Maand: mei 2013

Walt Whitman, Frank Goosen, Gabriel Barylli, Konstantin Paustovski

De Amerikaanse dichter Walt Whitman werd geboren op 31 mei 1819 in Westhills, Long Island, New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Whalt Whitman op dit blog.

 

A Leaf For Hand In Hand


A LEAF for hand in hand!
You natural persons old and young!
You on the Mississippi, and on all the branches and bayous of the
Mississippi!
You friendly boatmen and mechanics! You roughs!
You twain! And all processions moving along the streets!
I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to
walk hand in hand!

 

 

 

As Adam, Early In The Morning


AS Adam, early in the morning,
Walking forth from the bower, refresh’d with sleep;
Behold me where I pass–hear my voice–approach,
Touch me–touch the palm of your hand to my Body as I pass;
Be not afraid of my Body.

 

 

Uit: Calamus Poems

 

11.

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been received with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that followed;

And else, when I caroused, or when my plans were accomplished, still I was not happy;

But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refreshed, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,

When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,

When I wandered alone over the beach, and, undressing, bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,

And when I thought how my dear friend, my lover, was on his way coming, O then I was happy;

O then each breath tasted sweeter — and all that day my food nourished me more — And the beautiful day passed well,

And the next came with equal joy — And with the next, at evening, came my friend;

And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,

I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me,

For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,

In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me,

And his arm lay lightly around my breast — And that night I was happy.

 

 

Walt Whitman (31 mei 1819 – 26 maart 1893)

Hier met vriend Peter Doyle (rechts)

 

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Svetlana Alexievich

De Wit-Russische schrijfster en onderzoeksjournaliste Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich  werd geboren op 31 mei 1948 in Stanyslaviv (sinds 1962 Ivano – Frankivsk) Na haar schoolopleiding werkte ze als verslaggever in diverse lokale kranten, en vervolgens als correspondente voor het literaire tijdschrift “Neman” in Minsk. Zij maakte carrière in de journalistiek en door het schrijven van verhalen, gebaseerd op interviews met getuigen van de meest dramatische gebeurtenissen in het land zoals de Tweede Wereldoorlog,de Sovjet – Afghaanse oorlog, de val van de Sovjet- Unie en de ramp in Tsjernobyl. Na de vervolging door het Loekasjenko-regime  verliet zij Belarus in 2000. Gedurende de volgende tien jaar woonde ze in Parijs, Göteborg en Berlijn .In 2011 verhuisde Alexievich terug naar Minsk. Haar boeken worden beschreven als een literaire kroniek van de emotionele geschiedenis van de Sovjet -en post-Sovjet-mens. Haar meest opmerkelijke werken in Engelse vertalingen gaan over de oorlog in Afghanistan (The Boys of Zinc) en over de ramp in Tsjernobyl (Voices from Chernobyl. Haar eerste boek “Het onvrouwelijk gezicht van de oorlog” kwam uit in 1985. Het werd meerdere malen herdrukt en er werden meer dan twee miljoen exemplaren van verkocht. Deze roman is opgebouwd uit monologen van vrouwen in de oorlog die spreken over de aspecten van de Tweede Wereldoorlog die nooit eerder aan de orde kwamen. Een ander boek, “De laatste getuige: het Boek van onkinderlijke verhalen” beschrijft persoonlijke herinneringen van kinderen in oorlogstijd. In 1993 publiceerde ze “Betoverd door de dood”, een boek over geslaagde zelfmoorden en zelfmoordpogingen als gevolg van de ondergang van de Sovjet- Unie. Veel mensen voelden zich onlosmakelijk verbonden met de communistische ideologie en waren niet in staat om de nieuwe orde en de nieuw geïnterpreteerde geschiedenis te accepteren . Alexievich ’s boeken zijn gepubliceerd in vele landen, waaronder de VS, Duitsland, Groot-Brittannië, Japan, Zweden, Frankrijk, China, Vietnam, Bulgarije en India met een totaal van 19 landen in totaal. Ze heeft 21 scripts voor documentaires op haar naam en drie toneelstukken die werden opgevoerd in Frankrijk, Duitsland en Bulgarije.

