De Britse schrijver Evelyn Waugh werd geboren in Londen op 28 oktober 1903. Zie ook alle tags voor Evelyn Waugh op dit blog.

Uit: Brideshead Revisited

“From the moment he arrived the newcomer took charge, talking in a luxurious, self-taught stammer; teasing; caricaturing the guests at his previous luncheon; telling lubricious anecdotes of Paris and Berlin; and doing more than entertain–transfiguring the party, shedding a vivid, false light of eccentricity upon everyone so that the three prosaic Etonians seemed suddenly to become creatures of his fantasy.
This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the “æsthete” par excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville, a young man who seemed to me, then, fresh from the sombre company of the College Essay Society, ageless as a lizard, as foreign as a Martian. He had been pointed out to me often in the streets, as he moved with his own peculiar stateliness, as though he had not fully accustomed himself to coat and trousers and was more at his ease in heavy, embroidered robes; I had heard his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him, under the spell of Sebastian. I found myself enjoying him voraciously, like the fine piece of cookery he was.
After luncheon he stood on the balcony with a megaphone which had appeared surprisingly among the bric-à-brac of Sebastian’s room, and in languishing, sobbing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.
“‘I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all,'” he sobbed to them from the Venetian arches–
“Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead….”
And then, stepping lightly into the room, “How I have surprised them! All b-boatmen are Grace Darlings to me.”
We sat on sipping Cointreau while the mildest and most detached of the Etonians sang “Home they brought her warrior dead” to his own accompaniment on the harmonium.
It was four o’clock before we broke up.
Anthony Blanche was the first to go. He took formal and complimentary leave of each of us in turn. To Sebastian he said: “My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion,” and to me: “I think it’s perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivvy you out like an old st-t-toat.”
The others left soon after him. I rose to go with them, but Sebastian said: “Have some more Cointreau,” so I stayed and later he said, “I must go to the Botanical Gardens.”

 

 

De Hongaarse dichter en schrijver István Kemény werd geboren op 28 oktober 1961 in Boedapest. Zie ook alle tags voor István Kemény op dit blog.

 

Treurig

Je moet binnen zinnen raken.
Zoals de zelfmoordenaar, als hij rugwaarts leeft.
Het puntje van de I halen,
maar het terugzetten als zijn plaats wit is.

Beter is het als alles zo blijft als ik het aantrof,
het was eigenlijk zo slecht nog niet.
De lakens uitstoppen, op de grond slapen.
En het verleden wordt weer gezond.

Het was een cadeau. Ik hoor de smak
al voor de val, nog veel eerder.
Een engel zweeft langs. De orde herstelt zich.
Het papier vouwt open, het voorwerp valt eruit.

Dan weer helemaal mooi opnieuw beginnen,
Zoals de zelfmoordenaar, als hij rugwaarts leeft
Dit hier, het allemaal vergeten.
Briefjes schrijven: melk, brood
melk, brood.

 

Vertaald door Mischa Andriessen

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 28^e oktober ook mijn blog van 28 oktober 2018 deel 2 en eveneens deel 3.