Guimaraes Rosa - A terceira margem do rio

"Nosso pai era homem cumpridor, ordeiro, positivo; e sido assim desde mocinho e menino, pelo que testemunharam as diversas sensatas pessoas, quando indaguei a informação. Do que eu mesmo me alembro, ele não figurava mais estúrdio nem mais triste do que os outros, conhecidos nossos. Só quieto. Nossa mãe era quem regia, e que ralhava no diário com a gente — minha irmã, meu irmão e eu. Mas se deu que, certo dia, nosso pai mandou fazer para si uma canoa."

(...)
[Eu?]
(...)

"Sou o que não foi, o que vai ficar calado."


ROSA, João Guimarães. “A terceira margem do rio”. In: Primeiras Estórias.José Olympio Editora.

The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga

Adiga goes on about the other side of the so-much-talked-of rise of India to a new economic power. The fancy promises of outsourcing and IT businesses and a bangalore from a distance.
The sweat and the stinky taste of Old Delhi, New Delhi, and the part - what a huge part - of India that has not seen much change. Cooped and all. Family ties, servitude, not far from hat on his hands, hands hanging low, face to the dust of this old road while listening to the coronel or the local politician. Northeast there. Northeast here.

I mean, how different - I mean - is Brazil from the picture he draws?
Not much.
We, after all, have some very Great Socialists...
And quite often one can hear someone saying about his or hers maid:"She's been with us for so long she is practically family!"

The Corrections - Jnathan Franzen

"(...)
The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The oak trees were the same oily black as the crows perching in them. The sky was the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St.Judean drivers obeying barbiturate speed limits were crawling to their destinations: to malls with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to a million acres of thawing hinterland where pickups were axle-deep in clay and .22s were fired in the woods and only gospel and pedal steel guitars were on the radio; to residential blocks with the same pallid glare in every window, besquirreled yellow lawns with a random plastic toy or two embedded in the dirt, a mailman whistling something Celtic and slamming mailboxes harder than he had to, becaus ethe deadness of these streets, at such a nonhour, in such a nonseason, could honestly kill you.
(...)"

José Saramago II - Do Cerco de Lisboa

"Raimundo Silva abriu de par em par a janela, alguns borrifos salpicaram-lhe a cara, esta é a cidade que foi cercada, as muralhas descem por ali até ao mar, que sendo tão largo o rio bem lhe merece o nome, e depois sobem, empinadas, onde não alcançamos a ver, esta é a moura Lisboa, se não fosse ser pardacento o ar deste dia de inverno distinguiríamos melhor os olivais da enconsta que desce para o esteiro, e os da outra margem, agora invisíveis como se os cobrisse uma nuvem de fumo. Raimundo Silva olhou e tornou a olhar, o universo murmura sob a chuva, meu Deus, que doce e suave tristeza, e que não nos falte nunca, nem mesmo nas horas de alegria.."

"Raimundo Silva spalancò la finestra, qualche spruzzo gli arrivò sulla faccia, non sul libro, perché l'aveva protetto, e la stessa impressione di forza total e traboccante gli invase lo spirito e il corpo, questa è la città che è stata assediata, le mura arrivano fino al mare, ché il fiume è cosí largo da meritarne il nome, e poi salgono, ripide, fin dove non riusciamo a vedere, questa è la Lisbona mora, se non fosse cosí cupa l'aria diq uesta giornata invernale scorgeremmo meglio gli uliveti del pendio che scende fino all'estuario, e quelli sull'altra sponda, adesso invisibili come se li coprisse una nuvola di fumo. Raimundo Silva ha guardato e riguardato, l'universo mormora sotto la pioggia, Mio Dio, che dolce e tenera tristezza, e speriamo che non ci manchi mai, neanche nei momenti di gioia."
Traduzione di Rita Desti 

Passaggio in italiano

José Saramago I - Storia dell'assedio di Lisbona

"O revisor tem nome, chama-se Raimundo. Era já tempo de sabermos quem seja a pessoa de quem vimos falando indiscretamente, se é que nome e apelidos alguma vez puderam acrescentar proveito que se visse às costumadas referências sinaléticas e outros desenhos, idade, altura, peso, tipo morfológico, tom da pele, cor dos olhos, e dos cabelos, se lisos, crespos ou ondulados, ou simplesmente perdidos, metal da voz, límpida ou rouca, gesticulação característica, maneira de andar, porquanto a experiência das relações humanas tem demonstrado que, sabendo nós isto e às vezes muito mais, nem o que sabemos nos serve, nem somos capazes de imaginar o que nos falta."

(..) Il revisore un nome ce l'ha, si chiama Raimundo. Ormai era ora che sapessimo chi fosse la persona di cui abbiamo parlato con indiscrezione, ammesso che nomi e cognomi abbiano mai potuto aggiungere qualche vantaggio evidente ai soliti riferimenti segnaletici e ai vari schemi, età, altezza, peso, tipo morfologico, incarnato, colore degli occhi e dei capelli, se lisci, crespi o ondulati, o semplicemente perduti, timbro della voce, limpida o roca, gesti caratteristici, maniera de camminare, mentre l'esperienza dei rapporti umani ha dimostrato che, pur sapendo questo e talvolta molto di piú, neanche quello che  conosciamo ci serve, né siamo capaci di immaginare che cosa ci manca." 
Traduzione di Rita Desti

Passaggio in italiano

An old one - Prufrock and a non-tropical zeitgeist

"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit."

