Roberto Bolaño - El Exilio y la literatura

"He sido invitado para hablar del exilio. La invitación me llegó escrita en inglés y yo no sé hablar inglés. Hubo una época en que sí sabía o creía que sabía, en cualquier caso hubo una época, cuando yo era adolescente, en que creía que podía leer el inglés casi tan bien, o tan mal, como el español. Esa época desdichadamente ya pasó. No sé leer inglés. Por lo que pude entender de la carta creo que tenía que hablar sobre el exilio. La literatura y el exilio. Pero es muy posible que esté absolutamente equivocado, lo cual, bien mirado, sería a la postre una ventaja, pues yo no creo en el exilio, sobre todo no creo en el exilio cuando esta palabra va junto a la palabra literatura.

Para mí, creo que es conveniente decirlo ya mismo, es un placer estar aquí con ustedes, en la renombrada y famosa Viena. Para mí Viena tiene mucho que ver con la literatura y con la vida de algunas personas muy cercanas a mí y que entendieron el exilio como en ocasiones lo entiendo yo mismo, es decir como vida o como actitud ante la vida. En 1978 o tal vez en 1979 el poeta mexicano Mario Santiago, de regreso de Israel, pasó unos días en esta ciudad. Según me contó él mismo, un día la policía lo detuvo y luego fue expulsado. En la orden de expulsión se le conminaba a no regresar a Austria hasta 1984, una fecha que le parecía significativa y divertida a Mario y que hoy también me lo parece a mí. George Orwell no sólo es uno de los escritores remarcables del siglo XX sino también y sobre todo y mayormente un hombre valiente y bueno. Así que a Mario, en aquel año ya un tanto lejano de 1978 o 79, le pareció divertido que lo expulsaran de Austria con esa recomendación, como si Austria lo hubiera castigado a no pisar suelo austríaco hasta que pasaran seis años y se cumpliera la fecha de la novela, una fecha que para muchos fue el símbolo de la ignominia y de la oscuridad y de la derrota moral del ser humano. Y aquí, dejando de lado lo significativo de la fecha, los mensajes ocultos que el azar o ese monstruo aún más salvaje que es la causalidad enviaba al poeta mexicano y por intermedio de éste me enviaba a mí, podemos hablar o retomar el posible discurso del exilio o del destierro: el ministerio del Interior austríaco o la policía austríaca o la Seguridad austríaca cursa una orden de expulsión y envía mediante esa orden a mi amigo Mario Santiago al limbo, a la tierra de nadie, que en inglés se dice no man’s land, que francamente queda mejor que en español, pues en español tierra de nadie significa exactamente eso, tierra yerma, tierra muerta, tierra en donde no hay nada, mientras que en inglés se sobreentiende que sólo no hay hombres, pero animales o bichos o insectos sí hay, lo que la hace más agradable, no quiero decir muy agradable, pero infinitamente más agradable que en la acepción española, aunque probablemente mi percepción de ambos términos esté condicionada por mi ignorancia progresiva del inglés e incluso por mi ignorancia progresiva del español (el diccionario de la Real Academia Española no registra el término tierra de nadie, cosa que no es de extrañar, o yo no he buscado bien)..."

Texto completo aqui.

Alex Gilvarry - From the memoirs of a non-enemy combatan

(...)
"But on the first foray into Brooklyn Heights with Michelle, I wasn't thinking about any of this. Through the open collar of her frock, I could see her pale skin, the ridges in her chest, and where the plumpness of her small breasts began. Then there was the long freckled neck - a branch. How intoxicating. Her face a ripened piece of fruit! Take a bite, it said. I resisted this compulsion to sexualize her, I swear. Oh, but how I lusted for a body! Still, I knew I needed patience and self-control if I wanted to get together with a girl of Westchester stock. I wasn't going to kiss her yet, I decided,"
(...)

"I watched Michelle trail off along a row of oil street lanterns with Todd Wayne Mercer's knapsack slung over one shoulder. I watched his initials fade away."
(...)