 

Uit: Voices from Chernobyl

 

“Lyudmilla Ignatenko Wife of deceased Fireman Vasily Ignatenko

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea . . . We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was.

One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon.”

I didn’t see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant. The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke. The heat was awful. And he still hadn’t come back.

They went off just as they were, in their shirtsleeves. No one told them. They had been called for a fire, that was it.

Seven o’clock in the morning. At seven I was told he was in the hospital. I ran over there‚ but the police had already encircled it, and they weren’t letting anyone through. Only ambulances. The policemen shouted: “The ambulances are radioactive‚ stay away!” I started looking for a friend, she was a doctor at that hospital. I grabbed her white coat when she came out of an ambulance. “Get me inside!” “I can’t. He’s bad. They all are.” I held onto her. “Just to see him!” “All right‚” she said. “Come with me. Just for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

I saw him. He was all swollen and puffed up. You could barely see his eyes.

“He needs milk. Lots of milk‚” my friend said. “They should drink at least three liters each.”

“But he doesn’t like milk.”

“He’ll drink it now.”

Many of the doctors and nurses in that hospital‚ and especially the orderlies‚ would get sick themselves and die. But we didn’t know that then.

At ten‚ the cameraman Shishenok died. He was the first.”

 


Svetlana Alexievich (Stanyslaviv, 31 mei 1948)

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Elizabeth Alexander, Countee Cullen, Emmanuel Hiel, Martin Jankowski, Jan Geerts

Bij Sacramentsdag

 

 

 

Abendmahl door Hans Leonhard Schäufelein, 1515, Ulmer Münster

 

 

Am Fronleichnamstage

“Mein Fleisch ist wahrhaftig eine Speise,
und mein Blut ist wahrhaftig ein Trank”

O fasse Mut; er ist dir nah!
Du hast sein Fleisch, sein heilig Blut
Genossen ja.
O meine arme Seele, fasse Mut;
Er ist ja dein, er ward dein Fleisch und Blut.

Nicht, wie ich sollte, reich und warm
Kam freilich ich zu deinem Mahl:
Ich war ein arm
Zerlumpter Gast; doch zitterte die Qual
In mir des Sehnens; Tränen sonder Zahl

Hab’ ich vergossen in der Angst,
Die dennoch Freudeschauer war.
Sprich, warum bangst
Du vor der Arzenei so süß und klar,
Die Leben dir und Frieden bietet dar?

Wohl ist es furchtbar, seinen Gott
Zu einen mit dem sünd’gen Leib;
Es klingt wie Spott.
O Herr, ich bin ein schwach und wirres Weib,
Und stärker als die Seele ist der Leib!

So hab’ ich schuldbeladen dir
In meiner Sünde mich vereint;
Doch riefst du mir
So laut wie Einem, der um Leben weint:
So ist es Gnade, was von oben scheint.

Und hast du des Verstandes Fluch
Zu meiner Prüfung mir gestellt:
Er ist ein Trug.
Doch hast du selber ja, du Herr der Welt,
Hast selber den Verführer mir gesellt.

Drum trau ich, daß du dessen nicht
Vergessen wirst an jenem Tag,
Daß dein Gericht
Mir sprechen wird: Den Irren seh’ ich nach;
Dein Herz war willig, nur dein Kopf war schwach.

 

 

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (10 januari 1797 – 24 mei 1848)

De Paulusdom in Münster, dichtbij Drostes geboortehuis

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André Brink, Eduard Escoffet, G. K. Chesterton, Bernard Clavel, Leah Goldberg

De Zuid-Afrikaanse schrijver André Brink werd geboren op 29 mei 1935 in Vrede. Zie ook alle tags voor André Brink op dit blog.

