De Russische dichteres en schrijfster Marina Tsvetájeva werd geboren op 9 oktober 1892 in Moskou. Zie ook alle tags voor Marína Tsvetájeva op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 9 oktober 2010.
Why such tenderness?
Why such tenderness?
Not the first – these curls
I stroke, I’ve known, yes,
Lips much darker than yours.
As stars fade and rise,
– Why such tenderness?
Eyes have risen
And faded to my eyes.
Yet with no such song
Have I heard night darker
Crowned – O tenderness –
In the breast of the singer.
Why such tenderness,
And what to do with it, singer
So young, simply passing by?
And could eyelashes – be longer?
Dying, I’ll not say: ‘I was’.
No regrets, I’ll not cast blame.
There are greater things in this world
Than love’s storm, and passion’s game.
But you – wing-beat against my chest,
Fresh, guilty cause of my inspiration –
You I command to: – Be!
My obedience – knows no evasion.
When I watch the flight of leaves,
When I watch the flight of leaves,
To the cobblestones at my feet,
Swept up – as if by an artist,
Whose picture’s at last complete,
I think how (already no one likes
My figure, face deep in thought)
A strongly yellow, decidedly rusty,
Leaf, there at the crown’s – forgot.
Vertaald door A. S. Kline
Portret door George G. Sjisjkin
De Noorse schrijver, schilder en essayist Jens Bjørneboe werd geboren op 9 oktober 1920 in Kristiansand. Zie ook alle tags voor Jens Bjørneboe op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 9 oktober 2010
Uit: Powderhouse (Vertaald door Esther Greenleaf Mürer)
“It’s very clear that at a Soviet embassy in a Christian country this is not compatible with diplomatic dignity and etiquette. And it’s evident that for the wife herself these diplomatic years beside her silent, flawless ambassador-husband were pure purgatory, before she finally said to hell with it and took to howling and raping freely. That’s how she came here. Nothing is simple.
Of course I’m not a “caretaker,” but—as Lefèvre puts it—”combination caretaker and physician-in-chief of the Institute,” and as such I naturally have a radical insight into all that goes on here, into everything that happens. Now when I say “physician-in-chief,” that’s of course to be understood in a higher, so to speak purely spiritual sense—as chief ideologist and father-confessor to nearly everybody. From the viewpoint of the employment roster I’m a caretaker. Janitor. Cleaning man.
This last point in particular—my being the place’s trusted renovation worker—must not be underestimated from an epistemological standpoint. How else, for example, would I have had any awareness of the stupendous quantities of prophylactics with which the diplomat’s wife fills her wastebasket between attacks? What, indeed, would I have understood of anything at all without access to wastebaskets and garbage pails?
Another side of the matter is that I have full opportunity to pursue my studies and my research here. My interests are the same as before, even though I’ve acquired an ice-cold scientific attitude to reality. Of course, while collecting my documents I had to come sooner or later to one of the central points in our Christian culture—possibly to its heart, to the matter’s core. It’s natural too that I began on the topic in just the geographic situation in which I now find myself: in a landscape which has been the historic arena for our culture’s very innermost concerns. One is located even more centrally if one travels some miles further to the northeast, up to Trier. It was impossible to continue with The History of Bestiality without taking up the Christian churches’ heretic and witch trials.”
Hier met leerlingen van de Rudolf Steinerschool in Oslo, 1952
De Senegalese schrijver Léopold Senghor werd geboren op 9 oktober 1906 in het plaatsje Joal aan de Atlantische kust, zo’n 70 kilometer van de Senegalese hoofdstad Dakar. Zie ook mijn blog van 9 oktober 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Léopold Senghor op dit blog.
Night in Sine
Woman, place your soothing hands upon my brow,
Your hands softer than fur.
Above us balance the palm trees, barely rustling
In the night breeze. Not even a lullaby.
Let the rhythmic silence cradle us.
Listen to its song. Hear the beat of our dark blood,
Hear the deep pulse of Africa in the mist of lost villages.
Now sets the weary moon upon its slack seabed
Now the bursts of laughter quiet down, and even the storyteller
Nods his head like a child on his mother’s back
The dancers’ feet grow heavy, and heavy, too,
Come the alternating voices of singers.
Now the stars appear and the Night dreams
Leaning on that hill of clouds, dressed in its long, milky pagne.
The roofs of the huts shine tenderly. What are they saying
So secretly to the stars? Inside, the fire dies out
In the closeness of sour and sweet smells.
Woman, light the clear-oil lamp. Let the Ancestors
Speak around us as parents do when the children are in bed.
Let us listen to the voices of the Elissa Elders. Exiled like us
They did not want to die, or lose the flow of their semen in the sands.
Let me hear, a gleam of friendly souls visits the smoke-filled hut,
My head upon your breast as warm as tasty dang streaming from the fire,
Let me breathe the odor of our Dead, let me gather
And speak with their living voices, let me learn to live
Before plunging deeper than the diver
Into the great depths of sleep.
Vertaald door Melvin Dixon
De Deense dichter en schrijver Holger Drachmann werd geboren op 9 oktober 1846 in Kopenhagen. Zie ook alle tags voor Holger Drachmann op dit blog en ook mijn blog van 9 oktober 2010.
Sakuntala
I could not sleep for longing,
a flower-wind
wafted towards me,
streaming in through my window
like a fragrance-breathing river;
I heard the tall palm trees
gently murmuring
with music sweet;
it whispered where I placed my feet:
Sakuntala, Sakuntala.
You eternal Himalaya
with summit high
against the roof of the sky,
why do you send your springs
to meet my foot today?
Why do the scented waves
heavy with memories
purl past my feet?
why trembling does my gaze again meet:
Sakuntala, Sakuntala!
O maiden, you lower your eye
so moist and soft
into my gazing eyes,
as if it were at this hour
you were given the ring that binds!
ah, not a single hour,
a single day,
but a thousand years
do separate us now, I fear:
Sakuntala, Sakuntala!
You did not lose your ring in the river
Dushjántas himself
has flung it therein,
and should he not stem the swift-fl owing stream,
the ring he will not bring again.
Dushjántas in the grove of palms
will hunt
along the river’s slope;
he downs an antilope:
Sakuntala, Sakuntala.
Vertaald door Rolf Kristian Stang
Portret door Edvard Munch, 1902
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 9e oktober ook mijn drie blogs van 9 oktober 2011.