"Those hands could grip my whole being and hold me close. I felt safe whenever she put one on me, as she did at the counter while we slurped our borscht. I placed mine on top of hers and we interlaced our fingers. What warmth! That first breach: My hand touching hers, her hand touching mine, my thigh in her hand, her hand on my thigh. The first time two lovers touch intentionally is always more memorable than a first kiss or a first time, at least for me. It's that rare singular jolt that can never be replicated."
(...)

"Naked, we bare our souls to each other. There are no pretensions. It is the antifashion. Whenever I show skin in one of my dresses - an open chest in front of the heart, or a slither of exposed back - I feel I am providing a peek at the truth. Michelle's body, naked, was like truth serum. I melted at the sight of her bare shoulders, lightly freckled from a summer spent on Nantucket Island; her breasts, two matured handfuls of pale white flesh, outlined with a bikini tan like. I'd get down on my knees and breathe her in just below the navel until her white stomach fuzz stood on end. American women are so wonderfully hairy. Oh, how I fell apart before everything down there! The scent of young womanhood, so unmistakable! Her ass was tremendous - I still dream about its two halves. And what her buttocks held within its dark shadow was the God's honest truth! It was His work, revealed. Go tell it on the mountain."
(...)

No Country for old men - Cormac McCarthy

(..)
"He stood there looking out across the desert. So quiet. Low hum of wind in the wires. High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock monuntains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. He walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away."

(..)
"I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it. It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is something I don't want to be wrong about."

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt

(...)
"Life in the militia brought about many positive changes in my life. I was forced to bathe regularly, which I did not like at the start, but I endured, and this return to the habits of cleanliness successfully killed my bedeviling excrement obsession. I was fed, and the cots were comfortable, the barracks warm enough, and there was usually at least a little something to drink at night. We played cards, sang songs. A sturdy group of men, those soldiers. A bunch of orphans, really, alone in the world, passing time together, with nothing much to do."
(...)

(...)
"The gold from our buckets shone in dense shafts of light, and the branches and limbs of the surrounding trees were bathed in the glow of the river. There was a warm wind pushing down through the valley and off the surface of the water, it kissed my face and caused my hair to dance over my eyes. This moment, this one position in time, was the happiest I will ever be as long I am living. I have since felt it was too happy, that men are not meant to have access to this kind of satisfaction, certainly it has tempered every moment of happiness I have experienced since. At any rate, and perhaps this is just, it was not something we could hold on for very long. Everything immediately after this went just as black and wrong as could be imagined. Everything after this was death in one or the other way."
(...)

Antonio tabucchi - Il gioco del rovescio

Entrando in Portogallo - Entrando en Portugal

"Il treno era fermo, dal finestrino si vedevano le luci della cittadina di frontiera, il mio compagno di viaggio aveva il volto sorpreso e scomposto di chi è svegliato improvvisamente dalla luce, il poliziotto sfogliò attentamete il mio passaporto, viene spesso nel nostro paese, disse, cosa ci trova ditanto interessante? (...)"

Passaggio in italiano

"El tren se había detenido, por la ventanilla se veían las luces de la pequeña ciudad fronteriza, mi compañero de viaje mostraba el rostro sorprendido y molesto de quien se despierta bruscamente por la luz, el policía hojeó atentatmente mi passaporte, viene a menudo a nuestro país, dijo, ¿qué le encuentra de interessante? (...)"

Fragmento de texto en Español



Entrando in Portogallo... qui:

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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. "

Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian I

"When the coach had passed they donned their hats again and moved on. The dogs stood tail to tail. Two other dogs sat a little apart, squatting loosely in their skins, just frames of dogs in napless hides watching the coupled dogs and then watching the prisoners clanking away up the street. All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men's minds."

Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient

"(...) I was not like him. Though I loved him. Admired him. I had this side to my nature which saw reason in all things. I was the one who had an earnest and serous air at school, which he would imitate and mock. You understand, of course, I was far less serious than he was, it was just htat I hated confrontation. It didn't stop me doing whatever I wished or doing things the way I wanted to. Quite early on I had discovered the overlooked space open to those of us with a silent life. I didn't argue with the policeman who said I couldn't cycle over a certain bridge or through a specific gate in the fort - I just stood there, still, until I was invisible, and then I went through. Like a cricket. Like a hidden cup of water. You understand? (...)"

"Yo no era como él, aunque lo quería, lo admiraba. Yo tenía la facultad de ver una razón de ser en todas las cosas. Era el que adoptaba una actitud seria y formal en la escuela, que él remedaba y de la que se burlaba. Claro, que yo era mucho menos serio que él; sólo que detestaba la confrontación. Lo que no me impedía hacer lo que me apetecía o salirme con la mía. Muy pronto había descubierto un espacio del que disfrutábamos sólo los que llevábamos una vida reservada. No discutía con el policía que me impedía circular en bicicleta por determinado puente o entrar por determinada puerta del fuerte, me limitaba a quedarme ahí, inmóvil, hasta que me volvía invisible y entonces entraba: como un grillo, como una taza de agua escondida. ¿Entiendes?"

Translation: Carlos Manzano    

Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient

A quiet river. Flowing. Slowly.

"Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumour of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city."

["Às vezes, quando ela tem a chance de passar a noite com ele, são despertados pelos três minaretes da cidade iniciando suas orações ainda de madrugada. Andam juntos pelos mercados de indigo que ficam entre o sul da cidade do Cairo e a casa dela. As belas canções de fé atravessam o ar como flechas, um minarete respondendo a outro, como se transmitissem rumores sobre os dois enquanto eles caminham ao ar frio da manhã, já carregado, àquela hora, com o cheiro de carvão e de cânhamo. Pecadores numa cidade sagrada. "]
Translation: Iran

"A veces, cuando ella podía pasar la noche con él, los despertaban los tres minaretes de la ciudade, que iniciaban las plegarias antes del amanecer. Recorrían juntos los mercados de añil situados entre El Cairo meridional y la casa de ella. Los hermosos cantos de fe entraban en el aire como flechas, un minarete respondía a otro, como si se transmitieran un rumor sobre ellos dos, mientras paseaban en el fresco aire matutino, ya cargado con el olor a carbón y cáñamo. Pecadores en una ciudad santa."
 Translation: Carlos Manzano
 

Antonio Tabucchi - Il gioco del rovescio

"Dalla finestra arrivò il suono di una sirena, forse una nave che entrava in porto, e immediatamente sentii un enorme desiderio di essere uno di quei passeggeri di quella nave, di entrare nel porto di una città sconosciuta che si chiamava Lisbona e di dover chiamare al telefono una donna sconosciuta per dirle che era uscita una nuova traduzione di Fernando Pessoa, e quella donna si chiamava Maria do Carmo, sarebbe venuta alla libreria Bertrand indossando un vestito giallo, amava il fado e i piatti sefarditi, e io sapevo già tutto questo, ma quel passeggero che ero io e che guardava Lisbona dal parapetto della nave non lo sapeva ancora e tutto sarebbe stato per lui nuovo e identico. E questa era Saudade (...)"
    

["Da janela chegou o som de uma sirene, talvez um navio que entrava no porto, e imediatamente senti um desejo enorme de ser um dos passageiros daquele navio, de entrar no porto de uma cidade desconhecida que se chamava Lisboa e de ter que chamar por telefone a uma mulher desconhecida para dizer-lhe que havia saído uma nova tradução de Fernando Pessoa, e aquela mulher se chamaria Maria do Carmo, iria à livraria Bertrand usando um vestido amarelo, adorava o fado e os pratos sefarditas, e eu já sabia tudo isso, mas aquele passageiro que era eu e que contemplava Lisboa do convés do navio ainda não sabia e para ele tudo iria ser novo e idêntico. E isso era saudade" (...)]
Translation: Iran