Taccuino di traduzione 2.0

Non voglio riservare i post di poesia per il lunedì o il fine settimana. Per questo oggi vi propongo tre videopoesie, tratte dalla serie HBO Def Poetry Jam.

La prima è Hands di Sarah Kay.

Ascoltatela fino in fondo.

La seconda è Not Your Erotic, Not Your Exotic di Suheir Hammad, poetessa palestinese/americana, la mia preferita.

E la terza è Instructions for a Body di Marty McConnell.

Buon  ascolto.

Postato da: IM 

La serie Great Poets del Guardian si conclude con giustizia poetica. Dopo Sylvia Plath presentata da Margaret Drabble, tocca a Ted Hughes, di cui scrive Jeannette Winterson.

Indipendentemente dalle vicende matrimoniali della coppia Plath-Hughes (sinceramente non ho mai capito chi fosse l’oppresso e chi l’oppressore), è difficile rimanere indifferenti ai versi di Hughes.

Hughes is a vigorous poet and the muscle of his language lifts the ordinary or overlooked experience, turns it about, holds it up to the light, carries it for us, then gently puts it down where we won’t forget it. Getting up before dawn, staying up long after dark, (common features of his poetry), he stands witness to what the functional, clock-driven world is too busy or too asleep to notice.

La poesia di Ted Hughes che vi propongo si intitola A modest proposal

There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.
Now neither’s able to sleep - even at a distance
Distracted by the soft competing pulse
Of the other; nor able to hunt - at every step
Looking backwards and sideways, warying to listen
For the other’s slavering rush. Neither can make die
The painful burning of the coal in its heart
Till the other’s body and the whole wood is its own.
Then it might sob contentment toward the moon.

Each in a thicket, rage hoarse in its labouring
Chest after a skirmish, licks the rents in its hide,
Eyes brighter than is natural under the leaves
(Where the wren, peeping round a leaf, shrieks out
To see a chink so terrifyingly open
Onto the red smelting of hatred) as each
Pictures a mad final satisfaction.

Suddenly they duck and peer.
And there rides by
The great lord from hunting. His embroidered
Cloak floats, the tail of his horse pours,
And at his stirrup the two great-eyed greyhounds
That day after day bring down the towering stag
Leap like one, making delighted sounds.

Per chi vuole qualche cosa di più, c’è la Ted Hughes Homepage, con poesie, articoli e saggi. Su Youtube.com trovate un’intervista con Hughes. Da non perdere.

Postato da: IM

Nella serie Great Poets, il Guardian pubblica la prefazione di Margaret Drabble (non perdetevi il suo libro For Queen and Country) a una raccolta di poesie di Sylvia Plath.

Her poems about her children - Morning Song, You’re, Nick and the Candlestick - are, I believe, the first poems ever to celebrate the pleasures of breast feeding. She evokes the independent being of a baby, the power and mystery of the maternal bond. She struggled with her role as a Good Wife of the 1950s, oppressed by her husband’s greater freedom and an uncomfortable, angry, vestigial sense of duty, but her delight in her children flows irrepressibly. Writing to her mother of the birth of her son Nick, she describes how “this great bluish, glistening boy shot out onto the bed in a wave of tidal water that drenched all four of us to the skin, howling lustily.” The colour and energy of this childbed description (which appears in several poems) struck those of us who were her contemporaries as something wholly new in literature. Here was a whole new world of sensation, familiar throughout women’s history, but at last captured and acknowledged in words. It was a broken taboo, a new dawn of freedom.

La mia copia delle poesie della Plath (testo originale e traduzione di Giovanni Giudici, del lontano 1982) sta ormai cadendo a pezzi; per fortuna, qualcuno ha pensato di raccogliere 230 poesie della Plath in un’unica pagina. C’è anche la mia preferita in assoluto, Daddy, che però è troppo lunga da riportare qui. Quindi vi offro questa, intitolata The Applicant:

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked
How about this suit -

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

Postato da: IM