De Amerikaanse schrijver Stewart O’Nan werd geboren op 4 februari 1961 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Zie ook alle tags voor Stewart O’Nan op dit blog.
Uit: Henry, Himself
“His mother named him Henry, after her older brother, a chaplain killed in the Great War, as if he might take his place. In family lore the dead Henry had been a softhearted boy, a rescuer of stranded earthworms and fallen sparrows, presaging his vocation as a saver of souls. Salutatorian of his seminary class, he volunteered for duty overseas, sending home poems and charcoal sketches of life in the trenches. At church the stained-glass window that showed a barefoot Christ carrying a wayward lamb draped about his neck like a stole was dedicated in loving memory of the Rt. Rev. Henry Leland Chase, 1893-1917, the mock-Gothic inscription so elaborate it verged on illegibility, and each Sunday as they made their way to their pew up front, his mother would bow her head as they passed, as if to point out, once more, his uncle’s saintliness. When he was little, Henry believed he was buried there, that beneath the cold stone floor of Calvary Episcopal, as below the medieval cathedrals of Europe, the noble dead moldered in cobwebbed catacombs, and that one day he would be there too.
When Henry was eight, his mother enrolled him as an altar boy, a vocation for which he betrayed no calling, picking at his nails inside his billowy sleeves through the weighted silences and turgid hymns, afraid he’d miss his cue. He had nightmares of arriving late for the processional in his baseball uniform, his cleats clicking as the holy conclave paraded down the aisle. The cross was heavy, and he needed to stretch on tiptoe with the brass taper to light the massive Alpha-Omega candle. Funerals were the worst, held Saturday afternoons when all of his friends would be at their secret clubhouse deep in the park. The grieving family huddled beside the casket, praying with Father McNulty for the repose of their loved one’s soul, but once the service was done and the candles snuffed, the funeral director took charge, bossing around the pallbearers like hired porters as they lugged the box down the front steps and slid it into the hearse. Invariably Henry pictured his uncle, his nose inches from the closed lid, on a train crossing bomb-pocked French farmland, or in the dark hold of a ship, cold water gliding by outside the thin steel skin of the hull. He had so many friends and well-wishers, the story went, that the visitation-in their grandparents’ front parlor, where his sister Arlene taught Henry to play “Heart and Soul” on their Baldwin-lasted three days and nights.”
De Moldavische dichter en schrijver Grigore Vieru werd geboren in Pereita op 4 februari 1935. Zie ook alle tags voor Grigore Vieru op dit blog.
In jouw taal
In dezelfde taal
Huilen alle mensen
In dezelfde taal
Lacht een land.
Maar alleen in jouw taal
Kun je de pijn weg strelen,
En de vreugde veranderen in een lied.
In jouw taal
Verlang je naar mama
En is wijn meer wijn.
En is lunch meer lunch
En alleen in jouw taal
Kun je stoppen met huilen.
En wanneer je noch
Huilen kunt noch lachen
Wanneer je niet kunt strelen
En niet eens zingen,
Met jouw land,
Met jouw hemel voor je,
Hou je mond dan
Ook in jouw taal.
Vertaald door Frans Roumen
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 4e februari ook mijn blog van 4 februari 2019 en eveneens mijn blog van 4 februari 2018 deel 1 en ook deel 2.