Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888 - 1970)

(Giuseppe Ungaretti lê seu poema "Inno alla morte", do livro Sentimento del tempo)

Inno alla morte

Amore, mio giovine emblema,
Tornato a dorare la terra,
Diffuso entro il giorno rupestre,
É l'ultima volta che miro
(Appiè del botro, d'irruenti
Acque sontuoso, d'antri
Funesto) la scia di luce
Che pari alla tortora lamentosa
Sull'erba svagata si turba.

Amore, salute lucente,
Mi pesano gli anni venturi.


Abbandonata la mazza fedele,
Scivolerò nell'acqua buia
Senza rimpianto.

Morte, arido fiume...

Immemore sorella, morte,
L'uguale mi farai del sogno
Baciandomi.

Avrò il tuo passo,
Andrò senza lasciare impronta.

Mi darai il cuore immobile
D'un iddio, sarò innocente,
Non avrò più pensieri nè bontà.

Colla mente murata,
Cogli occhi caduti in oblio,

Farò da guida alla felicità.

(1925)


HINO À MORTE

Amor, meu emblema de jovem,
Que volta a dourar a terra,
Difuso no dia rupestre,
É a última vez que contemplo
(Ao pé deste barranco, de impetuosas
águas, suntuoso, funesto
De antros) o rastro de luz
Que, como a lastimosa rolinha
Inquieta, meandra no gramado.

Amor, salvação fulgurosa,
Pesam-me os anos do porvir.

Largado o bastão fiel,
Resvalarei para a água sombria
Sem um queixume.

Morte, árido rio ...

Imêmore irmã, morte,
Igual ao sonho me farás
Beijando-me.

Terei teu mesmo passo,
Irei sem deixar traço.

Tu me darás o coração indiferente
De um deus, serei inocente,
Sem pensamentos, nem cuidados.

Com a mente murada,
Com os olhos caídos em esquecimento,
Far-me-ei guia da felicidade.

Tradução de Geraldo Holanda Cavalcanti


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(Pier Paolo Pasolini em conversa com Giuseppe Ungaretti)

4 poets, 5 languages, 1 reading – Tuesday: Aug.19 – 20:00 @ Rayuela (Berlin, Germany)

4 poets, 5 languages, 1 reading – Tuesday/Dienstag: Aug.19 – 20:00 @ Rayuela

Coming Tuesday, at the bookstore Rayuela, the poets Ricardo Domeneck (Brazil), Odile Kennel (Germany), Sandra Santana (Spain) and Damien Spleeters (Belgium) meet for a reading of poems and conversation, in English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese.


Reading: Lesung: Lecture: Lectura: Leitura - 19.08.2008 - 20:00

Ricardo Domeneck (Brasil)
Odile Kennel (Deutschland)
Sandra Santana (España)
Damien Spleeters (Belgique)


La Rayuela
Die spanische Buchhandlung in Berlin
Elisabethkirchstraße 3 (U-Bahn Rosenthaler Platz)
10115 Berlin

T: 440 132 93
www.la-rayuela.de


About the poets:

§ - Ricardo Domeneck was born in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil and lives in Berlin. He has published the volumes of poems "Carta aos anfíbios" (2005) and "a cadela sem Logos" (2007), and works with video and sound poetry. He is the co-editor of Hilda Magazine (Germany) and Modo de Usar & Co. (Brazil).

Click here for poems by Ricardo Domeneck

§ - Odile Kennel was born in the southwest of Germany as product of a German/French jumelage and lives in Berlin. She has published "Wimpernflug" in 2000, and is co-editor of the French/German magazine La mer gelée. She has translated poets from French and Portuguese, as for example Jean Portante, Adília Lopes and Arnaldo Antunes.

Click here for poems by Odile Kennel

§ - Sandra Santana was born in Madrid, Spain. She has published "Marcha por el desierto" (2005) and "Es el verbo tan frágil" this year. She is the co-founder of the collective El Águila Ediciones which investigates alternative media por poetry. She also collaborates with Miguel Álvarez Fernández in sound poetry and installations.

Click here for poems by Sandra Santana

§ - Damien Spleeters was born in Charleroi and lives in Brussels, Belgium. He published the novel "Transere" in 2006, the collection of poems "ouroboros" and the theater play "La Prophétie" this year, and also directed his first play "La Pièce", at Atelier de la Dolce Vita. He has performed in festivals such as Teranova (Metz et Nancy) and "Nuits Blanches" in Brussels.

Click here for poems by Damien Spleeters

I met the Walrus - John Lennon in interview

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941 - 2008)

The first time I saw/heard Mahmoud Darwish was in Jean-Luc Godard´s film "Notre Musique", and his words on War and on Palestine and Israel stuck to my mind. The Palestinian poet died this weekend. A tiny hommage to an amazing poet I could unfortunately only read in translation.



