Bloomsbury rules!!!

Ah! O pessoal (ou Grupo, para os puristas) de Bloomsbury! Nenhuma das travas classe média, um comportamnento tão upper-class que até hoje são tão modernos que não são midiáticos! Sugiro "The Loving Friends", de David Gadd, àqueles que tiverem curiosidade sobre a tchurma.

O poema abaixo é de Vita, uma das mais ativas membros do grupo.

No Obligation

Come on the wings of great desire,
or stay away from me.
You're not more stable than the day,
or than the day less free.

The dawning day has clouds in store;
Desire her cloudy moods;
and sunlit woods of morning may
by noon be darkened woods.

So be you free to come or stay
without a reason given,
as free as clouds that blot the light
across the face of heaven.

Para se entender a teia de relacionamentos do grupo, aberto a qualquer tipo de experimentação, fizeram este quadrinho, que me ajudou a entender tudo!!

A literatura produzida por e sobre eles é enorme e até hoje os scholars procuram entender tudo o que acontecia por ali. Em português também ha bastante material, é só se animar!! Posso garantir que é muito divertido!!

D.H. Lawrence

O Figo
A maneira correcta de comer um figo à mesa
É parti-Io em quatro, pegando no pedúnculo,
E abri-Io para dele fazer uma flor de mel, brilhante, rósea, húmida,
desabrochada em quatro espessas pétalas.

Depois põe-se de lado a casca
Que é como um cálice quadrissépalo,
E colhe-se a flor com os lábios.
Mas a maneira vulgar
É pôr a boca na fenda, e de um sorvo só aspirar toda a carne.

Cada fruta tem o seu segredo.
O figo é uma fruta muito secreta.
Quando se vê como desponta direito, sente-se logo que é simbólico:
Parece masculino.
Mas quando se conhece melhor, pensa-se como os romanos que é
uma fruta feminina.

Os italianos apelidam de figo os órgãos sexuais da fêmea:
A fenda, o yoni,
Magnífica via húmida que conduz ao centro.
Enredada,
Inflectida,
Florescendo toda para dentro com suas fibras matriciais;
Com um orifício apenas.

D.H.Lawrence
(tradução de Herberto Helder)

e, para surpresa do Pedro Malanski, o original, o que talvez explique minha predileção pela forma em que o poema foi concebido....

Figs

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,

Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,

And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Then you throw away the skin

Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,

After you have taken off the blossom, with your lips.

But the vulgar way

Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Every fruit has its secret.

The fig is a very secretive fruit.

As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic :

And it seems male.

But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part ; the fig-fruit :

The fissure, the yoni,

The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

Involved,

Inturned,

The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled ;

And but one orifice.

The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.

Symbols.

There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward ;

Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

It was always a secret.

That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.

There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough

Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals ;

Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,

Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems

Openly pledging heaven :

Here’s to the thorn in flower ! Here is to Utterance !

The brave, adventurous rosaceæ.

Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,

And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,

Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it ;

Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,

Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,

One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light ;

Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,

Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,

Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilization, and fruiting

In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see

Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

Till the drop of ripeness exudes,

And the year is over.

And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.

So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.

And the fig is finished, the year is over.

That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That’s how women die too.

The year is fallen over-ripe,

The year of our women.

The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

The secret is laid bare.

And rottenness soon sets in.

The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked

She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.

She’d been naked all her days before,

But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn’t had the fact on her mind.

She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig-leaves.

And women have been sewing ever since.

But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.

They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,

And they won’t let us forget it.

Now, the secret

Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips

That laugh at the Lord’s indignation.

What then, good Lord ! cry the women.

We have kept our secret long enough.

We are a ripe fig.

Let us burst into affirmation.

They forget, ripe figs won’t keep.

Ripe figs won’t keep.

Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.

Ripe figs won’t keep, won’t keep in any clime.

What then, when women the world over have all bursten into affirmation ?

And bursten figs won’t keep ? D.H.Lawrence ficou muito famoso pelo "O AMante de Lady Chatterley", mas à época já era um poeta muito conceituado. Sua história de vida daria um livro e /ou um filme ótimos, que continuo esperando alguém fazer. A Vintage Books tem uma edição gigantesca de toda a poesia de DH. Não sei se vale a pena, mas vale a pena...

