Charles Bukowski, Reiner Kunze, Moritz Rinke, Ferenc Juhász, Alice Nahon

De Amerikaanse dichter en fictieschrijver Charles Bukowski werd geboren op 16 augustus 1920 in Andernach, Duitsland. Zie ook alle tags voor Charles Bukowski op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 16 augustus 2010.

An Almost Made Up Poem

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.

 
Charles Bukowski (16 augustus 1920 – 9 maart 1994)

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Jules Laforgue, T. E. Lawrence, Pierre Henri Ritter jr., Max Schuchart

De Franse dichter Jules Laforgue werd geboren in Montevideo op 16 augustus 1860. Zie ook alle tags voor Jules Laforgue op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 16 augustus 2010.

Sundays

Autumn! It is autumn! Once again autumn!
The great gale and all its trail
Of reprisals, and of music . . .
It is “Closed for the Season” at seaside hotels.
Leaf-fall, fall of Antigones and Philomels:
My gravedigger, Alas poor Yorick!
Lumps them pell-mell.

Love and straw-fires for ever!

The good young ladies
Inviolable and frail
File soberly this way
Summoned by the chapel-bell
Hygienically and most dulcetly
As befits the “sweet” Sabbath-day.

How all around them grows purified
And Sundayfied.

And how faces all grow long at the sight of them!

As for me, though: I am the Great White Bear,
Brought hither by iceberg ferry,
More polar, more spotless pure
Than those girls in white millinery;
Not, though, what you would call a churchgoer.
I am the Grand Master of Analysis;
Remember this.

And yet . . . and yet . . . why so pale?
Come, trust your old friend, you can tell me the tale.

Ah no? Can such things be?
I turn my face to the seas and the rough skies,
To all things that grumble and that utter sighs.

Such things! Such things!
Matter for sleepless nights and nail-bitings.

Poor, poor, for all their promisings!

And we! Drowned in such seas,
Plunged into such wonderment,
Fallen to our knees . . . !

O wonder, found and at once hidden,
So martyred, poor, yet full of passion,
Being, as it were, a thing forbidden
Never to be touched, save in dream fashion.

Wondrous thing,
Most violet attar, precious residue,
The universe
Has care of you
And planets in their courses are your nurse
From burying to marrying.

Oh, it is rich not to be bought!
Just your dear eyes, there, in the skies –
Greater than God, higher than thought,
Those thoughtless and thought-coloured eyes!

So frail, so thin!
And all that mortal warmth
Hoarded within!

O forgive her, if, unthinking
(How well it becomes her!)
She makes eyes a little
To beg you a little
To have pity a little!

O frail, frail, and still athirst
For those Masses which I so mock!
Bend, bend your dear head; O look,
The spring-time, the lilac-burst.
I was not thinking, I swear, of lovemakings
But of heavenly things!

O if, after morning Mass,
We could but vanish and be no more
– Being sick of the human race,
So well-contented, so crass,
There, at the church-door

 

Vertaald door P. N. Furbank

 
Jules Laforgue (16 augustus 1860 – 20 augustus 1887)
Cover

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