Edmund White, Daniel Kehlmann, Jay McInerney, Lorrie Moore, Jan de Bas, Jurgis Kunčinas, Clark Ashton Smith

De Amerikaanse schrijver en essayist Edmund White werd geboren op 13 januari 1940 in Cincinnati. Zie ook alle tags voor Edmund White op dit blog.

Uit: Caracole

“One of them had a clay pig, small enough to fit into his pocket; it whistled one dry, low note when blown on the snout. The other knew the names of stones but he was the hardest to understand. Someone’s youngest brother he called “the Least One.” If he doubted a story, he said, “I don’t confidence you.” Windows he called “lights” and their hiding place in an oak bole he spoke of as the “plunder room.” Where the creek fanned out into a hundred rivulets, this child said, “That’s where it turkey-tailed,” and if a grown-up showed him special attention he’d ask later, “Why did he much me?” Both of Gabriel’s companions spoke in doubled nouns (“biscuit-bread,” “ham-meat,” sulfur-match”). Nor did they grasp what Gabriel meant when he said once, “Have a nice weekend.” After a while it turned out their families worked every day and the notion of a weekend was beyond their means.
(…)

When Mathilda asked Mateo to bring Gabriel to his very first reception at her house, Mateo assumed she was merely being polite out of consideration for him, Mateo. More than once she’d assured him she knew what it was like to be stuck with a child in their nearly childless world of artists and intellectuals; after all she (with Mateo’s distant if affectionate assistance) had raised a child, Daniel, who was now thirty and looked so nearly as though he were her brother that her maternity would have been suspect had not their celebrated, even infamous past together been so well documented. Nevertheless Mathilda was delighted when naïve or provincial people mistook Daniel for her brother or lover, and to increase the confusion she often referred to him coyly as “the darling.” This coyness was so unlike her that people expected to catch a sardonic smile and were shocked to see instead the sort of smile people wear when they speak of their pets. What few people knew was that an older child, a girl, had died when she was four. This loss had poisoned Mathilda’s joy in motherhood at the same time it had intensified her love for – no longer “my son” but “the darling.”

 


Edmund White (Cincinnati, 13 januari 1940)
Cover

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Kostís Palamás, Karl Bleibtreu, Victor de Laprade, Eduard von Bauernfeld, Maler Müller, Mark Alexander Boyd

De Nieuwgrieks dichter Kostís Palamás werd geboren op 13 januari 1859 in Patra. Zie ook alle tags voor Kostís Palamás op dit blog.

 

MIA PIKRA (GRIEF)

My early unforgettable years I lived them
Close to the sea,
There by the shallow and calm sea,
There by the open and boundless sea.

And every time that my budding, early life
Comes back to me,
And I see the dreams and hear the voices
Of my early life there by the sea,

You, oh my heart, feel the same old yearning:
If I could live again,
Close to the shallow and calm sea,
There by the open and boundless sea.

Was it really my destiny, was it my fortune,
I haven’t met another
A sea within me as shallow as a lake,
And like an ocean boundless and big.

And, lo! In my sleep a dream brought her
Close again to me,
The same there shallow and calm sea,
The same there boundless and open sea.

Yet, thrice be alas! A grief was poisoning me,
A powerful grief,
A grief that you did not lighten, my dream
Of my great early love, my home by the sea.

What storm, I wonder, was raging in me,
And what whirlwind,
That couldn’t put it to rest, or lull it to sleep
My wonderful dream of my home by the sea.

A grief that is unspoken, an unexplained grief,
A powerful grief,
A grief not quenched even within the paradise
Of our early life close to the boundless sea.

 

Vertaald door Alex Moskios

 

Kostís Palamás (13 januari 1859 – 27 februari 1943)
‘De dichters’ door Georgios Roilos, ca 1919
Dichters van de generatie 1880, in het midden, leunend op zijn hand, Palamás

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