Uit: Philida

“Here come shit. Just one look, and I can see it coming. Here I walk all this way and God know that is bad enough, what with the child in the abbadoek on my back, and now there’s no turning back, it’s just straight on to hell and gone. This is the man I got to talk to if I want to lay a charge, they tell me, this Grootbaas who is so tall and white and thin and bony, with deep furrows in his forehead, like a badly ploughed wheat field, and a nose like a sweet potato that has grown past itself.
It’s a long story. First he want to find out everything about me, and it’s one question after another. Who am I? Where do I come from? What is the name of my Baas? What is the name of the farm? For how long I been working there? Did I get a pass for coming here? When did I leave and how long did I walk? Where did I sleep last night? What do I think is going to happen to me when I get home again? And every time I say something, he first write it down in his big book with those knobbly hands and his long white fingers. These people got a thing about writing everything down. Just look at the back pages of the black Bible that belong to Oubaas Cornelis Brink, that’s Francois Gerhard Jacob’s father.
While the Grootbaas is writing I keep watching him closely. There’s something second-hand about the man, like a piece of knitting gone wrong that had to be done over, but badly, not very smoothly. I can say that because I know about knitting. On his nose sit a pair of thick glasses like a bat with open wings, but he look at me over them, not through them. His long hands keep busy all the time. Writing, and dipping the long feather in the ink, and sprinkling fine sand on the thick paper, and shifting his papers this way and that on top of the table that is really too low for him because he is so tall. He is sitting, I keep standing, that is how it’s got to be.

In the beginning I feel scared, my throat is tight. But after the second or third question I start feeling better. All I can think of is: If it was me that was knitting you, you’d look a bit better, but now whoever it was that knitted you, did not cast you off right. Still, I don’t say anything. In this place it’s only him and me and I don’t want to get on his wrong side. I got to tell him everything, and that is exactly what I mean to do today, without keeping anything back.”

 

André Brink (Vrede, 29 mei 1935)

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Adriaan Bontebal, Leo Pleysier, Frank Schätzing, Maeve Binchy, Thomas Moore, Ian Fleming

De Nederlandse dichter en schrijver Adriaan Bontebal werd als Aad van Rijn op 28 mei 1952 in Leidschendam geboren. Zie ook alle tags voor Adriaan Bontebal op dit blog.

ONTWAKEN

Ieder ontwaken
een feest

Ik sta op
rek me uit en
krab me eens flink
aan het onderlijf

Als rijpe vruchten
vallen de eitjes
van mijn schaamluis
op het dauwvochtige
slaapkamerzeil

Iedere morgen
een feest

Zwarte koffie
zware shag en
scharreleieren
bij het ontbijt

 

 

PAULUS POTTERSTRAAT

naar De Dapperstraat van J.C.Bloem

De legen kom je aan de randen tegen
Waar stoffig op de schoorsteen prijkt:
‘Over mijn lijk naar de Schilderswijk’
Dat volk ervaart de rust als zegen

Maar zo niet ik, voor mij geen kassen
Hoewel ik van een dorpje ben
De stad niet echt van huis uit ken
Haal ‘k nu mijn lucht uit uitlaatgassen

Als kneuter ben ik afgemeld
Mijn teugen zijn steeds voller teugen
De stedeling hij kent geen maat

Tevreden heb ik vastgesteld
Ik deug niet en ik zal nooit deugen
Dom weg gelukkig in de Potterstraat

 

Adriaan Bontebal (28 mei 1952 – 11 februari 2012)

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Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jan Blokker, Niels ’t Hooft, Kaur Kender, Georges Eekhoud

De Franse schrijver Louis-Ferdinand Céline (pseudoniem van Louis Ferdinand Destouches) werd geboren in Courbevoie op 27 mei 1894. Zie ook alle tags voor Louis-Ferdinand Céline op dit blog.

