"Sé de versos que no son poesía, como un montón de plumas no es un ala."
Déjenme así. Mi corazón no pide... - Horacio Rega Molina
Déjenme así. Mi corazón no pide
nada más; pues no hay vida tan hermosa
como la que uno para sí decide.
Mi arcilla es mía; nadie hará otra cosa.
¿De qué recuerdos quieren que me olvide?
¿Qué huida me proponen, temerosa?
¿De qué peligros dicen que me cuide
si tengo los del verso y de la prosa?
¿Quién procura tomarme la medida
y el peso, y en el libro de lecciones
anotarme un examen de conciencia?
¿Qué haría con el alma corregida?
Gracias, Dios mío, porque Tú no pones
mi manera de ser en penitencia.
September 1, 1939 - W. H. Auden (1907–1973)
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by the Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Zamba para Olvidarte - Letra: Julio Fontana / Música: Daniel Toro (1976)
No sé para qué volviste
Si ya empezaba a olvidar
No sé si ya lo sabrás
Lloré cuando vos te fuiste
No sé para qué volviste
Qué mal me hace recordar
La tarde se ha puesto triste
Y yo prefiero callar
¿Para qué vamos a hablar
De cosas que ya no existen?
No sé para que volviste
Ya ves que es mejor no hablar
Qué pena me da
Saber que al final de este amor
Ya no queda nada
Sólo una pobre canción
Da vueltas por mi guitarra
Y hace rato que te extraña
Mi zamba para olvidar
Mi zamba vivió conmigo
Parte de mi soledad
No sé si ya lo sabrás
Mi vida se fue contigo
Contigo, mi amor, contigo
Qué mal me hace recordar
Mis manos ya son de barro
Tanto apretar al dolor
Y ahora que me falta el sol
No sé que venís buscando
Llorando, mi amor, llorando
También olvídame vos
Si ya empezaba a olvidar
No sé si ya lo sabrás
Lloré cuando vos te fuiste
No sé para qué volviste
Qué mal me hace recordar
La tarde se ha puesto triste
Y yo prefiero callar
¿Para qué vamos a hablar
De cosas que ya no existen?
No sé para que volviste
Ya ves que es mejor no hablar
Qué pena me da
Saber que al final de este amor
Ya no queda nada
Sólo una pobre canción
Da vueltas por mi guitarra
Y hace rato que te extraña
Mi zamba para olvidar
Mi zamba vivió conmigo
Parte de mi soledad
No sé si ya lo sabrás
Mi vida se fue contigo
Contigo, mi amor, contigo
Qué mal me hace recordar
Mis manos ya son de barro
Tanto apretar al dolor
Y ahora que me falta el sol
No sé que venís buscando
Llorando, mi amor, llorando
También olvídame vos
Qué pena me da
Saber que al final de este amor
Ya no queda nada
Saber que al final de este amor
Ya no queda nada
Sólo una pobre canción
Da vueltas por mi guitarra
Y hace rato que te extraña
Mi zamba para olvidar
Da vueltas por mi guitarra
Y hace rato que te extraña
Mi zamba para olvidar
A Cold Spring - Elizabeth Bishop
Nothing is so beautiful as spring.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins.
A cold spring:
The violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing,
taking a long time to eat the afterbirth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.
The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette butt,
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practiced leaping over your fences.
The infant oak leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song sparrows were wound up for the summer
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the South.
In his cap the lilacs whitened;
then one day they fell like snow.
Now, in the evening,
a new moon comes.
The hills grow softer. Tufts of long grass show
where each cow-flop lies.
The bullfrogs are sounding,
slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs.
Beneath the light, against your white front door,
the smallest moths, like Chinese fans,
flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt
over pale yellow, orange, or gray.
Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies
begin to rise:
up, then down, then up again—
lit on the ascending flight,
drifting simultaneously to the same height,
exactly like the bubbles in champagne.
(Later on they rise much higher.)
And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer
these particular glowing tributes
every evening now throughout the summer.
Published in the print edition of the May 31, 1952, issue. As part of an effort to make The New Yorker’s archive more accessible to readers, this story was digitized by an automated process and may contain transcription errors.
