Derek Walcott e vb a Radio Rai 3 Farenheit

Lettura di poesie di Derek Walcott, traduzioni di Matteo Campagnoli, ascolta sul sito di Farenheit

Epithalamion

for Thomas Campbell and Rebecca McClane, London, March 13th, 2010


Asked at any other age
to write about commitments
I’d have come up with some sage
lines that soon I would amend.
But not now, now without cigarettes,
and with our baby, and you, friends.


Of course these are not comparable,
if not for the special grip
of being irreversible.
Baby’s case is evident;
with smoking, once you’ve quit
you’re no longer free to be dependent,


you’ll live on and on but chagrined
held in a nostalgic mist
which no inhaling thins –
meanwhile to be expectant
is nostalgia’s opposite,
is the would-be, the latitant.


And what about the wedding?
Well I actually don’t know.
But O, I know who’s marrying.
Two of a most, most special kind,
Becks ma belle, Tom mon beau,
with you there’s no rewind.


Right now about to shift
from your small room, earning
space, the two of you sift
beliefs, sadness, Shestov,
your bodies, Time, though a ring.
O friends, your ring be love.


Lips that with words run wild
mould still air into a yes,
a breath that conjures binds
beyond the human spheres –
you did it long before this
special moment here


but when vows afar cajole
for precisely the same goal
time is not the one-and-all
human choice then plays a role,
hand in hand your fingers wind
with one touch both heart and mind.


Plus, dear Tom, dear Becks,
your very yes will use you
for the gods, as did some Aztecs.
But again like giving birth –
I’ll put aside the smoking issue –
with your yes you inherit the earth.


Thomas, from the utmost radi-
ant, grey and green Eastern shores,
be luminous to your lady.
Rebecca, from Hull’s steady
shadows, moraines and bright ores,
let loose your loveliest lore.

33

33

Dormiamo stretti io e te

come le due cifre della mia nuova età –

e se uno si gira nel sonno 

anche l’altro subito si incunea –

i due tre;

da una settimana hai trent’anni

e un tre anche tu, l’altro non è un numero

ma il tondo della tua pancia

(e tuttavia il tondo dello stupore)

per chi la abita da tre mesi,

siamo tre

tre.

33

We sleep together tight, you and me,

like the two figures of my age –

and if one in his sleep turns

the other immediately fits in –

the two threes;

it’s one week now that you’ve turned thirty

and got yourself a three, not followed by a number

but the roundness of your womb

(and still, the roundness of our stupor)

where someone has been living for three months,

we are three

three.

Articolo per "Passages"

