De Iraanse schrijver Hooshang Golshiri werd geboren op 16 maart 1938 in Isfahan. Zie ook alle tags voor Hooshang Golshiri op dit blog.
Uit: Black Parrot, Green Crow(Introductie door Heshmat Moayyad)
“He was one of the prominent members of the Writers Association of Iran that was formed in 1968 but soon fell apart under the unacceptable demands and conditions set by the government to hold tight control over their activities. In 1977, on the eve of the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79, the Writers Association of Iran was revived, this time more vigorous in its aspirations and enjoying greater support from academic and professional anti-regime circles. The so-called “Ten Nights” of reading poems and delivering provocative speeches against the system of suppression and censorship by fifty-nine poets and speakers, sponsored by the Writers Association of Iran and was hosted by the German Goethe Institute in Tehran from October 10 to 19, 1977, an unprecedented occasion for the Iranian intelligentsia to air their grievances and celebrate their victory. According to all accounts, Golshiri played a significant role at different stages of this successful event.4
The joyous mood of freedom following the revolution did not last more than a few months, if not only a few weeks, at least for the young anti-reactionary and modernist segments of the population. The anticipated freedom failed to materialize. The enthusiasm of the masses was dashed all too soon. Persecutions and the mechanism of censorship reappeared more fiercely and less compromising than ever before, only this time blasphemously, in the name of religion and God.”
De Amerikaanse schrijfster Alice Hoffman werd geboren op 16 maart 1952 in New York. Zie ook alle tags voor Alice Hoffman op dit blog.
Uit: Seventh Heaven
“Late in August, three crows took up residence in the chimney of the corner house on Hemlock Street. In the mornings they set up a racket that could wake the dead. They picked up stones in their beaks and tossed them down at picture windows; they plucked out their feathers, which would surface all day long in odd places, in bowls of Cheerios, in the pockets of shirts drying on laundry lines, inside glass milk bottles delivered at dawn.
This corner house was the only one to have been vacated since the subdivision was carved out of a potato farm, six years earlier. Before the builders began working, the town was nothing more than a post office up on Harvey’s Turnpike, surrounded by farms. All that first spring renegade potatoes were unearthed when the men on Hemlock Street put down their lawns and planted mimosas and poplars; on trash day there would be heaps of potatoes alongside the aluminum cans. Everything in the neighborhood was brand new, the elementary school, the high school, the A&P, the police station on the Turnpike. The air itself seemed new; it could make you dizzy if you weren’t used to it, and relatives visiting from Brooklyn or Queens often had to lie down on a couch with a damp handkerchief pressed to their temples. The bark on the trees left fresh, green patches on your hands if you dared to climb the thin, wavering branches. Each house in the subdivision was the same, and for the longest time husbands pulled into the wrong driveways after work; children wandered into the wrong houses for cookies and milk; young mothers who took their babies out for walks in their new carriages found themselves wandering past identical houses, on identical streets, lost until twilight, when the ice-cream man’s truck appeared, and they could follow the sound of his bell, which traced his reliable route past their doorsteps.
De Peruaanse dichter César Vallejo werd geboren op 16 maart 1892 in Santiago de Chuco, Peru. Zie ook alle tags voor César Vallejo op dit blog..
Guitar
The pleasure of suffering, of hating, dyes my
throat with plastic venoms,
but the bristle that implants its magic order,
its taurine grandeur, between the first string
and the sixth
and the mendacious eighth, suffers them all.
The pleasure of suffering… Who? Whom?
who, the molars? whom society,
the carbides of rage in the gums?
How to be
and to be here, without angering one’s neighbor?
You are worthier than my number, man alone,
and worthier than all the dictionary,
with its prose in poetry,
its poetry in prose,
are your eagle display,
your tiger machinery, bland fellow man.
The pleasure of suffering,
of hoping for hope at the table,
Sunday with all its languages,
Saturday with Chinese, Belgian hours,
the week, with two hockers.
The pleasure of waiting in slippers,
of waiting contracted behind a stanza,
of waiting empowered with a sick pintle;
the pleasure of suffering: hard left by a female
dead with a stone on her waist
and dead between the string and the guitar,
crying the days and singing the months.
Vertaald door Clayton Eshleman
César Vallejo (16 maart 1892 – 15 april 1938)
Omslag biografie
De Franse schrijver en dichter Sully Prudhomme (eig. René François Armand Prudhomme) werd geboren op 16 maart 1839 in Parijs. Zie ook alle tags voor Sully Prudhomme op dit blog.
Pluie
Il pleut. J’entends le bruit égal des eaux ;
Le feuillage, humble et que nul vent ne berce,
Se penche et brille en pleurant sous l’averse ;
Le deuil de l’air afflige les oiseaux.
La bourbe monte et trouble la fontaine,
Et le sentier montre à nu ses cailloux.
Le sable fume, embaume et devient roux ;
L’onde à grands flots le sillonne et l’entraîne.
Tout l’horizon n’est qu’un blême rideau ;
La vitre tinte et ruisselle de gouttes ;
Sur le pavé sonore et bleu des routes
Il saute et luit des étincelles d’eau.
Le long d’un mur, un chien morne à leur piste,
Trottent, mouillés, de grands boeufs en retard ;
La terre est boue et le ciel est brouillard ;
L’homme s’ennuie : oh ! que la pluie est triste !
Sully Prudhomme (16 maart 1839 – t september 1907)
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 16e maart ook mijn blog van 16 maart 2011 deel 3.