Uit: Journey To The End Of The Night (Vertaald door Ralph Manheim)

 

“Lola had a genuine official uniform, and it was really natty, decorated with little crosses all over, on the sleeves and on the tiny cap that she perched at a rakish angle on her wavy hair. She’d come to help us save France, as she told the hotel manager, to the best of her humble ability but with all her heart! We understood each other right away, but not completely, because the transports of the heart were beginning to give me a pain, I was more interested in the transports of the body. You can’t trust the heart, not at all. I’d learned that in the war, and I wasn’t going to forget it in a hurry.

Lola’s heart was tender, weak, and enthusiastic. Her body was sweet, it was adorable, so what could I do but take her all together as she was? Lola was a good kid all right, but between us stood the war, the monstrous frenzy that was driving half of humanity, lovers or not, to send the other half to the slaughterhouse. Naturally this interfered with our relationship. 

To me her body was a joy without end. I never wearied of exploring that American body. I have to admit that I was a terrible lecher. I still am. And I formed the pleasant and fortifying conviction that a country capable of producing bodies so daringly graceful, so tempting in their spiritual flights, must have countless other vital revelations to offer, of a biological nature, it goes without saying.

I made up my mind, while feeling and fondling Lola, that sooner or later I’d take a trip, or call it a pilgrimage, to the United States, the sooner the better. And the fact is that I knew neither peace nor rest (in an implacably adverse and harassed life) until I managed to go through with that profound and mystically anatomical adventure.

So it was in the immediate vicinity of Lola’s rear end that I received the message of a new world. Of course Lola wasn’t all body, she also had a wee little face that was adorable and just a bit cruel because of her gray-blue eyes that slanted slightly upward at the corners like a wildcat’s.”

 

 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (27 mei 1894 – 1 juli 1961)

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Alan Hollinghurst, Radwa Ashour, Hugo Raes, Maxwell Bodenheim, Isabella Nadolny

De Britse schrijver Alan Hollinghurst werd geboren op 26 mei 1954 in Stoud, Gloucestershire. Zie ook alle tags voor Alan Hollinghurst op dit blog.

Uit: The Line of Beauty

“When Gerald had won Barwick, which was Nick’s home constituency, the arrangement was jovially hailed as having the logic of poetry, or fate.

Gerald and Rachel were still in France, and Nick found himself almost resenting their return at the end of the month. The housekeeper came in early each morning, to prepare the day’s meals, and Gerald’s secretary, with sunglasses on top of her head, looked in to deal with the imposing volume of post. The gardener announced himself by the roar of the mower outside an open window. Mr Duke, the handyman (His Grace, as the family called him), was at work on various bits of maintenance. And Nick was in residence, and almost, he felt, in possession. He loved coming home to Kensington Park Gardens in the early evening, when the wide treeless street was raked by the sun, and the two white terraces stared at each other with the glazed tolerance of rich neighbours. He loved letting himself in at the three-locked green front door, and locking it again behind him, and feeling the still security of the house as he looked into the red-walled dining room, or climbed the stairs to the double drawing room, and up again past the half-open doors of the white bedrooms. The first flight of stairs, fanning out into the hall, was made of stone; the upper flights had the confidential creak of oak. He saw himself leading someone up them, showing the house to a new friend, to Leo perhaps, as if it was really his own, or would be one day: the pictures, the porcelain, the curvy French furniture so different from what he’d been brought up with. In the dark polished wood he was partnered by reflections as dim as shadows. He’d taken the chance to explore the whole house, from the wedge-shaped attic cupboards to the basement junk room, a dim museum in itself, referred to by Gerald as the trou de gloire. Above the drawingroom fireplace there was a painting by Guardi, a capriccio of Venice in a gilt rococo frame; on the facing wall were two large gilt-framed mirrors. Like his hero Henry James, Nick felt that he could ‘stand a great deal of gilt’.