Under Siege

Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time
Close to the gardens of broken shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
And what the jobless do:
We cultivate hope.

***
A country preparing for dawn. We grow less intelligent
For we closely watch the hour of victory:
No night in our night lit up by the shelling
Our enemies are watchful and light the light for us
In the darkness of cellars.

***
Here there is no "I".
Here Adam remembers the dust of his clay.

***
On the verge of death, he says:
I have no trace left to lose:
Free I am so close to my liberty. My future lies in my own hand.
Soon I shall penetrate my life,
I shall be born free and parentless,
And as my name I shall choose azure letters...

***
You who stand in the doorway, come in,
Drink Arabic coffee with us
And you will sense that you are men like us
You who stand in the doorways of houses
Come out of our morningtimes,
We shall feel reassured to be
Men like you!

***
When the planes disappear, the white, white doves
Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven
With unbound wings taking radiance back again, taking possession
Of the ether and of play. Higher, higher still, the white, white doves
Fly off. Ah, if only the sky
Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me].

***
Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets protecting
The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel
Soldiers piss—under the watchful eye of a tank—
And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in
A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass...

***
[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
to find one’s identity again.

***
The siege is a waiting period
Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm.

***
Alone, we are alone as far down as the sediment
Were it not for the visits of the rainbows.

***
We have brothers behind this expanse.
Excellent brothers. They love us. They watch us and weep.
Then, in secret, they tell each other:
"Ah! if this siege had been declared..." They do not finish their sentence:
"Don’t abandon us, don’t leave us."

***
Our losses: between two and eight martyrs each day.
And ten wounded.
And twenty homes.
And fifty olive trees...
Added to this the structural flaw that
Will arrive at the poem, the play, and the unfinished canvas.

***
A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved
For my clothing is drenched with his blood.

***
If you are not rain, my love
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
If you are not tree, my love
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
If you are not stone, my love
Be moon
In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon
[So spoke a woman
to her son at his funeral]

***
Oh watchmen! Are you not weary
Of lying in wait for the light in our salt
And of the incandescence of the rose in our wound
Are you not weary, oh watchmen?

***

A little of this absolute and blue infinity
Would be enough
To lighten the burden of these times
And to cleanse the mire of this place.

***
It is up to the soul to come down from its mount
And on its silken feet walk
By my side, hand in hand, like two longtime
Friends who share the ancient bread
And the antique glass of wine
May we walk this road together
And then our days will take different directions:
I, beyond nature, which in turn
Will choose to squat on a high-up rock.

***
On my rubble the shadow grows green,
And the wolf is dozing on the skin of my goat
He dreams as I do, as the angel does
That life is here...not over there.

***
In the state of siege, time becomes space
Transfixed in its eternity
In the state of siege, space becomes time
That has missed its yesterday and its tomorrow.

***
The martyr encircles me every time I live a new day
And questions me: Where were you? Take every word
You have given me back to the dictionaries
And relieve the sleepers from the echo’s buzz.

***
The martyr enlightens me: beyond the expanse
I did not look
For the virgins of immortality for I love life
On earth, amid fig trees and pines,
But I cannot reach it, and then, too, I took aim at it
With my last possession: the blood in the body of azure.

***
The martyr warned me: Do not believe their ululations
Believe my father when, weeping, he looks at my photograph
How did we trade roles, my son, how did you precede me.
I first, I the first one!

***
The martyr encircles me: my place and my crude furniture are all that I have changed.
I put a gazelle on my bed,
And a crescent of moon on my finger
To appease my sorrow.

***
The siege will last in order to convince us we must choose an enslavement that does no harm, in fullest liberty!

***
Resisting means assuring oneself of the heart’s health,
The health of the testicles and of your tenacious disease:
The disease of hope.

***
And in what remains of the dawn, I walk toward my exterior
And in what remains of the night, I hear the sound of footsteps inside me.

***
Greetings to the one who shares with me an attention to
The drunkenness of light, the light of the butterfly, in the
Blackness of this tunnel!

***
Greetings to the one who shares my glass with me
In the denseness of a night outflanking the two spaces:
Greetings to my apparition.

***
My friends are always preparing a farewell feast for me,
A soothing grave in the shade of oak trees
A marble epitaph of time
And always I anticipate them at the funeral:
Who then has died...who?

***
Writing is a puppy biting nothingness
Writing wounds without a trace of blood.

***
Our cups of coffee. Birds green trees
In the blue shade, the sun gambols from one wall
To another like a gazelle
The water in the clouds has the unlimited shape of what is left to us
Of the sky. And other things of suspended memories
Reveal that this morning is powerful and splendid,
And that we are the guests of eternity.