Elizabeth Bishop, a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, began contributing poetry to The New Yorker in 1940. She died in 1979.
Ars poetica - Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
La única tecnología verbal disponible... - Eric Havelock
"La única tecnología verbal disponible para garantizar la preservación y fijación de la transmisión, era aquella de la astuta organización rítmica de las palabras en patrones verbales y métricos, que fueran suficientemente únicos para retener su forma."
Eric Havelock, 1963
Eric Havelock Bibliography
Obras fundamentales
The Lyric Genius of Catullus. Oxford: Blackwell, 1939.
The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, Incorporating a Fresh Translation into English Verse of the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950. Reprinted as Prometheus. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.
The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. Traducción española: Visor, 1994.
Prologue to Greek Literacy. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Press, 1971.
The Greek Concept of Justice: From its Shadow in Homer to its Substance in Plato. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.
The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Traducción española: Paidós, 1996; 2008.
The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, Incorporating a Fresh Translation into English Verse of the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950. Reprinted as Prometheus. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.
The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. Traducción española: Visor, 1994.
Prologue to Greek Literacy. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Press, 1971.
The Greek Concept of Justice: From its Shadow in Homer to its Substance in Plato. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.
The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Traducción española: Paidós, 1996; 2008.
Simone de Beauvoir, sobre Simone Weil (filósofa francesa)
En uno de sus escritos autobiográficos, Simone de Beauvoir comenta sobre Simone Weil (filósofa francesa): «Me intrigaba por su gran reputación de mujer inteligente y audaz. Por ese tiempo, una terrible hambruna había devastado China y me contaron que cuando ella escuchó la noticia lloró. Estas lágrimas motivaron mi respeto, mucho más que sus dotes como filósofa. Envidiaba un corazón capaz de latir a través del universo entero».
Bob Dylan Interview for 20/20 (1985)
“I want to figure out what’s happening. I did look into it. It didn’t necessarily make life easier, but it definitely made it clearer. Again, a lot of things, really—hard to say in a few words what I gained from it. But it’s always easier if you understand something than if you don’t. If you don’t understand something, you’re just tossed about. If there’s a storm coming up, it’s always much easier on you knowing that it’s only going to last a certain time.
Is there another world after this one? This is a testing ground. This is a place you have to work certain things out. You have to work out where your place is and who you are. But we’re all spirit—that’s all we have. Just walking, dressed up in a suit of skin. And that we’re going to leave that. You make of it what you make of it. Nothing’s forever—everything is temporary. You don’t leave any nice place behind. You just have to have some kind of focus on what you need and what people force you to need. It’s only your work you’re leaving behind.
At a certain time, all the people from history will stand up. I believe in the resurrection. There are certain things—certain knowledge—that I’m not sure is available right now on a mass level. It may be sometime, because some of it is a little extreme. It might go against what a lot of people already think. A lot of what’s happening today throughout the world operates under something like a spiritual religious order, but it’s actually happening more in terms of a financial empire. And this is from what I can see—it has nothing really to do with spirituality or the next world, or the soul—the trip that the soul’s on. I could go deeper, but I’m not sure how much of it I want to state right out and say, because I’m not sure how much of it applies here. Oh yeah, sure—I think this whole thing’s got to end. Well, there’s a messianic kingdom that would be coming in. When it comes in, some people say tomorrow—I don’t particularly think it’s going to be tomorrow, but I believe it’s going to happen.”
Destino de poeta - Octavio Paz
¿Palabras? Sí, de aire,
y en el aire perdidas.
Déjame que me pierda entre palabras,
déjame ser el aire en unos labios,
un soplo vagabundo sin contornos
que el aire desvanece.
También la luz en sí misma se pierde.
Jay Shetty
The door was never locked. You just stopped checking after the first time it felt heavy. Try the handle again.
And I felt that
Jay Shetty
Morning - Frank O'Hara
I’ve got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death
in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe
chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow
At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes
I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine
although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you’d be proud of
the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle
what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies it
is difficult to think
of you without me in
the sentence you depress
me when you are alone
Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I’ll not be cordial
there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
do you know how it is
when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go
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