                                                       ( More of T.S. Eliot's "The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"  here.)

Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

"He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. but they would not be this one."


(...)
"They seemed in a state of improvident and hopeless vigilance. Like men committed upon uncertain ice." (193)

Missing scarcity - of information, at least

I remember reading  a few years ago Pablo Casal's autobiography. At some point he tells how his father and him one day in 1904 (or around that year), while browsing for music in some bookstores in Spain (what city?), found a copy of Bach's suites for violoncello.

"No one had recorded them. Nobody I knew knew how to play them." So in order to hear these suites he had no other option than to learn how to play them. And so he did, beautifully.

Fast forward to today's world of instant gratification. You hear a piece of music (or almost of anything), type some of it, click, and there you (almost certainly) find a version, a recording, and some comments about it. And this on music, movies, literature, you pick your preference...

So, I often ask myself how to best navigate this maze of information, and what implications there might be from the way and how intensely you do it. Choosing between an electronic book or one in paper; between scanning on blogs, sites, information providers and going back to a book I have read before; between the slower pace of disconnection and 'unfriendedness' and the fast ball of  "I can't be more than an arm's length away from a connected device." 

This is, perhaps, just a generational dilemma. If you grew up mostly interacting on screen, slowness is likely to mean something different. Such as e-mails, for some, have become the new snail mail.

Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses II

"The house was built in eighteen seventy-two. Seventy-seven years later his grandfather was still the first man to die in it. What others had lain in state in that hallway had been carried there on a gate or wrapped in a wagonsheet or delivered crated up in a raw pineboard box with a teamster standing at the door with a bill of lading. The ones that came at all. For the most part they were dead by rumor. A yellowed scrap of newsprint. A letter. A telegram. The original ranch was twenty-three hundred acres out of the old Meusebach survey of the Fisher-Miller grant, the original house a oneroom hovel of sticks and wattle. That was in eighteen sixty-six. In that same year the first cattle were driven through what was still Bexar County and across the north end of the ranch and on to Fort Sumner and Denver. Five years later his great-grandfather sent six hundred steers over that same trail and with the money he built the house and by then the ranch was already eighteen thousand acres. In eighteen eighty-three they ran the first barbed wire. By eighty-six the buffalo were gone. That same winter a bad die-up. In eighty-nine Fort Concho was disbanded.

His grandfather was the oldest of eight boys and the only one to live past the age of twenty-five. They were drowned, shot, kicked by horses. they perished in fires. They seemed to fear only dying in bed. The last two were killed in Puerto Rico in eighteen ninety-eight and in that year he married and brought his bride home to the ranch and he must have walked out and stood looking at his holdings and reflected long upon the ways of God and the laws of primogeniture. Twelve years later when his wife was carried off in the influenza epidemic they still had no children. A year later he married his dead wife's older sister and a year after this the boy's mother was born and that was all the borning that there was. The Grady name was buried with that old man the day the northern blew the lawnchairs over the dead cemetery grass. The boy's name was Cole. John Grady Cole."

Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses I

"By midmorning the rain had stopped. Water dripped from the trees in the alameda and the crepe hung in soggy strings. He stood with the horses and watched the wedding party emerge from the church. The groom wore a dull black suit too large for him and he looked not uneasy but half desperate, as if unused to clothes at all. The bride was embarrassed and clung to him and they stood on the steps for their photograph to be taken and in their antique formalwear posed there in front of the church they already had the look of old photos. In the sepia monochrome of a rainy day in the lost village they'd grown old instantly"

[I wonder whether Cole recognized himself in that faded picture. Frozen and from another, then already gone, world]

Ernest Hemingway - Farewell to Arms I

"I wanted to go to Austria without war. I wanted to go to the Black Forest. I wanted to go to the Hartz Mountains. Where were the Hartz Mountains anyway? They were fighting in the Carpathians. I did not want to the there anyway. It might be good though. I could go to Spain if there was no war. The sun was going down and the day was cooling off. After supper I would go and see Catherine Barkley. I wish she were here now. I wished I were in Milan with her. I would like to eat at the cova and then walk down the Via Manzoni in the hot evening and cross over and turn off along the canal and go to the hotel with Catherine Barkley. Maybe she would. Maybe she would pretend that I was her boy that was killed and we would go in the front door and the porter would take off his cap and I would stop at the concierge's desk and ask for the key and she would stand by the elevator and then we would get in the elevator and it would go up very slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor and the boy would open the door and stand there and she would step out and I would step out and we would walk down the hall and I would put the key in the door and open it and go in and then take down the telephone and ask them to send a bottle of capri bianca in a silver bucket full of ice and you would hear the ice against the pail coming down the corridor and the boy would knock and I would say leave it outside the door please.Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the window open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink the capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be. I would eat quickly and go and see Catherine Barkley. "