a new one of mine...

Half truth

Winter upon us. Yet
He returns from his month
in a hut, from his African mistress
whose fan breathes its breathless
artifice of wind along the milky whiteness
of his sleep, into
the dark-curtained rooms of a
Spanish lover.
Soon he will be off again, this time toward
east-lying plains
Where his girls will folk-dance him into the night
And offer him red wine, sausages, morning rides
Into the hills.
Daddy still pays for his plane tickets.
Women still believe his stories.
History proceeds at a breakneck pace
Yet sometimes so little changes:
Our foolishness, our deep-churning need
For the tiniest element, the smallest blue flame
sheltered for a second from the wind.

Versão...

Gente, aí vai, já incorporando algumas sugestões do amigo
Marcelo Toffoli...

CASAMENTO

- Denise Duhamel (do livro Kinky)

Barbie imagina se seria traição
sonhar com namorados, bonecos que
Mattel nunca fabricou para suas brincadeiras.
Um com dreads rastafári feitos de pelúcia
Em lugar de duros arcos de plástico,
Outro gordinho, meio calvo
Com óculos de John Lennon
E um terceiro com um nariz grande e sexy
como Gerard Depardieu.
Porém, supõe ela, seu Ken é mesmo inofensivo
Peitoral todo sarado afastado por rígidos seios
que não cedem ao toque
e ele não pode lhe obrigar à nada
quando ela não está
com vontade.
Ela se lembra das últimas palavras
da descontinuada boneca Midge,
“Hey Barbie, não complique,
É um casamento, não é?”
Desde o outro lado do corredor
Entre o monte de brinquedos pra menino
O Soldado Joe de vez em quando olha pra ela
Mas não faz exatamente seu tipo.
Ela na sua caixa, com elásticos que prendem
Seus braços.
A capa de plástico distorce sua visão
Do mundo.
Não é só aventura romântica o que ela deseja::
Há passeios de balão,
Aulas no curso noturno, trabalho de caridade.
Barbie se consola, reconhecendo que não é
Muito diferente do resto de nós, de como jogamos:
Entre gratidão e ambição,
Passividade e culpa.





versão: Miriam Adelman.

Promessas...

Gente, passou voando um mês inteirinho, sem nenhuma postagem nova!
Continua sendo minha intenção escrever a segunda parte do ensaio dedicado a Fatima
Mernissi, e muitas outras coisas. Mas o semestre está num momento crítico, ando
sem tempo para vários projetos, e ainda escrevendo palestras de última hora, para "atender a demanda"... Em todo caso, consegui escolher mais um poema de
Denise Duhamel para traduzir, e reproduzo aqui a versão original, prometendo ter
uma versão preliminar em português, se for possível, antes do final do mês.

MARRIAGE


Barbie wonders if it’s cheating
when she dreams of fashion doll boyfriends
Mattel never made for her to play with.
One with Rastafarian dreadlocks –
spun with fuzz, not stiff
like the arcs of a plastic Jello mold.
Another chubby and balding
with John Lennon glasses.
And a third with a big sexy nose
like Gerard Depardieu.
Still, she supposes, Ken is harmless enough.
His pecs kept at bay by her stiff unyielding breasts.
And there is nothing he can force on her
When she’s not in the mood.
She remembers discontinued Midge’s last words:
“Hey Barbie, it’s a marriage, don’t knock it.”
From the stack of boy’s toys across the aisle,
GI Joe occasionally gives Barbie the eye,
though he’s not exactly what she has in mind.
In her box, elastic bands hold back her arms
And the plastic overlay she peers through
distorts her view of the world.
It’s not only a romantic fling she desires:
there are hot air balloon rides,
night school classes, charity work.
Barbie comforts herself
knowing she’s not much different
from the rest of us, juggling gratitude,
ambition, passivity and guilt.


- Denise Duhamel

Telling stories, connecting lives.

(Part I)

To travel is the best way to learn and empower yourself”, said Yasmina, my grandmother, who was illiterate and lived in a harem, a traditional household with locked gates that women were not supposed to open. “You must focus on the strangers you meet and try to understand them”. The more you understand a stranger and the greater is your knowledge of yourself, the more power you will have”. For Yasmina, the harem was a prison, a place women were forbidden to leave. So she glorified travel and regarded the opportunity to cross boundaries as a sacred privilege, the best way to shed powerlessness.
(Fatema Mernissi, Scheherezade Goes West…)

Of all the authors and writers on my ever-expanding list for this one of my current projects (helping to extend mappings of gender and culture beyond the borders and boundaries of Euro-american paths and patterns; advancing the fusion of feminist and post colonial perspectives for sociology, etc. ), no one has inspired me more than Moroccan feminist, Fatema Mernissi, in her more personally-informed writings, Dreams of Tresspass and Scheherezade Goes West. These two works, which weave their tapestry through a language particularly rich in personal memoir and reflection (and thus show how the fabric of each of our lives is linked up to culture, history and social institutions), render a convincing picture of the common threads, that, moving beyond conventional bias and stereotype, connect women’s struggles for equality, for full access to public space and voice, and for (individual and collective) self-representation (in politics and in art, in media and everyday life), historically and at present, in different parts of the world.


