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: The Journey (Vertaald door Pablo Baler and Matt Losada)
“She spent days trying to get in touch with Bolek by phone. She had no idea how she gave her master class at the Anthropological Association with such galloping anguish. On automatic pilot, of course. Friday at noon she opted for a decisive step. She called the Tel Aviv company and rented a car in order to pick him up at Creedmoor, that grand psychiatric institution. She arrived in one hour; that is, a bit before one, caught Bolek outside his sancta santorum , or better said, his lunatic lunaticorum, and I’ll have him give me some explanations that cannot be given over the phone. He leaves me insulting messages; he is about to get into a plane without even telling me and to top it all off he doesn’t return my calls. It’s too much. No one plays with me. Going by car would cost almost the same reasonable price as going to Kennedy, she had calculated, and she was not wrong. Now she is at home hurrying to get ready. She intends to send the car away at the door of Creedmoor as one who burns her own bridges. She can’t find the map with the directions, in desperation overturns a pile of papers on the kitchen counter, as an answer to her desperation the blessed map appears and she can finally set sail. She tells the driver Take the Triborough to LaGuardia airport and follow Grand Central Parkway to Union Turnpike, exit 22. The second exit, not the first one, eh? since it’s chaotic around here and if you get distracted for a second you get lost forever. Parallel lines do intersect, that is true, and the most dramatic part of it is that once they intersect they start irremissibly moving away from each other, and suddenly you take a street right next to another one and a bit further on you find yourself miles away from your destination. The driver is an unflappable guy. He’s only interested in exact directions. Maybe he thinks his passenger is going to the mental hospital to check herself in by her own will and he’d rather take no chances. His silence protects him, like the thick bullet-proof Plexiglas taxi drivers have on the back of their seats, with a tiny slot for the cash. It’s true that if she had to check herself in—none of us is exempted from having a breakdown—she would fight with her last speck of reason to not be committed by someone else. She would sign her own sentence; she knows the mechanics of it because one time she attended the drama of some old, poor parents who could not free their own daughter from a certain psychiatric institution for the simple reason that they had signed her in themselves. All this is very complex and it’s not to the point, except to define the strange laws governing the confinement of the insane, the pseudo-insane and the mentally disturbed in this part of the planet.”
De Canadese dichteres en schrijfster Nicole Brossard werd geboren op 27 november 1943 in Montreal (Quebec). Zie ook alle tags voor Nicole Brossard op dit blog.
Steden met hun oesters
zout op de wangen, daar hou ik van
deze smaak van intieme materie die voedt
gedachten, viooltjes, wijn, blote schouders van zomeravonden
in Sète, Sitges en in de hele Memramcook-vallei
het hoofd boven de stilte
Ik kan mezelf onderdompelen in de oester en het heldere zeezout
grijs, roze of zonder vuur
steden schoongeveegd door het ochtendgloren
overgevlogen als mijnenvelden
met antwoorden ver weg begraven
die lijken op fantoompijn omgeven door
blauwe bloemblaadjes van een middag
steden in het heden zonder afscheid te nemen
Vertaald door Frans Roumen
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.