Vikram Seth, Paul Muldoon, Kurt Schwitters, Jean-Claude Izzo, Silke Andrea Schuemmer, Carel van Nievelt

De Indische schrijver Vikram Seth werd geboren op 20 juni 1952 in Kolkata. Zie ook alle tags voor Vikram Seth op dit blog.

Uit: An Equal Music

“The Tononi seems to purr at the suggestion. Something happy, something happy, surely:

In a clear brook
With joyful haste
The whimsical trout
Shot past me like an arrow.

I play the line of the song, I play the leaps and plunges of the right hand of the piano, I am the trout, the angler, the brook, the observer. I sing the words, bobbing my constricted chin. The Tononi does not object; it resounds. I play it in B, in A, in E flat. Schubert does not object. I am not transposing his string quartets.
Where a piano note is too low for the violin, it leaps into a higher octave. As it is, it is playing the songline an octave above its script. Now, if it were a viola . . . but it has been years since I played the viola.
The last time was when I was a student in Vienna ten years ago. I return there again and again and think: was I in error? Was I unseeing? Where was the balance of pain between the two of us? What I lost there I have never come near to retrieving.
What happened to me so many years ago? Love or no love, I could not continue in that city. I stumbled, my mind jammed, I felt the pressure of every breath. I told her I was going, and went. For two months I could do nothing, not even write to her. I came to London. The smog dispersed but too late. Where are you now, Julia, and am I not forgiven?“

 

Vikram Seth (Kolkata, 20 juni 1952)

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Robert Rozhdestvensky, Laure Wyss, Lillian Hellman, Nicholas Rowe, Charles W. Chesnutt, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Joseph Autran

De Russische dichter en schrijver Robert Ivanovich Rozhdestvensky werd geboren op 20 juni 1932 in Kosikha in het district Altai Krai. Zie ook alle tags voor Robert Rozhdestvensky op dit blog.

 

Instants

Do not look down on the seconds. Why?
The time will come and you will see
the reasons:
like bullets at the temple they flow by,
the instants
the instants
the instants

Each instant has its own cause and aim,
its own bells and marks,
its own colours,
the instants give some people painful shame
disgrace immortality to others

The instants are well pressed into the years,
they are compressed and pressed into the centuries
I cannot understand where
the first
and where on earth the final instant is.

The momentary instants weave the rain,
and water falls from heaven in a torrent.
At times for many years you have
to wait
to see your very last and final moment.
It will arrive as big as gulp some day
in summer when your thirst is so insistent..
And yet we should remember
anyway
our duty from the first to final instant

Do not look down on the seconds. Why?
The time will come and you will see, as imminence, –
Like bullets at the temple they flow by,
the instants
the instants
the instants

 

Vertaald door Alec Vagapov

 

 
Robert Rozhdestvensky (20 juni 1932 – 19 augustus 1994)

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In Memoriam James Salter

In Memoriam James Salter

De Amerikaanse schrijver James Salter is op 90-jarige leeftijd overleden. Amerikaanse media schrijven dat zijn vrouw zijn overlijden bekend heeft gemaakt. James Salter werd op 10 juni 1925 in New York geboren. Zie ook alle tags voor James Salter op dit blog.

Uit: Light Years

“Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.
And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.”
(…)

“He had his life—it was not worth much—not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one—we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.”
(…)

“He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before the rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.”

James Salter (10 juni 1925 – 19 juni 2015)