 


Scene uit de tv-serie „The Line of Beauty“ uit 2006

 

Sometimes Toby would have come back, and there would be loud music in the drawing room; or he was in his father’s study at the back of the house making international phone calls and having a gin-and-tonic – all this done not in defiance of his parents but in rightful imitation of their own freedoms in the place. He would go into the garden and pull his shirt off impatiently and sprawl in a deckchair reading the sport in the Telegraph. Nick would see him from the balcony and go down to join him, slightly breathless, knowing Toby quite liked his rower’s body to be looked at. It was the easy charity of beauty. They would have a beer and Toby would say, ‘My sis all right? Not too mad, I hope,’ and Nick would say, ‘She’s fine, she’s fine,’ shielding his eyes from the dropping August sun, and smiling back at him with reassurance, among other unguessed emotions.”

 

Alan Hollinghurst (Stoud, 26 mei 1954)

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Vítězslav Nezval, Ivan O. Godfroid, Edmond De Goncourt, Machteld Brands

De Tsjechische dichter en vertaler Vítezslav Nezval werd geboren op 26 mei 1900 in Biskoupky. Zie ook alle tags voor Vítězslav Nezval op dit blog.

 

Fireworks 1924, A Cinemagenic Poem (Fragment)

the detective while choosing a magazine stares deep into the lady’s eyes (medium close shot)
the lady getting up (full shot)
the detective grabs his heart & sinks down to the floor (fade out)
a crowd of guests & waiters
the lady puts a handkerchief on the detective’s head
(close-up) the detective’s hand picking a photo & 2 tram tickets from the lady’s bag
in the fields the hare is pricking up its ears
a railway station where a train is being boarded
a gentleman with monocle at ticket counter
a hand plugging lines in at the phone exchange
the detective makes a call while staring at the tram ticket
index finger in the book
the tram ticket held in two hands as it grows in size till it dissolves into
the image of the tram (interior)
the dispatcher in his office struggling to recall something (medium close shot)
presses his index finger to his forehead (full shot)
& gives a smile (medium close shot)
giving a large banknote to the gentleman with the monocle seated beside the lady in the tram
a maze of telegraph wires
a postal clerk pondering a telegram
a lookout post in front of which there stands a yardman
the yardman runs into the lookout
a corridor inside the train down which the man with monocle is passing
he is entering the toilet
dumping his revolver
his pocket watch
(fade out) in the dark a sign HOTEL

 

Vertaald door Jerome Rothenberg en Milos Sovak

 


Vítězslav Nezval (26 mei 1900 – 6 april 1958)

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Egyd Gstättner, Eve Ensler, Friedrich Dieckmann, Claire Castillon, Raymond Carver, Jamaica Kincaid

De Oostenrijkse schrijver en essayist Egyd Gstättner werd geboren op 25 mei 1962 in Klagenfurt. Zie ook alle tags voor Egyd Gstättner op dit blog.

 

Uit: Absturz aus dem Himmel

 