http://www.prohelvetia.ch/Latest-issue.121.0.html?&L=4

Nervi ottici, ossimori e termometri

Londra, 6 del mattino, dall’alto. La città sale al ritmo lento della foschia che cala, o che si scioglie in suono, l’esteso vibrato che di notte gela. Una mattina di sole, primavera. Cosa scriverebbe qui il poeta? Sono nato e cresciuto nel diradarsi della nebbia. Le braccia inclinate delle gru gli accenti tonici. L’alternarsi di blocchi abitativi, macchie di alberi, grattacieli, ma anche cornicioni imbiancati, torrette, antenne, suggeriscono la metrica. Nella topografia caotica, anche a grande distanza edifici si guardano, le facciate allineate, da qui le rime. Ora sono sveglio e devo scrivere di un sogno, una visione. È questa: che non sia una comunità di scapoli (papa, clero) a pontificare sui valori della famiglia. Che non siano le agenzie immobiliari a progettare gli edifici. Che non siano gli altoparlanti a comporre la musica nei supermercati (eppure, non c’è altra spiegazione). Esempi con cui non intendo sottolineare la divergenza tra interesse privato e bene comune, ma l’impossibilità, o l’incongruenza, della visione. Quello che voglio dire, e innanzitutto a me stesso, è che deve essere l’allenamento del nervo ottico e non la montatura degli occhiali a qualificare le visioni. Questo vale anche per la politica culturale svizzera, gestita bene a livello di istituzioni e linee direttive, ma spesso miope in fase di realizzazione, di progetti effettivi. Negli ultimi mesi ho partecipato a uno scambio transoceanico tra scrittori, chi l’ha ideato non ha parlato di scrittura una sola volta; ho dato delle poesie per un’antologia di testi svizzeri tradotti in inglese, molto curata in ogni aspetto eccetto le traduzioni; ho preso parte a un workshop per lo sviluppo strategico di una regione, gestito da professionisti del marketing (cartoncini colorati e tortura linguistica) che non distinguevano arti figurative da arredamento di interni (ma che sollievo quando hanno giustificato la nostra esistenza confidandoci che è dimostrato, la cultura è un valore economico). Questi progetti, comunque interessanti e in qualche modo utili, sembrano promuovere la promozione culturale, non la cultura (tanto meno l’arte, la letteratura). Ripenso alla poesia di Brodskij con cui mi sono svegliato, gli ultimi versi, “A salvaguardare i cuori dal falso in questa piatta regione / è l’assenza di rifugi e l’ampio spazio per la visione. / Solo il suono ha bisogno d’eco e senza di esso è affranto, / lo sguardo non si aspetta uno sguardo di rimando”. Interpretandoli per i fini del discorso, la differenza può essere tra chi vive per mettere a fuoco un’immagine (la visione) e chi vive del ritorno di immagine. In fondo è un atto di partecipazione, il tentativo di superare la distanza tra soggetto e oggetto (chilometri di ego, schematismi, preconcetti); l’arte è un tentativo di perseguire quella partecipazione, la cultura è la volontà di preservarla: si propaga da un libro, un quadro, attraverso chi gli presta attenzione (“leggere è complicità nel processo creativo” scrive Cvetaeva), su su fino nelle maglie di un’iniziativa che promuove altri libri, altri quadri. Non credo, sebbene la tendenza planetaria della politica culturale mi contraddica, che un progetto valido possa nascere da manager culturali e simili creature mitol-ossimoriche. E non voglio dire che la promozione culturale debba essere gestita, per esempio, dai poeti (gesummaria), ma che nessuno, e men che meno i professionisti della visione politica, deve perdere di vista il senso dell’operazione: la cultura non è un valore statistico o economico, è qualcosa che avvicina uomo e mondo (e, quando il gelo buca i termometri, avvicinandoli li scalda). Per questo va promossa. Ci penso solo adesso: dirigo un festival letterario il cui comitato scientifico è composto quasi esclusivamente da poeti. È un bel festival. Ora che ho superato le battute a disposizione riguardo l’invito di Passages e scopro che il tema proposto non era proprio questo. Per fortuna ho già espresso le mie riserve anche sui poeti... Già che spero nell’indulgenza, torno alla finestra – bianco, rosso mattone, cemento scuro, ora i colori rimano; double-deckers e furgoni sono gli accenti dei versi ancora scorrevoli – la città è una poesia diversa.




Through a Glass brightly

London, 6 am, from up high. The city arises slowly, in time with the mist as it descends or melts into sound, an extended vibrato that freezes over at night. A sunny morning in spring. What would the poet write here? I was born and grew up in a break in the fog, where cranes distribute the stresses with their booms; housing estates interspersed among stands of trees and skyscrapers provide the scansion. In such a topographic helter-skelter, buildings confront one another no matter how far apart they are, their façades aligned. Hence, the rhymes.

Now I’m awake and should write about a dream, a vision – so here goes: let no community of the celibate (the Pope and his clerics) dictate family values. Let it not be estate agents to design buildings, nor loudspeakers to compose the music in the malls (and yet there can be no other explanation for it). My examples are not intended to stress the divide between private interest and public good, but rather demonstrate the impossibility, or the incongruity, of vision. What I am saying, speaking first and foremost to myself, is that vision is a function of the properly trained optic nerve, and not of one’s spectacles.

