elements of the scene in preparation.”

 

 
Don DeLillo (New York City, 20 november 1936)

 

 

Rectificatie

De Russische dichteres en schrijfster Zinaida Nikolaevna Hippius werd als kind van uit Duitse familie geboren op 20 november in Beljov bij Tula.(Niet op 8 november) Zie ook alle tags voor Zinaida Hippius en Zinaida Gippius op dit blog.

 

Zij

In haar verdorven, schamele geslepenheid
Is zij als as zo grijs, als stof is zij.
Ik sterf aan die verstikkende benepenheid,
Aan die verbondenheid van haar en mij.

Ze zit vol stekels en is niet inschikkelijk,
Gelijk een slang is zij, koud en gevlekt,
Haar kromgebogen schubben zijn verschrikkelijk
En hebben mij met wonden overdekt.

Log is ze, afgestompt en niet ontvankelijk,
O, drong een scherpe angel door tot mij!
Ze is zo lusteloos en ontoegankelijk, 
Niet te benaderen en doof is zij.

Ze kronkelt vleiend rond me, de aanhalige,
Ze smoort me haast, dit duistere reptiel.
En dit vasthoudende, en dit onzalige,
Dit angstaanjagende - dat is mijn ziel!

 

Vertaald door Mieke en Mouring Lindenburg

 

 
Zinaida Hippius (20 november 1869 - 9 september 1945)

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 20^e november ook mijn blog van 20 november 2011 deel 1 en eveneens deel 2.

De Amerikaanse dichter, librettist en essayist Scott Cairns werd geboren op 19 november 1954 in Tacoma, Washington. Zie ook alle tags voor Scott Cairns op dit blog.

 

Imperative

The thing to remember is how
Tentative all of this really is.
You could wake up dead.

Or the woman you love
Could decide you’re ugly.
Maybe she’ll finally give up
Trying to ignore the way
You floss your teeth as you
Watch television. All I’m saying
Is that there are no sure things here.

I mean, you’ll probably wake up alive,
And she’ll probably keep putting off
Any actual decision about your looks.
Could be she’ll be glad your teeth
are so clean. The morning could
be full of all the love and kindness
you need. Just don’t go thinking
you deserve any of it.

 

 

Possible Answers to Prayer

Your petitions—though they continue to bear  
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.  
Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent  
entertainment value—nonetheless serve  
to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath  
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more  
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,  
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes  
recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly  
righteous indignation toward the many  
whose habits and sympathies offend you—         

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend  
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

 

 
Scott Cairns (Tacoma, 19 november 1954)

 

 

De Amerikaanse dichteres Sharon Olds werd geboren op 19 november 1942 in San Francisco. Zie ook alle tags voor Sharon Olds op dit blog.

 

The Space Heater

On the then-below-zero day, it was on,
near the patients' chair, the old heater
kept by the analyst's couch, at the end,
like the infant's headstone that was added near the foot
of my father's grave. And it was hot, with the almost
laughing satire of a fire's heat,
the little coils like hairs in Hell.
And it was making a group of sick noises-
I wanted the doctor to turn it off
but I couldn't seem to ask, so I just
stared, but it did not budge. The doctor
turned his heavy, soft palm
outward, toward me, inviting me to speak, I
said, "If you're cold-are you cold? But if it's on
for me..." He held his palm out toward me,
I tried to ask, but I only muttered,
but he said, "Of course," as if I had asked,
and he stood up and approached the heater, and then
stood on one foot, and threw himself
toward the wall with one hand, and with the other hand
reached down, behind the couch, to pull
the plug out. I looked away,
I had not known he would have to bend
like that. And I was so moved, that he
would act undignified, to help me,
that I cried, not trying to stop, but as if
the moans made sentences which bore
some human message. If he would cast himself toward the
outlet for me, as if bending with me in my old
shame and horror, then I would rest
on his art-and the heater purred, like a creature
or the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,
the father of a child, the spirit of a father,
the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,
the heat of vision, the power of heat,
the pleasure of power.

 

 
Sharon Olds (San Francisco, 19 november 1942)

 

 

De Amerikaanse schrijver en literaire biograaf Mark Harris (eig. Mark Harris Finklestein) werd geboren op 19 november 1922 in Mount Vernon, New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Mike Harris op dit blog.