„Eigentlich wollte ich – literarisch gerade wieder einmal frei geworden, was ein nervlich strapaziöser und auf Dauer wenigstens mir unausstehlicher Zustand ist – die Geschichte eines mündigen Staatsbürgers schreiben, der nach einem langen Wahlkampf in der Wahlzelle plötzlich von einer akuten Unentschiedenheit gepackt wird.
Denn er hält alle Parolen und Versprechungen und Gesichter aller Kandidaten aller Parteien gegeneinander und weiß partout nicht, in welchen Kreis er sein Kreuz machen könnte: eine Prosa übrigens, die deutliche autobiografische Züge enthalten soll; immerhin sagt eine meiner wenigen Literaturtheorien, dass meine Existenz von Haus aus derart dramatisch ist, dass ich keine andere benötige und nichts erfinden muss. Ich muss nur Ordnung schaffen.
Ich kann von meinem Leben leben. Weil er trotz der dringlichen Aufforderungen der Wahlhelfer der Parteien die Wahlzelle stundenlang nicht wieder verlässt mit der Begründung, eine solche Wahl sei eine heikle Angelegenheit und die gründlichste und genaueste Überlegung daher ein unerlässlicher Sachzwang, ungeachtet des sicher stimmigen Einwands, dass zunehmende Gründlichkeit und Genauigkeit dieser Überlegung eine daran anschließende Entscheidung für einen der Spitzenkandidaten, denen von der Meinungsforschung seriöse Gewinnchancen zugebilligt werden, keineswegs vereinfache, sondern im Gegenteil erschwere und verunmögliche, wird bald nicht nur die Warteschlange außerhalb der Wahlzelle, sondern auch das Fernsehen und damit das gesamte Bundesgebiet auf den Wähler aufmerksam, denn der Fernsehmoderator muss der am Höhepunkt der Hochspannung befindlichen Bevölkerung eingestehen, dass die für siebzehn Uhr angekündigte Hochrechnung, die das für das politische Leben der nächsten Jahre oder gar Jahrzehnte so richtungweisende und bedeutsame und mit einem Wort entscheidende Endergebnis der Wahlen erfahrungsgemäß mit verblüffender Exaktheit vorwegnimmt, nicht ausgestrahlt werden könne, obwohl sie natürlich bereits vorliege, aber erst veröffentlicht werden dürfe, sobald das letzte Wahllokal geschlossen habe.“

 

 

Egyd Gstättner (Klagenfurt, 25 mei 1962)

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Robert Ludlum, Theodore Roethke, Georges Bordonove, W. P. Kinsella, Max von der Grün, John Gregory Dunne

De Amerikaanse schrijver Robert Ludlum werd geboren in New York op 25 mei 1927. Zie ook alle tags voor Robert Ludlum op dit blog.

 

Uit: The Janson Directive

 

“N. Indian Ocean, 250 miles east of Sri Lanka
Northwestern Anura
The night was oppressive, the air at body temperature and almost motionless. Earlier in the evening there had been light, cooling rains, but now everything seemed to radiate heat, even the silvery half-moon, its countenance brushed with the occasional wisps of cloud. The jungle itself seemed to exhale the hot, moist breath of a predator lying in wait.
Shyam shifted restlessly in his canvas chair. It was, he knew, a fairly ordinary night on the island of Anura for this time of year: early in the monsoon season, the air was always heavy with a sense of foreboding. Yet only the ever attentive mosquitoes disturbed the quiet. At half past one in the morning, Shyam reckoned he had been on checkpoint duty for four and a half hours. In that time, precisely seven motorists had come their way. The checkpoint consisted of two parallel lines of barbed-wire frames–“knife rests”–set up eighty feet apart on the road, to either side of the search and administration area. Shyam and Arjun were the two sentries on forward duty, and they sat in front of the wooden roadside booth. A pair of backups was supposedly on duty on the other side of the hill, but the hours of silence from them suggested that they were dozing, along with the men in the makeshift barracks a few hundred feet down the road. For all the dire warnings of their superiors, these had been days and nights of unrelieved boredom. The northwestern province of Kenna was sparsely populated in the best of times, and these were not the best of times.
Now, drifting in with the breeze, as faint as a distant insect drone, came the sound of a gunned motor.
Shyam slowly got to his feet. The sound was growing closer.
“Arjun,” he called out in a singsong tone. “Ar-jun. Car coming.”
Arjun lolled his head in a circle, working out a crick in his neck. “At this hour?” He rubbed his eyes. The humidity made the sweat lie heavily on his skin, like mineral oil.

 

 

Robert Ludlum (25 mei 1927 – 12 maart 2001)

Lees verder “Robert Ludlum, Theodore Roethke, Georges Bordonove, W. P. Kinsella, Max von der Grün, John Gregory Dunne” →