De Amerikaanse dichter en schrijver John Robinson Jeffers werd geboren op 10 januari 1887 in Allegheny, nu Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Zie ook ook alle tags voor Robinson Jeffers op dit blog.
Delusion Of Saints
The old pagan burials, uninscribed rock,
Secret-keeping mounds,
Have shed the feeble delusions that built them,
They stand inhumanly
Clean and massive; they have lost their priests.
But the cross-bearing stones
Still foot corruption, and their faces carved
With hopes and terrors
At length too savagely annulled to be left
Even ridiculous.
Long-suffering saints, flamelike aspirers,
You have won your reward:
You sleep now as easily as any dead murderer
Or worn-out lecher.
To have found your faith a liar is no thorn
In the narrow beds,
Nor laughter of unfriends nor rumor of the ruinous
Churches will reach you.
As at Clonmacnoise I saw them all ruined,
And at Cong, at Glendalough,
At Monasterboice; and at Kilrnacduagh
All ruined, all roofless
But the great cyclopean-stoned spire
That leans toward its fall.
A place perfectly abandoned of life,
Except that we heard
One old horse neighing across the stone hedges
In the flooded fields.
End Of The World
When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don’t think so. They’ll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.
Robinson Jeffers (10 januari 1887 – 20 januari 1962)
Portret door Hamilton Wolf, 1919
De Duitstalige, uit Namibië stammende, schrijver Giselher Werner Hoffmann werd geboren op 10 januari 1958 in Windhoek. Zie ook alle tags voor Giselher Werner Hoffmann op dit blog.
Uit: Irgendwo in Afrika
„Da man die Passagiere nicht einfach mit einem Fallschirm über Südwestafrika abwerfen kann, hatte man vierzig Kilometer außerhalb der Hauptstadt Windhoek den J.G. Strijdom-Flughafen gebaut. An einem Freitag dem 13. August trommelten um sieben Uhr am Morgen ein Paar hochhackige Absätze einen klappernden Rhythmus auf den Marmorboden des Warteraums. Ohne die anerkennenden Blicke der Männer zu beachten, bahnte sich die kurvenreiche Trägerin dieser Schuhe einen Weg durch die Menschenmenge. Sie hatte es offensichtlich furchtbar eilig, in die Abfertigungshalle zu gelangen, doch schon wenige Meter hinter der Milchglastür wurde ihr ein Abflußgitter zum Verhängnis. Ihr Schuhabsatz blieb stecken!
“Achtung – Achtung!”, tönte eine wohlklingende Frauenstimme aus den Lautsprechern. “Flug 007 aus Frankfurt ist soeben gelandet! Die Passagiere werden durch Ausgang Nummer Eins erwartet, danke!” Während die Ansage in Englisch und Afrikaans wiederholt wurde, warf das unglückliche Mädchen einen gehetzten Blick zur Tür hinaus, wo sich auf dem Rollfeld die Boing 747 gespenstisch gegen den Morgenhimmel abhob. Aus dem erleuchteten Inneren der Maschine kamen immer mehr Passagiere die Bordtreppe herunter und strömten unrasiert und fern der Heimat dem Flughafengebäude entgegen. Es konnte sich nur noch um Sekunden handeln, bis der erste Fluggast in der Halle erschien!.“
Giselher Werner Hoffmann (Windhoek, 10 januari 1958)
De Nederlandse dichter en schrijver Jan H. Eekhout werd geboren op 10 januari 1900 in Sluis. Zie ook alle tags voor Jan H. Eekhout op dit blog.
Sebastiaan
Hij voelde hoe het lijf allengs bezweek
En neeg, neeg naar een duister, zacht en groot.
Maar nog vernam hij, sidderend, het week
Zoemen van pijlen, ijlboden des doods,
Hem roekloos roovend ’t klare, levend bloed,
Dat hij niet geven, nog niet geven wilde. –
Toen brak hij neer, als in een laatsten groet
Buigend de broze knieën en verstilde.