This goes for Swiss cultural policy as well, which as far as I can see is well managed at the level of institutional guidelines, but often myopic when it comes to actual projects. Over the past few months, I took part in an international writers’ exchange, the organizer of the project did not once speak about writing; I contributed some poems to an anthology of Swiss writers in English translation, which was meticulously prepared in every regard except for the English translations; I participated in a workshop on strategic regional development led by marketing professionals who did not distinguish between figurative art and interior design (but what a relief it was when they assured us that culture does indeed have economic value).

Nonetheless interesting and somehow useful, such projects seem to promote cultural promotion rather than culture (and still less art or literature). I am reminded once again of Brodsky’s poem I woke up with, its last lines: “What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region / is that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision. / Only sound needs echo and dreads its lack. / A glance is accustomed to no glance back.” Interpreting them for my own purposes, I understand these lines to propose a difference between those who live to give focus to an image (their vision), and those who are sustained by seeing their own image confirmed.

In essence what is at stake is an act of participation, the attempt to overcome the distance dividing subject and object (miles of ego, stereotype and prejudice). Art is an attempt to foster such participation, while culture is the will to maintain it. It begins with a book, a painting, it expands through those who pay attention to such artefacts (“reading is complicity in the creative process,” writes Tsvetaeva), and keeps expanding even within an initiative that promotes other books, other paintings. For all that the global trend in cultural policy may contradict me, I do not believe that cultural managers and other oxy-morons can conceive such a project. And I am not advising that cultural policy be handled, for example, by poets (heavenforbid!), but rather that no one, least of all the professionals of the political vision, should forget that culture is neither a statistical nor an economic value, it’s something that brings man and world together. This is the reason why we promote it.

It’s only just occurred to me now: I am the director of a literary festival whose committee is composed nearly exclusively of poets. It’s a nice festival.

Now that I’ve written more than I was supposed to, I discover that I have wandered slightly off the mark. Luckily for me, I have already expressed my doubts about poets, among others... Hoping for indulgence, I return to the window – white, brick-red, dark concrete: now colours are rhyming; double-deckers and vans are the stresses of flowing verses – the city is a different poem.


English translation by vb and Rafael Newman

Da "Ora prima", italiano, English translation 3

Spalancato e scuro

Spalancato e scuro per non essere visto
l'occhio è tuo, amore – la sua sistole
di ciglia mi fa vedere linee aliene,
il metro di alberi, le rime del lago costeggiato,
l’inizio che è il riflusso di una fine,
                                         tuo è lo iato.

Dormi ancora? – il treno esce dal traforo
più lungo che porta alle baracche, a un altro muro
di roccia quasi intatta; tu parli nel sonno,
un foglio di giornale che cade dopo l'uso;
sul fondovalle il fiume cambia tono
                                         passate le chiuse.

Li amavamo poi il calore del corpo cadendo
è passato alle mani e il calore si è spento,
il fiato è ridotto a respiro e parole
e la pioggia non cola ma infrange.
Spio la tua pupilla ricevere il sole,
                                         neve le guance.

Li abbiamo amati ora siamo soli insieme,
veniamo entrambi da un giorno che non tiene.
Lo stupore della luce filtra, dormi ancora?,
qualcosa annusa una macchia di inchiostro
nel mattino che allude alla crisi, e al tepore,
                                         al vostro.

Voi che rimanete a lungo d’ombra
come l’albero riflesso sul lago che ritrova
le sue foglie, voi consci del percorso dell’aria
che il sole smuove da una finestra chiusa.
Ma nel tuo occhio ora la fragilità dell’aria
ride confusa.


Wide-open and dark

Wide-open and dark not to be seen
the eye is yours, love, through its lean
eyelashes’ systoles I see alien lines:
the meter of trees, rhymes of waves just below us,
the beginning as ebb and flow of an end;
                                         yours is the hiatus.

Are you still sleeping? – the train surfaces
from the longest tunnel that leads to another face
of drilled rock; whilst asleep you talk,
a newspaper’s sheet falling after use;
on the valley floor the river changes tone
                                         after the sluice.