The disabling myths and traps of patriarchy have different faces and versions. We westerners tend to be unaware of the wide array of mechanisms and strategies that women in other parts of the world have developed to thwart and challenge their subordination, as we fall prey to “orientalist” mentalities that have encouraged us to think of Middle Eastern –and non-Western women in general – in monolithic terms, as oppressed victims who have been denied of the opportunities to reflect upon their lives and struggle for better ones. But as Mernissi points out, in Arab and Middle Eastern literary and folk traditions - and in history and society as well-, there is a legacy of intelligent, daring and competent women who not only assert themselves but are also admired for their unconventional attitudes. From a legendary tiger-hunting Persian princess to the clever Scheherezade who used her wit and story-telling skills to change her own fate, as well as that of other women who had been destined to doom , to the many women across the Arab world today who flock into universities, politics and scientific and technological occupations, Mernissi evokes another notion of the feminine: “A woman", she tells us, "must always be ready to jump on a horse and cross alien territories. Uncertainty is a woman´s destiny”. (And the courage to face this uncertainty, a not so uncommon response, I might add here)Yet Western philosophers, writers and painters (men, for the most part), mesmerized by what they had heard about the “harems of the Orient”, let their own imaginations run wild, fantasizing an enigmatic world populated by sensual eastern beauties who existed for and through their almost magical abilities to guarantee men their pleasures. These harem women became an object of male fascination – written about and painted by “masters” over the course of several centuries. As Mernissi’s witty narrative unfolds, she shares with us her unique insights – her own process of uncovering a foreign way of thinking – into Western representations of the harem, which have been cleansed of, or were perhaps always blind to, the intense subjective and relational dynamics in which women acted to assert their own desires, wrest control from men or construct particular forms of “counter-power”.

The worlds of east and west have both been, for many centuries, a “man’s world”. And modernity – as it makes its way over the globe, in different times and rhythms, and full of holes and contradictions of its own – does, in the best of hypotheses, create an important new terrain where women struggle for “subjecthood”. Mernissi evokes the work of other contemporary writers, such as Naomi Wolf and Pierre Bourdieu, who have been particularly brilliant in unmasking the forms of symbolic violence that are at work, in the West today, and run against the grain of modern feminist struggle. These are extremely powerful ways of devaluing women – and doing so through the reproduction of consent. Thus, “Unlike the Muslim man, who uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena, the Western man manipulates time and light… by putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility…”; the “violence embodied in the Western harem is less visible than in the Eastern harem because is not attacked directly, but masked as an aesthetic choice.”

[to be continued]

"Manifest Destiny"- primeira versão!

Trabalhei já na tradução do poema de Duhamel, e estou ansiosa para deixá-la à disposição d@s leitores/as que tenho por aqui. Sugestões aceitas, como sempre.
Aliás, pretendo continuar o trabalho... o livro ("Kinky") como um todo é realmente genial.

Obrigada,mais uma vez, à Sabrina Lopes, pelas correções/sugestões.

Destino Manifesto.

Nas Filipinas
as trabalhadoras das fábricas
de bonecas de moda
recebem um bônus em dinheiro
se se esterilizam. Nas esteiras,
rodam com excesso de velocidade
pedaços de corpos.
Nada a ver com o famoso episódio da tv
quando Lucy e Ethel experimentam
um dia de trabalho, botando chocolates dentro de caixas
numa linha de produção nos Estados Unidos. Elas
enchem suas bocas com uma boa parte
dos doces que vêm velozmente, dão risadas
de baba marrom quando são despedidas porque
realmente não tem importância –
Ricky e Fred têm bons empregos.
Para provar que são eles mesmos
os que devem trabalhar,
os garotos fazem uma bagunça na cozinha
da Lucy, uma panela de arroz explodindo
como um vulcão branco. As mulheres
nas Filipinas e noutros lugares ponderam
o big business, os benefícios de descontinuar
a própria linhagem. Nos seus sonhos
estas mulheres embalam úteros de Toys R Us
enquanto uma Barbie estéril, seu cabelo preso
sob um capacete de Lucite, finca a bandeira da Mattel
numa lua que pouco convence.


-Denise Duhamel, tradução: Miriam Adelman.

Next...

