O jovem Auden
A primeira vez que li W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973) foi em 1997, quando eu tinha entre 19 e 20 anos, ao comprar em São Paulo uma edição usada de uma antologia com tradução e introdução de José Paulo Paes e João Moura Jr., Poemas (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1986). Lembro-me de ter ficado encantado com os poemas que ele escreveu ainda jovem, mesmo que nunca tenha conseguido apreciar da mesma maneira sua produção tardia. De qualquer forma, dois de meus poemas favoritos, muito importantes para mim além de dois dos textos mais memoráveis que o século XX nos legou, são dele: "Musée des Beaux Arts" e "In Memory of W.B. Yeats". Hoje, mais temperado em minhas recusas e aceitações, leio com muito carinho poemas singelos e diretos como "Funeral Blues" e "The More Loving One" (os versos "If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me" sempre vão me acompanhar), e leio com admiração mesmo seus textos mais moralizantes, digamos, como "Lakes" e "Mountains". Tenho também simpatia grande por um poeta que satirizou os machos-alfa como o fez em "Moon Landing":
Às vezes me pergunto como e de que maneira minha vida hoje em Berlim seria diferente da que Auden e seu amigo Christopher Isherwood levaram na Berlim da República de Weimar. Completamente distintas e, ao mesmo tempo e em certos aspectos bastante específicos, imagino que muito parecidas. Assisti hoje a um documentário sobre a lírica amorosa de Auden. Quis compartilhá-lo. Encerro a postagem com meus dois poemas favoritos do autor.
"W. H. Auden - Tell Me The Truth About Love": documentário de Susanna White
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Musée des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Pieter Bruegel (a atribuição é questionada por especialistas) - "Paisagem com Queda de Ícaro"
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In Memory of W. B. Yeats
W. H. Auden
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
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