Lord Byron

Epitaph to a Dog

Near this Spot are deposited the Remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferosity, and all the virtues of Man without his Vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery if inscribed over human Ashes, is but a just tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a DOG, who was born in Newfoundland May 1803 and died at Newstead Nov. 18th, 1808.

When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,
Unknown to Glory but upheld by Birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below:
When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen
Not what he was, but what he should have been.
But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnotic'd all his worth,
Deny'd in heaven the Soul he held on earth:
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas'd by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honors none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one-and here he lies.

Eu e os cachorros, nós temos uma relação bastante boa...meio neurótica de minha parte, mas em geral funcionamos bem. Fuçando, encontrei este poema dedicado aos cães. Daí achei que cabia postar.

Ted Hughes

Ele mesmo, o capeta em pessoa!!!Segundo as feministas de butique, o responsável pelo suicidio da Silvia Plath! Mais fácil encontrar um demonio assim ao lado do que procurar as razões da deterioração da cabeça de uma pessoa tão sensitiva e especial quanto Sylvia. That's life!!!
O que se esquecem sempre de dizer é que Ted é um poeta maior, supersensível, antenas ligadíssimas no mundo e nas pessoas, uma parabólica do bem. Claro, há milhares de histórias a respeito dele, já li pepenta, mas até aonde vai a verdade é que é!

Fate playing

Because the message somehow met a goblin,
Because precedents pripped your expectationa,
Because your London was still a kaleydoscope
of names and places any jolt could scramble,
You waited mistaken. The bus from the North
Came in and emptied and I was not on it.
No matter how much you insisted
and begged the driver, probably with tears,
To produce me or to remember seeing me
Just miss getting on. I was not on it.
Eight in the evening and I was lost and at large
Somewhere in England. You restrained
Your confident inspiration
And did not dash out into the traffic
Milling around Victoria, utterly certain
of bumping into me where I would have to be walking.
I was not walking anywhere. I was sitting
Unperturbed in my seat on the train
Rocking towards King's Cross. Somebody,
calmer than you, had a suggestion. So,
When I got off the train, expecting to find you
Somewhere down at the root of the platform,
I saw that surge and agitation, a figure
Breating the flow of released passengers,
Then your molten face, your molten eyes
And your exclamations, your flinging arms
Your scattering tears
As if I had come back from the dead
Against every possibility, agains
Every negative but your own prayer
To your own gods. There I knew what it was
To be a miracle. And behind you
Your jolly taxi-driver, laughing, like a small god,
To see an American girl being so American,
And to see your frenzied chariot-ride,
Sobbing and goading him and pleading with him
To make happen what you needed to happen.
Succeed so completely, thanks to him.
Well, it was a wonder
That my train was not earlier, even much earlier,
TRhat it pulled in, late, the very moment
You irrupted onto the platform. It was
Natural and miraculous and an omen
Confirming everything
You wanted confirmed. So your huge despair,
Your cross-London panic dash
And now your triumph, splashed over me,
Like love forty-nine times magnified,
Like the first thunder cloudburst engulfing
The drought in August
When the whole cracked earth seems to quake
And every leaf trembles
And everything holds up its arms weeping.

Um desencontro, e voilá!!!C'est de la art!!!

O poema consta da coletânea Cartas de Aniversário, publicada pela editora Relógio D'Água, de Lisboa, edição de 2000. A edição é bilíngue, mas os irmãos Campos que me perdoem, poesia traduzida é uma coisa estranha, mesmo que por gênios como os próprios e Manuel Bandeira... Podem entrar no sitio da editora, o link taí....maravilhas...

John Keats

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone


For Fanny Brawne

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender semitone,
Bright eyes, accomplished shape, and lang'rous waist!
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!
Vanished unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday—or holinight—
Of fragrant-curtained love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight;
But, as I've read love's missal through today,
He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.

Foto de Rui David.

Thom Gunn

Já postei um poema dele, The Hug, um dos meus all time favorites. Ele é, melhor, era inglês, tem vários livros publicados, infelizmente nenhum aqui (novidade?).