All of the body’s warmth relinquished
had passed through the hands and the warmth extinguished,
and the breath is reduced to breathing and sound
and the rain doesn’t ooze but shatters in chips.
I spy on your pupil receiving the sun,
                                         snow are the cheeks.

We loved, now we are alone together,
we both come from a day that wasn’t there;
light’s stupor filters – are you still sleeping?
– something smells an ink stain therein
the morning, alluding to the crisis, the soothing:
                                         to theirs.

They, remaining shadows for long
as a tree that reflected on the lake found
its leaves. They, conscious of the air
stirred by the sun through a window long-closed.
But in your eye now air’s frailty
                                         laughs confused.


Translated by vb

Da "Ora prima", italiano, English translation, 2

PATMOS
Il pennello del sole lascia il suo liquido acerbo
su ogni metà foglia dell’albero, dell’erica, d’erba,
l’altra metà è come non fosse ancora creata
immensa e tangibile come il vento sul dito bagnato
oppure il fiume lanciato in un sasso
(questo l’ha scritto un amico che vive lì adesso).
A quest’ora gli uccelli planano simili alla loro ombra
per lei così è più facile riunirsi alle membra
e gli alberi pigolano per sintonizzarsi
con il segnale che si attenua (tipo gli astri).
Non solo al dolore gli antichi hanno dato contorno
forse è loro il pennello che apre il giorno
è di chi su un vaso ha dipinto il sole che si sveglia
e i bambini che si tuffano in mare o tra le foglie,
che cadono dolcemente tra i vivi e i morti
dove guardiamo e non ce ne siamo accorti.
(Agli scatti dei komboloi tra le mani dei vecchi
di sera fa eco la fine elettrica degli insetti,
se all’alba ha la luce di chi ci ha lasciato
ogni ora fa la morte più rigida in agguato).


PATMOS
Sun’s brush leaves its unripe liquid
On each half leaf of the grass, the heather, the tree,
The other half is as if still uncreated
Tangible and immense like wind on a wet fingertip
Or a river thrown into the stone
(This was written by a friend who now there has his home).
At this hour the birds glide resembling their shadow,
So it finds it easier to stick to their limbs
And the trees cheep to tune upwards
With the signal that fades (well, the stars).
The ancients didn’t just gave a contour to pain,
Perhaps theirs is the brush starting the day,
It’s the brush of the man who painted the waking sun on a vase
And around it children diving in the sea or through the leaves,
Gently falling between the living and the dead
Where we are looking but did not understand.
(The clicks of komboloi beads in the hands of old men
In the evening are echoed by the insects’ electric end,
If at dawn it has the light of those who left us
Every hour makes death more rigid in its ambush).