Uit: Lying in Bed

“I am hoping my parents will look on the matter in the same way, recognizing, as you do, the processes of fictional invention. However, that is a great deal to ask of people who have never given one moment's thought to the processes of anything except making money, fattening beef, grinding down children, and campaigning against the teaching of Darwinism in the schools of Arizona.
I suppose I should have known your attitude would be liberal and understanding. I know you don't like us to use superlatives, but you are the most sophisticated man I have ever met. As you can guess, most of the men I meet are boys. I feel so stupid about the wine in the restaurant, and I laugh with utmost admiration for your cosmopolitan wit when I remember your saying, "We should have ordered white wine with a white tablecloth." You amazed me. You never for a single instant looked at the wine; you just stood the glass up and placed a napkin over the scarlet pool and never took your eyes from mine. You are truly sophisticated. It was the nicest thing that has happened to me in a long time. You have told us time and again never to use the expression, "I have no words to express ..." because a writer should find the words to express whatever thoughts she wishes to express. Nevertheless, with many apologies for my error I must say, "I have no words to express my thrill of our luncheon."
You have given me self-confidence without which I could not have gone on. Last semester I was on the verge of leaving, feeling so victimized and put upon by so many people in this so-called institution, when one day you said to me, "O well, that's what we writers have to put up with." You were saying that I, too, was a writer. Nobody has ever said such a thing to me before. As far as I knew (know; I see that my tenses have fallen into inconsistency here) I was the only person in the world who viewed myself as a writer. I could not possibly have gone on without you. You opened every window for me.”

 

 
Mark Harris (19 november 1922 - 30 mei 2007)

 

 

De Vlaamse dichter, essayist en toneelschrijver Karel van den Oever werd geboren in Antwerpen op 19 november 1879. Zie ook alle tags voor Karel van den Oevern op dit blog.

 

Afrikaantjes

Mijn handen rieken van uw reuk
waar ik uw steel en blaren kreuk,
o gulden Afrikaantjes,
en 'k hou van u zo veel en teer
als straks uw parkskens gloeien weer
saffraan-goud in de laantjes;
ik riek u dan zo bitter-fris,
onaards en vol geheimenis.

 

 

Het open luik

Het harde, houten luik is dicht
en daar achter is de dag
met zijn parel-gouden licht;

daarachter de bomen, de bergen, de wereld, de wind,
de mensheid: man, vrouw en het fijne kind;

daarachter de zon,
daarachter de maan,
daarachter de zilveren sterren;

ook Vlaanderen, nevel-blauw,
en God.

Het leven is nabij en verre;
het hart des levens weten wij slaan,

de kracht der dingen horen wij gaan
achter het harde, houten luik.

Toen hebben wij het luik opengedaan.

 

 
Karel van den Oever (19 november 1879 – 6 oktober 1926)

 

 

De Oostenrijkse dichter, schrijver en vertaler Christoph Wilhelm Aigner werd geboren op 18 november 1954 in Wels. Zie ook alle tags voor Christoph Wilhelm Aigner op dit blog.

 

Vom Schwimmen im Glück

Sah zuletzt dass mein glücklich
schwimmender Körper sanft beschleunigt
gegen den Felsen gehoben wurde
Die Sonne floss ins Wasser zurück

 

Die Unsterbliche

Sie kostet alles unter deinen
Rippen. Dich friert wenn sie den Kopf
herauszwängt die Schnauze blutgeschminkt
dich ansieht mit dem herzzerreißenden
kleinen Tränengesicht des Geparden

 

 
Christoph Wilhelm Aigner (Wels, 18 november 1954)

 

 

De Amerikaanse dichter Alan Tate werd geboren op 19 november 1899 in de buurt van Winchester, Kentucky. Zie ook alle tags voor Alan Tate op dit blog.

 

The Eagle

Say never the strong heart
In the consuming breath
Cries out unto the dark
The skinny death.

Look! whirring on the rind
Of aether a white eagle,
Shot out of the mind,
The windy apple, burning,

Hears no more, past compass
In his topless flight,
The apple wormed, blown up
By shells of light;

So, faggot of the heart
On the cinder day
The woman and the man!
David and Sybil say

The world has a season
Under the world's might:
Now in deep autumn-
Black apple in the night.

Think not the world spins ever
(Only the world has a year)
Only the gaunt fierce bird
Flies, merciless with fear

Lest air hold him not,
Beats up the scaffold of space
Sick of the world's rot-
God's hideous face.

 

 
Allen Tate (19 november 1899 – 9 februari 1979)
De “Fugitive Poets”. Vlnr: Allen Tate, Merrill Moore, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom en Donald Davidson, 1956.

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 19e november ook mijn blog van 19 november 2011 deel 1 en eveneens deel 2.