Dag: 19 oktober 2011

Miguel Ángel Asturias, Leigh Hunt, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Nardo Aluman

De Guatemalteekse schrijver Miguel Ángel Asturias werd geboren op 19 oktober 1899 in Guatemala-Stad. Zie ook mijn blog van 19 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Miguel Ángel Asturias op dit blog.

 

Navels of Sun and Precious Copals

The little bones of the echo
on the tongue of the Forgetful Emissary.

On the tongue of the Forgetful Emissary,
the message of the Goldthinking-star-gods.

“May the mist rise early,
fragrant with tamarind, poplar, suquinay ,
may it spread its cloths over the words
and may the Four Magicians of the Sky be created
with navels of sun and precious copals.

“May they be of black maize,
maize coiled with sexes and snakes,
their hair, their pupils and their dreams.

“May they be of white maize,
maize coiled with sperm and the moon,
their teeth, the quicklime of their corneas,
their bones and their nails.

“And may their flesh be of yellow maize,
moistened in water sweet
with the night of the star
and skinned with quicklime
in blind boil,
the lime of the eyes
of the Twohanded Tattooer,
the one who was destroyed
along with his raisers of worlds of dream
by the man of mud
who in his turn was annihilated
by fire, the laughter of the stones.”

And so was created
the Man-of-Four-Magics,
the one who wears bluegreen feathers
of quetzals and flowers covered with dew,
who illuminates and burns like resinous pine,
who sets things alight
in my country forged of honey.

All was visible, except for the moment
of healing the navels
with webs of tobacco smoke
and placing in their folds,
along with the copals of splendor
and dust of worn-out words,
the magic of the three halves.

By the magic of the three halves,
the half which holds things within
becomes magnetized by the sole presence
of the Man-of-the-Four-Magics,
issues from things and penetrates
the interior of that which completes it,
before restoring it, with an unknown half.

By the magic of the three halves,
there is a half that remains in things,
another that leaves and returns to things
and the unknown half, the one that magic adds.

 

Vertaald door Robert W. Lebling


Miguel Ángel Asturias (19 oktober 1899 – 9 juni 1974)

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Philip Pullman, Andrew Vachss, Fannie Hurst, John le Carré

De Britse schrijver Philip Pullman werd geboren op 19 oktober 1946 in Norwich als zoon van een luchtmachtofficier. Zie ook mijn blog van 19 oktober 2008 en ook mijn blog van 18 oktober 2009en ook mijn blog van 19 oktober 2010

 

Uit: The Amber Spyglass

„Ama climbed the path to the cave, as she’d done for many days now, bread and milk in the bag on her back, a heavy puzzlement in her heart. How in the world could she ever manage to reach the sleeping girl? Would the woman never leave the cave for more than a few minutes?
Ama came to the rock where the woman had told her to leave the food since she wasn’t allowed in the cave anymore. She put down the bag, but she didn’t go straight home; she climbed a little farther, up past the cave and through the thick rhododendrons, and farther up still to where the trees thinned out and the rainbows began.
This part of the valley was where the streams and cascades ran most confusingly: shafts of green-white water would sink into potholes and emerge a little lower down, or gush upward in splintered fountains, or divide into myriad streamlets, or swirl round and round trapped in a whirlpool. When the world was frozen, spears and shelves and columns of glassy ice grew over every surface, and under it all, the water could still be heard gushing and tinkling, and spray still escaped to the air for the rainbows to form.
Ama and her daemon climbed up over the rock shelves and around the little cataracts, past the whirlpools and through the spectrum-tinted spray, until her hair and her eyelids and his squirrel fur were beaded all over with a million tiny pearls of moisture. The game was to get to the top without wiping your eyes, despite the temptation, and the sunlight sparkled and fractured into red, yellow, green, blue, and every color between right in front of Ama’s eyes, but she mustn’t wipe her hand across to see better until she got right to the top, or the game would be lost.
Kulang, her daemon, sprang to a rock near the top of the little waterfall, and she knew he would turn at once to watch and make sure she didn’t brush the moisture off her eyelashes – except that he didn’t.”

 


Philip Pullman (Norwich, 19 oktober 1946)

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Man Booker Prize voor Julian Barnes

Man Booker Prize voor Julian Barnes

De Engelse schrijver Julian Barnes heeft de Britse literatuurprijs Man Booker Prize 2011 gewonnen. Hij kreeg de prijs voor zijn boek ‘The Sense of an Ending’. De Man Booker Prize is een van de belangrijkste onderscheidingen in de Engelstalige literatuur. De prijs wordt toegekend aan het beste Engelstalige fictiewerk uit het Gemenebest, Ierland en Zimbabwe.Julian Barnes werd geboren op 19 januari 1946 in Leicester. Zie ook alle tags voor Julian Barnes op dit blog.

Uit: The Sense of an Ending

„I remember, in no particular order:

– a shiny inner wrist;

– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;

– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;

– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;

– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;

– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.

We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.

There were three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn’t expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life. His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself. For the first day or two, we took little notice of him: at our school there was no welcoming ceremony, let alone its opposite, the punitive induction. We just registered his presence and waited.“


Julian Barnes (Leicester, 19 januari 1946)