Translated by vb and knight,
pubblicata in: New Swiss Writing 2009

Chinese box

for Sheldon Leader, Christmas 2008 in Ambrì

He had just been staying in Macao. A few days of being told about the ancient and disparate traditions brought in by the Portuguese: African, Balinese, Indian, all somehow surviving underneath the imperative pulse of the city. He was there on a Cultural trip and appreciated past and heritage, a topic generally dismissed by the people met in the other Southern Chinese cities. Not that he hadn’t enquired, but receiving peremptory answers. “Well we just don’t believe”, “For the Chinese people now it’s the future that matters”, “I still consider religion as superstition”, “To reform is to re-shape”; “We aim to utter the Chinese spirit through a Western narration”. And everywhere around him these answers had found clear confirmations.
In Macao, instead, people responded enthusiastically, but their answers dissolved in the glasses of hot water. He even had some difficulties detecting the alleged city pulse, which seemed smothered beneath the bi-dimensional ministry of casinos. (Massive building sites were everywhere, yet all the exertion only left behind these slender schemes of light, the resulting infrastructure a billboard for some general statement, delimiting the road and intimately addressing the driver). And to observe space itself mutilated doesn’t inspire much hope for time past.
The clearest heritage was the Venetian one, seemingly told with Vegas narration: the Venetian is a casino, among the biggest palaces ever built, its king a benevolent one who avoids imposing his verb, or is only an abstraction – in any case with plenty of devoted subjects. So to the Venetian he went, with the other Swiss writer sent on that Cultural trip, and they gambled together. Their opposite attitudes worked out smoothly and they multiplied the mock initial capital. The following evening they both agreed that if they had played again that wouldn’t happen. They were right. (They could have tried to drag conclusions on probability, but didn’t, possibly due to the overbearing presence of statistics in those Chinese days).
They had just been staying in Macao and were now back in Hong Kong for the last day of the Cultural trip. After the other cities, Hong Kong was like an old friend sometimes suffering from fits of fever, melancholy, madness, and a little amnesia. (Precisely an old friend). Walking on the steep streets groping among the steeper skyscrapers and the slanted market stands he ran into a large clay Buddha. Not particularly beautiful, its charm consisted mainly in excessive weight, large cracks along the back, a removable head. All elements not too unfamiliar after the short but intense immersion in Contemporary China, which would end that night after having dragged around the overweight luggage for eight hours more. He pondered. Then to the side he saw a Chinese box, red, decorated with tiny carved figures, their round heads part of an equation involving round lamps and perhaps a few moons. For the rest, bridges, trees, pagodas, clouds. Most of the women were bowing to men, as were some men, while a few appeared to be simply bowing to no one. The other guy, patiently unimpressed by the Buddha, also liked it. They tossed a Macao Pataca, the verdict was clear, the other didn’t change his opinion about the Buddha and bought nothing, he got the red box for a worryingly low price.
The program of their trip consisted mainly of tripe plus other delicacies such as duck tongue, chicken feet, fish jaw, shark fin – apparently food is of the utmost importance for Chinese culture, in a way substituting other kinds of traditions nearly lost and mostly ignored. And meeting writers who were told to talk about food (in a way, a topic substituting more controversial ones). That afternoon being no exception, after making the purchase they set out for the cultural lunch where the box created an immediate diversion, if only because he looked odd carrying it under his arm. For once, they had their meal without discussing the food – not knowing what they were eating didn’t bother them either; the box was dated anywhere between two and one-hundred-and-something years old; everybody agreed that here and there it was losing paint (sign of age), and that you could see clear wood beneath (sign of youth); he claimed it contained eight cats just to use the two words he had learned (ba, mao), obtained condescending laughter, was corrected on both words. To keep talking about language, though carefully avoiding the Mandarin-Cantonese issue, they risked further embarrassment and asked what the sound of the names of their girlfriends might mean in Chinese: his, “peaceful beauty”; the other’s, “hot thunder”.
A box is a space to be filled with things, the things in the box are dispensed from the present time. It is also for this reason that we aren’t quite sure if they are actually there when the box is closed, anyway confident that they might enjoy themselves wherever else they are. We suspect that this place could have something to do with the box’s decoration, or instead the decoration is where the present time sits for as long as the box is closed. He was thinking these things while, at the post-prandial meeting, someone was specifying undisturbed what he considered to be the most substantial differences between Mandarin and Cantonese, often using edible examples; hence, perhaps, the concern about being dispensed from the present time. But his thoughts, once in the box, were dislocated in a place surprisingly unappealing, one of the cities he had visited which, alongside others simultaneously, was built to propel the post-reform economy at maximum speed. In twenty years, millions of people from all the regions of China found themselves delocalized there, apparently without carrying any trace of those homelands, no idol no flag no curtain or flower at the window. If Macao was a fancy facade this was a vector, a straight line exclusively expressing purpose and strength. An undecorated box in which to be both alive and dead, a factory with a dormitory in which to spend a day that lasts years before returning to the countryside to sleep. Hopefully a bit wealthier, in any case having taken part in the construction of a colossal box where the future alone can dwell. The future will tell.
But then he didn’t really know much about Western conditions during industrialization, he thought, opening the box. It creaked a five-tone noise, Mandarin!, he suggested. Only the other Swiss guy laughed.
After the meeting, they bid farewell and rushed to Kowloon jade market to enjoy the distance-forming pleasures of tourism. The box under his arm was once again an attraction. The sellers, more interested in the box than in their own merchandise, wanted to know its price, denied it was possible, guessed its age, passed it on from hand to hand; he felt a little jealous. The two of them went through the crowd, even more conspicuously because of the box. When the sellers did bargain for their jade, the box would sit on the blankets they used as stalls. After that, in a cab, a bus, an x-ray machine, through customs and, finally, in the airplane closet. When it woke up it was in Switzerland, now filled with duty-free, and still a little Chinese air.
The Swiss German customs clerk, not quite the antonomasia for a jolly fellow, laughed through his mustache asking whether it was the “Schatzkasse”. The “treasure box”. His poor understanding of German nearly translated it into “cat box” and, if only for the consistency of his ignorance, he was happy with it.
He and the other parted, they came from opposite ends of the country. They had enjoyed each-other’s company. The Chinese box sat with him on a train. He pondered. Just as the first syllable of the word “future” belongs to the past and contradicts itself before the whole word is pronounced, a train erases its own surface through speed, hurrying towards a destination (is the present time allowed to sit inside the train?). Or, didn’t the Chinese calligraphers use to write ideograms with a long spongy pencil dipped in plain water, so that a symbol wouldn’t last to see the following one? Or, Chinese characters are still partly the same as they were thousands of years ago... So, while in his memory the Chinese skyscrapers started to look like hi-speed trains heading vertically towards a set goal, ready to let the next building take their place as soon as they got there, he couldn’t help feeling that he had just been in a country whose name is perhaps writ in water, but by such a number of hands that it remains visible. Though, for him at least, hardly readable.
He felt like praising the Chinese box sitting next to him, its light globes, its figures, so dedicated in expressing their respect that they didn’t seem to be repeating their act, nor frozen in it, but just performing it as slowly as a man grows or as the present takes its seat. The box sat with him on the train. The horizontal train, that took him back to the past he had left three weeks before and now was about to be the present.


