Federico García Lorca, Elizabeth Alexander

De Spaanse dichter en toneelschrijver Federico Garcia Lorca werd geboren op 5 juni 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada. Zie ook alle tags voor Federico Garcia Lorca op dit blog.

 

Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

3. The Laid Out Body

Stone is a forehead where dreames grieve
without curving waters and frozen cypresses.
Stone is a shoulder on which to bear Time
with trees formed of tears and ribbons and planets.

I have seen grey showers move towards the waves
raising their tender riddle arms,
to avoid being caught by lying stone
which loosens their limbs without soaking their blood.

For stone gathers seed and clouds,
skeleton larks and wolves of penumbra:
but yields not sounds nor crystals nor fire,
only bull rings and bull rings and more bull rings without walls.

Now, Ignacio the well born lies on the stone.
All is finished. What is happening! Contemplate his face:
death has covered him with pale sulphur
and has place on him the head of dark minotaur.

All is finished. The rain penetrates his mouth.
The air, as if mad, leaves his sunken chest,
and Love, soaked through with tears of snow,
warms itself on the peak of the herd.

What is they saying? A stenching silence settles down.
We are here with a body laid out which fades away,
with a pure shape which had nightingales
and we see it being filled with depthless holes.

Who creases the shroud? What he says is not true!
Nobody sings here, nobody weeps in the corner,
nobody pricks the spurs, nor terrifies the serpent.
Here I want nothing else but the round eyes
to see his body without a chance of rest.

Here I want to see those men of hard voice.
Those that break horses and dominate rivers;
those men of sonorous skeleton who sing
with a mouth full of sun and flint.

Here I want to see them. Before the stone.
Before this body with broken reins.
I want to know from them the way out
for this captain stripped down by death.

I want them to show me a lament like a river
wich will have sweet mists and deep shores,
to take the body of Ignacio where it looses itself
without hearing the double planting of the bulls.

Loses itself in the round bull ring of the moon
which feigns in its youth a sad quiet bull,
loses itself in the night without song of fishes
and in the white thicket of frozen smoke.

I don’t want to cover his face with handkerchiefs
that he may get used to the death he carries.
Go, Ignacio, feel not the hot bellowing
Sleep, fly, rest: even the sea dies!

 

4. Absent Soul

The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,
nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house.
The child and the afternoon do not know you
because you have dead forever.

The shoulder of the stone does not know you
nor the black silk, where you are shuttered.
Your silent memory does not know you
because you have died forever

The autumn will come with small white snails,
misty grapes and clustered hills,
but no one will look into your eyes
because you have died forever.

Because you have died for ever,
like all the dead of the earth,
like all the dead who are forgotten
in a heap of lifeless dogs.

Nobady knows you. No. But I sing of you.
For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.
Of the signal maturity of your understanding.
Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.
Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety.

It will be a long time, if ever, before there is born
an Andalusian so true, so rich in adventure.
I sing of his elegance with words that groan,
and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.

 

Vertaald door Pablo Medina

 

 

De Amerikaanse dichteres en schrijfster Elizabeth Alexander werd geboren op 30 mei 1962 in New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Elizabeth Alexander op dit blog.

Crash

Ik ben de laatste vrouw uit het vliegtuig
dat is neergestort in een korenveld bij Philly,

en pik door heet metaal
mijn rugzak en luiertas op.

Geen zwarte doos, geen romp,
gewoon een zuster piloot die roet uit haar ogen veegt,

blij dat ze leeft. Haar dreadlocks
houden de rook wekenlang vast.

Alle blanke passagiers stapten uit
voor het neerstorten, zo zeker wisten ze dat een zuster

geen controle had over de crash. O geslacht.
O ras. O, kleingelovigen.

Hier zijn we in het korenveld, gekneusd en vies maar levend.
Ik nodig zuster piloot thuis uit voor het diner

bij mijn ouders, voor de gebraden kip van mijn moeder
met jus en rijst, om het te vieren.

 

Vertaald door Frans Roumen

 

 

Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 5e juni ook mijn blog van 5 juni 2019 en ook mijn blog van 5 juni 2017 deel 1 en eveneens deel 2.