Zij lieten ’t lichaam in de koorden achter
En geen zag bij het snelle heengaan om. –
Scheemring woei aan – Het bloed sijpelde zachter –
Tusschen de bergen daalde, rood, de zon.
Jan H. Eekhout (10 januari 1900 – 6 maart 1978)
Sint Sebastiaan door Giovanni Battista Carlone (1592-1677)
De Chileense dichter Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández werd op 10 januari 1893 geboren in Santiago. Zie ook alle tags voor Vincente Huidobro op dit blog.
Night
You hear the night glide across the snow
The song fell down from the trees
And through the fog sounded voices
I lit my cigar at a glance
Every time I open my lips
I flood the void with clouds
In the harbor
The masts are full of nests.
And the wind
groans in the birds’ wings
THE WAVES ROCK THE DEAD SHIP
Whistling on the shore I
Look at the star that glows between my fingers
Vertaald door Ian Barnett
Ars Poetica
Let poetry be like a key
Opening a thousand doors
A leaf falls; something flies by;
Let all the eye sees be created
And the soul of the listener tremble.
Invent new worlds and watch your word;
The adjective, when it doesn’t give life, kills it.
We are in the age of nerves.
The muscle hangs,
Like a memory, in museums;
But we are not the weaker for it:
True vigor
Resides in the head.
Oh Poets, why sing of roses!
Let them flower in your poems;
For us alone
Do all things live beneath the Sun.
The poet is a little God.
Vertaald door Jorge García-Gómez
Vicente Huidobro (10 januari 1893 – 2 januari 1948)
Cover
De Ierse dichter en criticus Aubrey Thomas de Vere werd geboren in Adare, County Limerick, op 10 januari 1814. Zie ook alle tags voor Aubrey Thomas de Vere op dit blog.
Human Life
Sad is our youth, for it is ever going,
Crumbling away beneath our very feet;
Sad is our life, for onward it is flowing,
In current unperceived because so fleet;
Sad are our hopes for they were sweet in sowing,
But tares, self-sown, have overtopped the wheat;
Sad are our joys, for they were sweet in blowing;
And still, O still, their dying breath is sweet:
And sweet is youth, although it have bereft us
Of that which made our childhood sweeter still;
And sweet our life’s decline, for it hath left us
A nearer Good to cure an older Ill:
And sweet are all things, when we learn to prize them
Not for their sake, but His who grants them or denies them.
Aubrey Thomas de Vere (10 januari 1814 – 20 januari 1902)
Foto door Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868
De Russische schrijver Alexei Tolstoy werd geboren op 10 januari 1883 in Sosnovka. Zie ook alle tags voor Alexei Tolstoy op dit blog.
Uit: The Marie Antoinette Tapestry
“Sheepskins, padded jackets, long-skirted peasant coats – the last of the sightseers file out of the palace, now a mu-seum. Off in the west the sun is sinking, crimson, into the winter murk. The day is short, here in the north. But I can still see the leaf designs that the frost has traced on the lofty windows, as though in memory of the leafy forests that once covered the earth.
Now the tracery begins to fade, and blue-grey dusk gathers over all. A door bangs in the distance. The watchman’s felt boots crunch down the path. A wintry hush spreads through the palace and the snow-blanketed park.
Sometimes, from her fearful height, the moon shines palely in at an uncurtained window. But that is not often. Most of the time it is fog, fog, fog over the park, and a storm-wind whistling through the bare branches of the trees. Cold and desolate. I try to amuse myself by looking back over the years of my life. They are many, those years — some of them bright with fetes and pageantry; others, grim and tragic.
Time does not touch me, does not age me as it did the women who pass through my memories; as it did those two queens to whom I belonged. I am beautiful still as I was a hundred and fifty years ago, in my powdered wig and my rich, blood-red gown. I hang in a spacious draw-ing-room, by a window to the left of the door. Over the mantelpiece, opposite the windows, hangs a portrait of my mistress, painted at full length— young, and proud, and rather too erect, almost like a soldier — as she looked in the first years after her marriage.”
Alexei Tolstoy (10 januari 1883 – 23 februari 1945)