Translated by Marjolijn De Jager

Three Lyric Poets: Sapho - Beatriz de Diá - Joanna Newsom

Sapho (630 BC - 570 BC)


Once you lay upon my bosom,
While the long blue-silver moonlight
Walked the plain, with that pure passion
All your own.


Now the moon is gone, the Pleiads
Gone, the dead of night is going;
Slips the hour, and on my bed
I lie alone.


fr. 47 V
............................... E Eros sacode-me
as entranhas, como o vento de sobre o monte nos carvalhos caindo.


fr. 130 V

Eros de novo a mim, o soltamembros, agita,
doceamargo indomável animal.

Ó Átis: a ti, em mim, fez-se odioso
pensar - e para Andrômeda voas.

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BEATRIZ DE DIÁ (fim do século XII - meados do século XIII)


(performance moderna do poema "A chantar m’er de so q’ieu non volria" da Condessa de Diá)

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JOANNA NEWSOM (n./b. 1982)

Video-Text Performances in Madrid, Spain

Festival Yuxtaposiciones 2008 @ Casa Encendida, Madrid.
May 30th, 2008.

POTLATCH:



THIS IS THE VOICE:

"Poesía con P de plural", artigo de Sandra Santana na revista espanhola POESÍA DIGITAL

Texto da poeta espanhola Sandra Santana (Madri, 1978), sobre o festival de poesia Yuxtaposiciones, de Madri, do qual participei este ano, tendo a honra de apresentar-me ao lado de poetas com Nora Gomringer (Alemanha), W. Mark Sutherland (Canadá), Josep Pedrals (Catalunha), Eugenio Tisseli (México), Rui Torres (Portugal) e Albert Pla (Catalunha).

Sandra Santana é autora do excelente Es El Verbo Tan Frágil, publicado há poucos meses na Espanha. A revista eletrônica espanhola POESÍA DIGITAL pode ser acessada aqui:

http://www.poesiadigital.es

Poesía con p de plural

por Sandra Santana

Desde que el poeta italiano Enzo Minareli publicase el “Manifiesto de la Polipoesía” en 1987, muchos autores se han apropiado de este término que tiene la virtud de dotar de un prefijo múltiple al género poético. Entre el 29 y el 31 de mayo de 2008 se celebró en La Casa Encendida de Madrid la cuarta edición del Microfestival de Poesía y Polipoesía Yuxtaposiciones, un momento perfecto para intentar tomarle el pulso a las prácticas más heterodoxas de la lírica actual.

¿Qué tienen en común los nombres de Rui Torres, Josep Pedrals, Mark Sutherland, Nora Gomringer o Ricardo Domeneck? Todos estos autores de diversa estirpe se reunieron durante tres días en el patio de La Casa Encendida para dar forma a un festival que nos dejó soñando con un territorio en el que cada nueva propuesta poética despierta un complejo universo alimentado por las más diversas y bien digeridas tradiciones. Cada uno de ellos abordó la poesía desde un flanco distinto para demostrar que este término se puede pronunciar en lenguajes y soportes muy diversos: desde el poema-monólogo de la joven poeta suizo-alemana Nora Gomringer –que encarnó a los distintos personajes de su autobiografía-lírica mediante una hipnótica lectura–, a los vídeos del brasileño Ricardo Domeneck, en diálogo con unos versos que conservaban el ritmo breve de la respiración de su autor; desde el producto amable y humorístico ofrecido por el barcelonés Josep Pedrals y el trabajo fonético de Mark Sutherland, hasta el espectáculo de poesía electrónica en tiempo real de Eugenio Tisseli. Todo ello pasando por la conferencia de Rui Torres acerca de Telepoesis (un ambicioso proyecto destinado a recoger, clasificar y reproducir en formato electrónico los fanzines y revistas de poetas visuales y concretos de la vanguardia portuguesa de los 60), y desembocando en un poetry slam en el que pudimos observar las distintas modulaciones que este tipo de competición lírica ha adoptado en las diversas áreas donde se practica: los franceses Abd El Haq y D´de Kabal aproximándose al ritmo de rap, los alemanes Timo Brunke y Bas Böttcher más cerca de la sobria vanguardia centroeuropea y, por último, Ajo, Gonzalo Escarpa (Pimpoets) y Julio Jara, que ofrecieron la versión española de este género tan poco frecuentado en nuestro país. En resumen, muchos motivos para regresar a casa más que satisfechos al contemplar tanta variedad y tan satisfactorias aptitudes entre las polipoéticas del festival.