First published, with Chinese translation, in: Foodscape, a Swiss-Chinese Intercultural Encounter about the Culture of Food
食事風景–瑞士與中國飲食文化觸碰, MCCM Creations Hong Kong

Da "Ora prima", italiano, English translation, 1

Era una festa dopo una festa dopo una festa
ti ho guardata, credo, due minuti e basta,
sei irlandese e non avevi voce
ma una retina nera sui capelli biondi e corti
simile a un pizzo sull'inguine ma il desiderio non c'entra,
eri in piedi in mezzo alla stanza,
sotto di te moquette, pittura bianca intorno,
persone risolute o addormentate,
mi hai detto che sempre è così la tua voce
so che ho pensato che non stava a me salvarti.
Ora ho ritrovato il sonno ma la tua follia è rimasta,
come se non esisti sei due guanti destri,
la direzione seguita dal sudore sul corpo
e tutto quanto senza badare ho visto,
sei un sogno dentro un sogno dentro un sogno
dove qualcuno si riveste, parte presto
prima che si avvii l'esistenza che calma,
poi un colpo d'arma sveglia chi dormiva:
il suo equilibrio caricato a salve
ha sparato su chi resta e sulla vita
dentro una vita che sembra sua all'alba.


It was a party after a party after a party
I looked at you, I think, for two minutes only,
You are Irish and your voice was gone,
You had a little black net on your hair short and blond
Like a lace on the thigh, but desire doesn't enter it,
You were standing in the middle of the room,
Below you carpet, around white painted walls
And people either resolute or asleep,
You said your voice was always so weak
I remember thinking it wasn't up to me to save you.
Now I can sleep again but your madness remains,
As if you don't exist, you are a pair of right gloves,
The direction followed by sweat on the body
And all that without noticing I saw,
You are a dream within a dream within a dream
Where someone gets dressed to slip away
Before the calming existence resumes,
Then a gunshot wakes the sleeper:
Its equilibrium loaded with blanks
Shot who remains there and the life
Within a life that seems his at dawn.


Translated by vb and knight,
pubblicata in: New Swiss Writing 2009