Showing posts with label J.D. Salinger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J.D. Salinger. Show all posts
Friday, August 12, 2011
Sal
Penso que o mundo bem precisa de provar nos lábios sal grego novamente. Voltar às fontes clássicas da nossa cultura.
Precisamos de um pensamento e nada como voltarmos à nossa matriz, regressar a casa, agora que vivemos o mundo todo simultaneamente.
Salt
by Eugenio Montale
translated by Jamie McKendrick
We don't know if tomorrow has green pastures
in mind for us to lie down in beside
the ever-youthful patter of fresh water
or if it means to plant us in some arid
outback ugly valley of the shadow
where dayspring's lost for good, interred beneath
a lifetime of mistakes. We'll maybe wake up
in foreign cities where the sun's a ghost,
a figment of itself and angular
starched consonants braid the tongue at its root
so all sense of who we are is lost to words,
and nothing that we know can be unravelled.
Even then, some vestige of the sea,
its plosive tide, its fretwork crests will surge
inside our syllables, bronze like the chant of bees.
However far we've stumbled from the source
a trace of the sea's voice will lodge in us
as the sunlight somehow still abides in
faded tufts that cling to bricks and kerbstones
on half-cleared slums or bomb-sites left unbuilt.
Then out of nowhere after years of silence
the words we used, our unobstructed accents,
will well up from the dark of childhood,
and once more on our lips we'll taste Greek salt.
Labels:
Eugenio Montale,
J.D. Salinger
Friday, February 12, 2010
gata
A minha gata precede-me sempre que me levanto da cama e vou à casa de banho. Vai contente à minha frente, com o rabo bem levantado.
Sempre que passo pela estante dos livros, vem-me sempre à cabeça o título : Carpinteiros, levantem bem alto o pau de cumeeira...não sei porquê, parece ser o que a gata quer dizer também.
Whenever I get up out of bed to go to the restroom, my "molly" precedes me with her tail held high up.
By the book shelf, it always comes to my mind the title : Raise high the roof beam, Carpenters...don't know why, it seems like what the kitten wants to tell too.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

"The story Seymour read to Franny that night, by flashlight, was a favorite of his, a Taoist tale. To this day, Franny swears that she remembers Seymour reading it to her:
Duke Mu of Chin said to Po Lo: 'You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?' Po Lo replied: 'A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse - one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks - is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative one. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him.'
Duke Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. 'It is now in Shach'iu,' he added. 'What kind of a horse is it/" asked the Duke. 'Oh, it is a dun-colored mare,' was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. 'That friend of yours,' he said, 'whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast's color or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?' Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. 'Has he really got as far as that?' he cried. 'Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses isght of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses.'
When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal.'"
Labels:
Ira Della Monica,
J.D. Salinger
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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