The Dump


He died, and I admired
the crisp vehemence
of a lifetime reduced to
half a foot of shelf space.
But others came to me saying,
we too loved him, let us take you
to the place of our love.
So they showed me
everything, everything--
a cliff of notebooks
with every draft and erasure
of every poem he
published or rejected,
thatched already
with webs of annotation.
I went in further and saw
a hill of matchcovers
from every bar or restaurant
he'd ever entered. Trucks
backed up constantly,
piled with papers, and awaited
by archivists with shovels;
forklifts bumped through
trough and valley
to adjust the spillage.
Here odors of rubbery sweat
intruded on the pervasive
smell of stale paper,
no doubt from the mound
of his collected sneakers.
I clambered up the highest
pile and found myself
looking across not history
but the vistas of a steaming
range of garbage
reaching to the coast itself. Then
I lost my footing! and was
carried down on a soft
avalanche of letters, paid bills,
sexual polaroids, and notes
refusing invitations, thanking
fans, resisting scholars.
In nightmare I slid,
no ground to stop me,

until I woke at last
where I had napped beside
the precious half foot. Beyond that,
nothing, nothing at all.

John Keats

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Foto: Jaboticabas.

D.H.Lawrence

Os poetas são antenados mesmo, no sentido de que captam tudo que acontece e acontecerá neste mundo e em outros que talvez existam. Escrito nos anos 10(1910's), este poema de D.H. Lawrence 'pressupõe um rompimento dramático com quase tudo que a cultura recente admite ser verdade'. Ouvindo o que acontece na Rússia, Israel, Palestina, África subsaariana, é de se pensar: onde estão as pessoas como esta?

Peace and War

People always make war when they say they love peace.
The loud love of peace makes one quiver more than any battlecry.
Why should one love peace?it is so obviously vile to make war.

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
It is a form of war, even, self-assertion and being wise for other people.
Let people be wise for themselves. And anyhow
nobody can be wise except on rare occasions, like getting married or dying.
It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
For everyday use, give me somebody whimsical, with not too much purpose in life,
then we shan't have war, and we needn't talk about peace.

D.H. Lawrence

DH poeta é pouco editado, infelizmente, e conservo com ciúmes a edição bilíngüe da Iluminuras, de 1985, com tradução de Leonardo Fróes. Esta semana encontrei em um sebo da cidade a edição de Poesias Completas, da Penguin. Será que esgotei minha sorte nesta e nunca terei chances de ganhar na Sena? Seguirei meus dias lendo...

DH é uma vítima do próprio sucesso, afinal, O Amante de Lady Chattlerly e Filhos e amantes são menires literários.
DH foi um poeta moderno à frente do modernismo, engajado, que não acreditava no retorno aos "bons tempos" e nem no 'bom selvagem'.Como Allan Watts (wikpédia existe para isso, corra lá!), acreditava que a principal (r)evolução é interna, o passado ficou lá! A sua total impossibilidade de enquadramento no mundo atual conduzia o Poeta à conclusão que é necessária a participação, de alguma forma, nas ações revolucionárias, sejam elas comportamentais, sociais etc.
No dizer do próprio DH, "uma pessoa é um ser humano tal como aparece aos outros, e a personalidade é o que é transmitido dessa pessoa para sua audiência; é o efeito transmissível de um homem".
Espero que o poema At a Lose End transmita uma idéia do grande poeta!

At a Loose End

Many years have I still to burn, detained
Like a candle-flame on this body; but I enclose
Blue shadow within me, a presence which lives contained
In my flame of living, the invisible heart of the rose.

So through these days, while I burn on the fuel of life,
What matter the stuff I lick up in my daily flame,
Seeing the core is a shadow inviolate
A darkness that dreams my dream for me, ever the same.

na tradução de Leonado Fróes:

Na corda bamba

Muitos anos eu tenho de queimar ainda, detido
Como uma chama de vela neste corpo; mas viçosa
Sombra se inclui em mim, presença de azul contido
No meu ardor de viver, o oculto coração da rosa.

Pelos dias assim, enquanto queimo ao combustível da vida,
Pouco importa o que lambo em minhas labaredas a esmo,
Já que vejo que o centro é a sombra inviolada,
A escuridão que por mim sonha meu sonho, sempre o mesmo.