De Argentijnse schrijfster Luisa Valenzuela werd geboren op 26 november 1938 in Buenos Aires. Zie ook alle tags voor Luisa Valenzuela op dit blog.

Uit: Dark Desires And The Others (Vertaald door Susan E. Clark)

“Further along the dates will have to be erased, but at the end of ’78, the person I was then was getting ready to jump, knowing her absence will be a long one. She’s been invited to be Writer in Residence at Columbia University for a semester, and that will be — she intuits already — the longest semester of her life. She breathes in huge gulps of her city’s air, the verb a lie at the time, because the air had become unbreathable. With vandal-like delight she is disemboweling her library. Some books will have to disappear — the word alone produces goose bumps — others are simply dismantled in order to preserve this story or that essay or those three chapters that she knows she’ll need for her course, or that she wants to keep with her in spite of the weight limit on planes. Get rid of everything to be able to leave as lightly as possible. She knows that if she stays in her own country, she won’t write anymore. She can’t show her latest work to anyone. She’s afraid of putting those readers in danger. She also has notebooks and notebooks — disheveled, awkward diaries with no continuity at all. From those she likewise vandalizes — or, in this case, rescues — some fragments that will later form the microstories of a volume titled precisely Libro que no muerde (Book that Doesn’t Bite). And it didn’t, really, unless we say that irony has a bite. Those were certainly times that lent themselves to furious biting. She did what she could with regard to the situation; she got involved and she wrote and later she wrote partly about her involvement. These pages however, only took in the shrapnel — shrapnel that was noted down in new and multiple foreign notebooks. So that all that’s left is to write the good-bye bite:
Her loved one of the time, ex-loved one now because of his abandoning her when everything seemed to promise the opposite, reappears after almost a year of absence in order to declare his passion and his anguish and to confess his error. The woman I was then has one foot already in the stirrup and treats him with disdain, and when he desperately swears that he will never stop searching for her, and asks, using these exact words, “Now what do I do?” she answers, “Become a man,” and turns right around.
So that’s where, in New York, and without realizing it, her notes about herself, about her efforts to become a woman, begin.”

 

 

Onafhankelijk van geboortedata

De Omaanse dichter Mohamed Al-Harthy werd geboren in al-Mudhayrib, Oman, in 1962. Zie ook alle tags voor Mohamed Al-Harthy op dit blog.

 

PAUSING IN THE GARDEN

Pauses are a bit like resting, and you cannot do without them when reading if you want to fully experience the poetic moment that flows from every verse, and that is carried by the overall harmony of the poem; for the pause is not some typographical device, but rather a psychological state. And sometimes it is more important than the verse that precedes it.
– the Peruvian poet Alberto Hidalgo

I will rest, poet, I will rest . . .
I will follow the signposts,
whether or not I stumble on the road,
and I will add more stumbling blocks
once I’ve crossed the threshold:
 
a small stone on which to pause and catch my breath
between the gasping verses;
or a rock still on its way to the abyss,
teetering now on the brink of the void
that the painter’s brush forgot to color in,
between Yeats’ stone and the rock on which they displayed
the poetry of Imru al-Qays . . .
where every poem before it’s born
carries within itself
descendants and ancestors, whether the stumbling
between one verse
and another
takes forever
or no time at all.
 
For some reason
 —or none at all—
a parenthesis
shone in the verse:
it might ruin the flow, might slow things down,
unless the (opening and closing) parentheses snatch up the verse—
if they even exist, that is.
And if they don’t exist, then the trap
is hidden between the lines,
and will conceal
or reveal
a sudden interruption
in the rhythm.
 
Forget about the dotted lines
(that say nothing)
…………………………….
…………………………….
although they say everything in this garden
where I’m pausing
—that which can be dispensed with,
and that which cannot—
because they are the poem’s guardian angel
in eternal wagers that do not settle
for the permanence of rock or stone,
so that the poem might live each day, so that it might live
its endless life
between the pages of a book. 

 

Vertaald door Kareem James Abu-Zeid

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 26e november ook mijn blog van 26 november 2018 en eveneens mijn blog van 26 november 2017 deel 1 en eveneens deel 2.