El término “polipoesía” viene asociado a una tradición que utiliza como carburante creativo las voces del dadaísmo, de la poesía concreta y, sobre todo, de unas segundas vanguardias que encontraron en el trabajo con el material fonético la batalla capaz de sacar a la literatura de su marasmo y ponerla en contacto directo y vivo con el público. La fórmula que ofrece Yuxtaposiciones (antes Intervocálica) tampoco es nueva. Este festival puede considerarse como el hermano pequeño de Proposta, un encuentro anual que (heredero del Festival de Polipoesía y de Viatge a la Polinesia en los años 90) llevó hasta el Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona entre el 2000 y el 2004 a lo más selecto de la escena poética experimental internacional (Jaap Blonk, Amanda Stewart, Nobuo Kubota, Franz Mon...), prestando un especial cuidado al producto autóctono de calidad (Bartomeu Ferrando, Accidents Polipoètics, Josep Ramon Roig...). Y es que Cataluña ha sido, desde finales de los 80, el paraíso de los polipoetas en nuestro país. Esto es, de las manifestaciones performativas, sonoras, cibernéticas, audiovisuales, etc., asociadas a la poesía y que, siendo ignoradas en gran parte del territorio español, en Estados Unidos o Alemania tan plácidamente parecen convivir, sin embargo, con el resto de usos poéticos asociados al texto escrito. Por supuesto, aunque con nombre plural, la polipoesía no lo es todo, pero hoy en día el reconocimiento de esta vertiente lírica puede y debe hacernos revisar el recital poético y contemplar la escritura con ojos nuevos.

Nada podemos reprochar a quien en sus recitales reproduce un poema originalmente pensado para ser degustado en silencio por medio del papel, siempre que perciba cómo, entre sus manos, está latiendo el tiempo vivo del público que presencia su lectura.

Después de pasar por el festival y ver la buena salud de la que goza esta vertiente poética en tan variadas latitudes, agradecemos a la polipoesía que nos recuerde que el nombre por el que denominamos al arte de escribir versos debe conservarse plural, abierto al contagio con otras artes y sin miedo a la exploración, al equívoco, a tantear sendas oscuras o inexploradas en el escenario. Con una tradición fuerte y consolidada de polipoetas dentro y fuera de nuestras fronteras, nada tenemos que objetar a quien escoge el libro como el soporte para su escritura: siempre que vuelva a él con la despierta conciencia de que su elección no es obligada, sino una opción más entre muchas otras (el vídeo, el blog, la performance, la poesía en soporte electrónico, la poesía sonora, el teatrema, el poema objeto...). Después de este viaje, el regreso al soporte-libro ya no puede ser el mismo. Nada podemos reprochar a quien en sus recitales reproduce un poema originalmente pensado para ser degustado en silencio por medio del papel, siempre que perciba cómo, entre sus manos, está latiendo el tiempo vivo del público que presencia su lectura. Con la certeza de esta ineludible responsabilidad deberá ofrecer una nueva obra literaria viva y desprendida ahora de las líneas del texto escrito.

Sandra Santana

Entrevista - Programa de rádio Ondas Literárias - HOJE

Vai ao ar, hoje à noite, minha entrevista para o programa de rádio Ondas Literárias, dirigido pela poeta paulistana Andréa Catrópa. Gravei as respostas aqui em Berlim, e o programa veicula tudo hoje às 21:30, incluindo a leitura de poemas.

O programa foi criado por Andréa Catrópa e vai ao ar toda segunda-feira,
às 21:30, na Cultura FM de Amparo 102,9.

Andréa Catrópa nasceu em 1974 em São Paulo e acaba de lançar seu livro Mergulho às avessas. É uma das poetas e críticas mais independentes da cena paulistana, claramente interessada em um debate aberto e honesto. Publicamos poemas seus no número impresso de estréia da Modo de Usar & Co.

Na semana passada, o programa veiculou a entrevista com Marcos Siscar e mostrou minha colaboração textual-sonora com o duo Tetine. Já passaram pelo programa poetas como Ricardo Aleixo, Fabiano Calixto, Carlito Azevedo, Heitor Ferraz, Alice Ruiz, Marcelo Montenegro, entre outros.

Hoje: às 21:30
Ricardo Domeneck no programa Ondas Literárias
Cultura FM de Amparo 102,9

Portrait of the artist as a young girl

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AND HERE AS ONE
OF THE MOST IMPORTANT
POETS OF THE 1990s.
POETRY as
Writing / Sound / Performance
as you like it, as we need it.

Poesia brasileira / Brazilian poetry

Recebi esta semana meu exemplar da antologia de poesia brasileira, editada por Horácio Costa e Charles A. Perrone e publicada nos Estados Unidos pela Tigertail.

Horácio Costa selecionou os poetas, e incluiu um dos meus poemas do livro Carta aos anfíbios (2005), com tradução de Charles Perrone.

São 15 poetas, dos quais gostaria de destacar os cearenses Diego Vinhas e Eduardo Jorge, assim como o carioca Franklin Alves Dassie.