De Engelse (Welshe) dichter, schrijver en presentator Owen Sheers werd geboren op 20 september 1974 in Suva op de Fiji eilanden. Zie ook alle tags voor Owen Sheers op dit blog.

 

Intermission
For L.

A night-long easterly and a chestnut tree
side-swiping the power lines
has stilled the house to this:

wells of darkness in the hallway,
doors opening onto mine shafts of night
and us,

sitting by firelight,
tipping heels of whisky
against the flames and the dust.

An evening of unfamiliar obstacles,
rooms shrunken to the candle’s halo,
the world lessened.

You speak from the shore of the other chair,
saying all you really want is to live
long enough to be good at the oboe

and remembering a fly I saw that morning,
vibrating across a window like a tattooist’s needle
towards the slip of space that was air not glass,

I think I understand.
That it is after all the small victories that matter,
that are In the end, enough.

 

Winter Swans

The clouds had given their all –
two days of rain and then a break
in which we walked,

the waterlogged earth
gulping for breath at our feet
as we skirted the lake, silent and apart,

until the swans came and stopped us
with a show of tipping in unison.
As if rolling weights down their bodies to their heads

they halved themselves in the dark water,
icebergs of white feather; paused before returning again
like boats righting in rough weather

‘They mate for life’ you said as they left,
porcelain over the stilling water. I didn’t reply
but as we moved on through the afternoon light,

slow-stepping in the lake’s shingle and sand,
I noticed our hands, that had, somehow,
swum the distance between us

and folded, one over the other;
like a pair of wings settling after flight.

 

Nog niet mijn moeder

Gisteren vond ik een foto
van jou op je zeventiende,
met een paard aan je hand en lachend,
nog niet mijn moeder.

De strakke rijpet verborg je haar,
en je benen waren nog de lange schenen van een jongen.
Je hield het paard aan de halster vast,
je hand een vuist onder zijn enorme kaak.

De omgewaaide bomen lagen nog op de achtergrond
en de lucht was korrelig door ‘t oude fotorolletje,
maar wat me opviel was je gezicht,
dat van mij was.

En ik dacht, een seconde lang, dat jij mij was.
Maar toen zag ik het damesjasje,
nauw in de taille, de ballonvormige rijbroek,
en natuurlijk de datum, gekrast in de hoek.

Dat alles vertelde me nog eens,
dat jij het was op je zeventiende, met een paard aan je hand
en lachend, nog niet mijn moeder,
hoewel ik duidelijk al je kind was.

 

Vertaald door Frans Roumen

 

 

 De Ierse schrijver Joseph Victor O’Connor werd geboren op 20 september 1963 in Dublin. Zie ook alle tags voor Joseph O’Connor op dit blog.

Uit: The Thrill of it All

“Who was this wraith? Whence had he come? My classmates traded theories about his birthplace. China was a candidate, as were Laos and Malaysia. Oddly, I don’t remember anyone ever suggesting Vietnam, his long-departed actual motherland. What was certain was that he’d been adopted in South Yorkshire as a child, looked fabulous and didn’t talk much. What Fran had wasn’t confidence. It was a million miles from flounce. The closest I can come is ‘dignity’. And you want to watch out when you’ve dignity in England because it can look like you’re taking yourself seriously.
Our first conversation took place on the afternoon of Good Friday 1982, which fell on April 9th. The holy day tended to unleash a viral panic through the undergraduate body, for it was one of only two throughout the entire year when the student bar, The Trap, being administered by an observant Irish Catholic landlord, was closed. The unease would commence at the start of Easter Week, rising to full-blown hysteria as Spy Wednesday approached. There would be no drink. What would we do? By Holy Thursday night, you could have sodomised anyone in the college in return for a six-pack of Harp.
The form was to stockpile and repair to someone’s flat, in one of the many crumbling old houses partitioned into bedsits for students or the not-quite-destitute. There, the Zeppelin wailed and the wallpaper peeled as Christ’s tears spattered the windows. A nice girl studying Accountancy would end up weeping into the communal toilet on the landing, puking like a fruit machine, her hair held aloft by some monster out of Poe, his other paw working its way into her tights. Scholars in a wardrobe chewed at one another under damp coats. The corrugated kacks of the lessee or his cousin dried by an electric fire. Some wurzle would start a fisticuff and get kicked down the stairs, only to return, an hour later, eyes raging for forgiveness, the bottle of Blue Nun he’d stolen from the 24-hour minimart in the town his passport back into the pleasure-dome.
Rebel-yells, drunken gropes. Lachrymose talk. Backroom fingerings, declined lunges, Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’, stale bread in the toaster at dawn. My Purgatory will be a thousand years of Good Friday, circa 1982, reeking of chips, old carpet, crushed sexual hopes and unlaundered nylon bed-sheets sprinkled with Brut aftershave by a student of Agricultural Science.”

 

 

Zie voor de schrijvers van de 20^e september ook mijn blog van 20 september 2020 en eveneens mijn blog van 20 september 2019 en ook mijn blog van 20 september 2018.