De Indiase schrijver Amitav Ghosh werd geboren in Calcutta op 11 juli 1956. Zie ook alle tags voor Amitav Ghosh op dit blog.

Uit: Gun Island

“Calcutta The strangest thing about this strange journey was that it was launched by a word — and not an unusually resonant one either but a banal, commonplace coinage that is in wide circulation, from Cairo to Calcutta. That word is bundook, which means ‘gun’ in many languages, including my own mother tongue, Bengali (or Bangla). Nor is the word a stranger to English: by way of British colonial usages it found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is glossed as ‘rifle’. But there was no rifle or gun in sight the day the journey began; nor indeed was the word intended to refer to a weapon. And that, precisely, was why it caught my attention: because the gun in question was a part of a name — ‘Bonduki Sadagar’, which could be translated as ’the Gun Merchant’. The Gun Merchant entered my life not in Brooklyn, where I live and work, but in the city where I was born and raised —Calcutta (or Kolkata, as it is now formally known). That year, as on many others, I was in Kolkata through much of the winter, ostensibly for business. My work, as a dealer in rare books and Asian antiquities, requires me to do a good deal of on-site scouting and since I happen to possess a small apartment in Kolkata (carved out of the house that my sisters and I inherited from our parents) the city has become a second base of operations for me. But it wasn’t just work that brought me back every year: Kolkata was also sometimes a refuge, not only from the bitter cold of a Brooklyn winter, but from the solitude of a personal  life that had become increasingly desolate over time, even as my professional fortunes prospered. And the desolation was never greater than it was that year, when a very promising relationship came to a shockingly abrupt end: a woman I had been seeing for a long time had cut me off without explanation, blocking me on every channel that we had ever used to communicate. It was my first brush with ‘ghosting’, an experience that is as humiliating as it is painful. Suddenly, with my sixties looming in the not-too-distant future, I found myself more alone than ever. So, I went to Calcutta earlier than usual that year, timing my arrival to coincide with the annual migration that occurs when the weather turns cold in northern climes and great flocks of `foreign-settled’ Calcuttans, like myself; take wing and fly back to overwinter in the city. I knew that I could count on catching up with a multitude of friends and relatives; that the weeks would slip by in a whirl of lunches, dinner parties and wedding receptions. And the thought that I might, in the midst of this, meet a woman with whom I might be able to share my life was not, I suppose, entirely absent from my mind (for this has indeed happened to many men of my vintage). But of course nothing like that came to pass even though I lost no opportunity to circulate and was introduced to a good number of divorcees, widows and other single women of an appropriate age.”

 

 

De Duitse dichter en schrijver Jürgen Becker werd op 10 juli 1932 in Keulen geboren. Zie ook alle tags voor Jürgen Becker op dit blog.

 

Wat er te bereiken valt

Het volgende uur. Alsof men zit te wachten. Maar
er is altijd iets te doen, over de vervuilde terreinen hoeven we
niet eens te praten.

Het is licht genoeg buiten. Het behoeft geen
verzoek, geen motief voor het hoofdartikel; ik vertel je
alles vroeg genoeg.

Het is werkelijk heel simpel. Met de rug tegen de muur,
naar het raam, naar het beeldscherm, naar de deur. Niets meebrengen,
de tafel blijft nu leeg.

 

Vertaald door Frans Roumen

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 11^e juli ook mijn blog van 11 juli 2020 en eveneens mijn blog van 11 juli 2019 en ook mijn blog van 11 juli 2016 en ook mijn blog van 11 juli 2015 deel 1 en ook deel 2.