Amig@s:
Depois de vários dias de
ponderação, escolhi este poema de Denise Duhamel,
para a próxima tradução:

MANIFEST DESTINY

In the Philippines
women workers in fashion doll factories
are given cash incentives
for sterilization. Body parts roll
too fast on conveyor belts.
It’s not like the famous episode
in which Lucy and Ethel
try a day of work, boxing chocolates
on an assembly line in the U.S. They stuff
most of the quick-coming candy
into their mouths, laugh brown drool
when they are fired because it really doesn’t matter –
Ricky and Fred have good jobs.
To prove they’re the ones
who belong at work, the men on t.v.
make a mess in Lucy’s kitchen,
a pot of rice exploding
like a white volcano. The women
in the Philippines and elsewhere ponder
big business, the benefits
of discontinuing its own children. In dreams
these women package Toys “R” Us Uteruses
while a sterile Barbie, her hair tucked up
inside her Lucite helmet, plants
a flag for Mattel on the cheesiest moon.

Denise Duhamel (from her book Kinky)

Escolha nada fácil, pois o livro está cheio de poemas
muito bons e os mesmos, muito cheios de "desafios" para @ tradutor(a).
Mas vamos lá... logo aparecerá por aqui, a versão!

Tunisia, part II.

It is windy, very windy and the sand blows over the desert in a gauzy white veil. We are there, my son and I, part of group coming from Spain in which we are the exception – the other 20 odd folk are all young Spanish university students, from Barcelona and Madrid, Valladolid and Granada. We mount the camels that are waiting for us and begin our saunter into the dunes: a tame ride on the fringes of the Sahara, where the sands have not yet taken on the reddish-ochre glow of the “deep desert” postcards we have seen. In fact, this is but a common ride offered to tourists, two or three camels pulled by taciturn men who seem disgruntled with their task. They become even more so when I exchange my odd mount for a better one - the fiery red Arabian horse who is offered to me, too tempting not to accept after so many years of nurturing my own “Orientalist” fantasy of deserts and desert horses…


As the days go by, we get to know our fellow travelers better. The young Spanish students in our group seem to take in everything with a definite enthusiasm for difference (the “natural”, the “cultural”) on occasions with awe … yet without any apparent signs of discomfort. Of course, our contact with the local people has been basically limited to the perfunctory – bargaining at the marketplace, primarily, and then there are the linguistic barriers that leave us content just to take in the long descriptions and explanations that our guide, who is quite fluent in Spanish, provides us. There are few moments when the barrage of vendors subsides. They are there even when rocky surge of the Atlas mountains separating Tunisia from Algeria rises before us, or while eating succulent dates in an “oasis” that looks more like a park in a small city than that which our long-kindled fantasies have led us to expect…

From the window of the bus, rapid succession of images: arid landscapes, arid towns. Peasant women with scarves and headgarb, or working alongside other members of the family in orchards and fields not so unlike “a roça” back home, occasional shepherds with their diminished flocks picking their way through the incongruous juxtaposition of new constructions and old mosques, people hawking their wares on the highway, a young woman waiting at an empty train station in the middle of nowhere. Driving through one small city at twilight, I see a neon sign outside a long flat building that says something like ‘Faculte d’Études Sociales et Politiques’, seeming so strangely out of context (my bias, albeit.)

Grabbing at any chance I get to talk to anyone, with whatever linguistic resources I have at my disposal – the cab driver, a gracious woman pharmacist with whom I share a brief exchange when I go in to purchase a pair of tweezers, the handsome young man whose horse I ride over the sands that in this case, are but the “gateway” to a Sahara I will never really enter. As days go by, we get better at the tasks at hand: bargaining at the medina, photographing peasants, veiled and unveiled women from a bus window as the scenarios whizz by, framing everything in transient perspective. Our guide is perpetually taking advantage of the hours spent riding our tour bus to feed us tidbits of information on his country: its long history since the days of Carthage and Rome, its route into modernity, the current political regime and the historic, improved status of women within this Muslim country, how Berber shepherds who still live inside caves carved into the stony hills depend also on the few dinars we drop into their boxes after our brief glimpse at their abode. I am not sure how many of the young folk on board pay attention, but some, I am sure, are as interested as I am. For others, perhaps much less.

Like most of the places I have been through too quickly, I feel like I should come back. There are things around me I try to grasp in too little time. Too many days spent on the bus, with all those landscapes and dun-colored towns whirring by. A calm afternoon in Sidi Bou Said and the gleaming blue sea stretching out behind it, Lucas and I drinking mint tea and almonds with the young ladies from Barcelona, and gentle caress of the Mediterranean sea and feeling just so damn lucky to be in a place I had never dreamed of getting to. Time, travel and strong(er) currencies are a privilege I know are not to be taken lightly. To greedily drink from the fountain of what this world has to offer and to perhaps give something back: just some coins, just these words?