From Diane di Prima, RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN

“Certain times, certain epochs, live on in the imagination as more than what they ‘actually’ were, and there is always a price to pay for them. They are, if you look close, times when the boundary between mythology and everyday life is blurred. The archetypes break out of prison, as it were, and by some collective consent we or many of us, simply choose a myth and live it, heedless of the restrictions of the so-called ‘real world’. Or we were somehow chosen by the myth we were born to live. Sometimes with deadly rapidity. This meeting of world and myth is where we all thought we were going. Where we thought we wanted to be; it was so beautiful. Vivid, bright and deadly, like some tropical flowers. Not human. Not cut to our measure. But we – we couldn’t see that. Thought we were gods. ‘The 60s’ are often referred to as such a time, though what is usually meant by the term is merely ‘The Summer of Love’ and its aftermath, 1967 and 1968. Tip of the iceberg, if you ask me. For me most of the 1960s, and on to about 1976, was a time bathed in the mythic. It was a time when the archetypes stalked the streets of Manhattan, numinous and often deadly. When angels, incubi and other dreams of what could be settled in your hair and refused to be brushed aside. When we saw the creatures that lived in the fog worlds of San Francisco as casually as you see your corner grocer. We had struggled so long and so furiously to find, reach into, the world of our feelings, our secret knowledges, and intuitions, and it was as if Something had caught us up, caught the hand as we slipped through some gap, and that Something was now pulling us in. Pulling us under. For as certainly as we knew that behind the facades our parents had lived there was the world of human feeling, behind that world was yet another that sought to claim us. What I have called the World of Archetypes. Inexorable bundles of soul purpose, often wearing human or humanoid form, sometimes walking among us. Without conscience and without regret. And so beautiful! As I can tell you now, behind the Archetypes are vast impersonal patterns or textures of energies we might call Orisha. Or Yidam. And behind that, perhaps the Void dances, not black, cold, or empty as we have believed, but dancing with light, sheet lightnings spread as a series of surfaces over nothing. And moving faster than the eye can register. Even the eye of the mind. Our downfall was – it was so beautiful. For us, who had replaced religion, family, society, ethics with Beauty, who saw ourselves as in the service of Beauty, no warnings were understood, no traps anticipated. To go down, in the service of That – that was the ultimate grace. But archetypes have their own drama: a vast uncharted cycle of Comedia dell’Arte, which they play out through us, without our informal consent. And with, ultimately, no concern for human purpose. And it is not without reason that we have been handed by the science of our time the image, the fact or metaphor, of tectonic plates. Earth continents floating on a core of molten magma. As we ourselves float, melting a little, changing shape. Bumping against each other, lifted by, dependent on, in total chemical exchange with, the molten stuff I have here called Archetypes. That seeks to break through the surface wherever the plates are thin. The plates were very thin in 1964.

Where are all the men?

Where are all the men?

He’s still driving his flatbed rig
across the highways of America
while Rosa wheels her cleaning ladies’ cart
room to room at the Best Western
in Minneapolis.
She still goes to church on Friday evenings
and on Saturday ice cold on the way to Safeway
with the food stamps stuffed in her back pocket,
  the girls at home huddled under the covers.

Clara, though , married her girl friend.
They went to Canada.
And Mary’s got a new job
in the old narrative order, she's
  keeping the foot soldiers quiet.
Manny, now, is glad to have gotten a girl`s job
he is so sweet to the clients and so beautiful in his beige leggings
And then there’s Felicia
speeding her black horse madly around the barrels
and dreaming of how she would ride the broncs
if only the West were still wild

Versão!

ANNA MARIE (fragmento do poema, My Name is Woman)

de ruth weiss, poeta beat...

descalça no inverno. na cidade. no inverno do meio oeste americano. tenho sete anos.os dedos do meu pé sentem frio. é tanto o frio que não conseguem me contar as histórias que me sustentam até o verão. o sangue nos meus dedos me conta todas as velhas histórias. as histórias que me dizem que sou cigana.

minha mãe me diz que não é verdade. de onde você sacou essa idéia que você é cigana. os ciganos roubam e inventam mentiras sobre o futuro. de onde você sacou essa idéia, que você é cigana.

é inverno. o frio nos dedos do pé sobe até as pontas dos dedos das mãos, e eu digo aos dedos do pé. não se preocupem. eu sou cigana. eu encontrarei sapatos para os aquecer. para que continuem me contando suas histórias.

num prédio onde mora muita gente eu olho para as galochas ao lado das portas. um par preto trás outro não são meus eu continuo andando pelos corredores, um par vermelho grita, prove-me. e fica bem, quase. mas eu prefiro minhas sandálias. aquelas que comprei numa loja, muitos anos mais tarde.

estou olhando pra meus dedos do pé, nas minhas sandálias onde eu sento do lado de uma árvore sequóia anciã para que não a derrubem com uma serra elétrica. e meus dedos me contam a história da sequóia. e do sobreviver.


versão: miriam adelman

Fragmento do poema MY NAME IS WOMAN

Da “beat poet” ruth weiss (n.1928 Berlin)
Estou preparando versão!

ANNA MARIE.

barefoot in winter. in the city. in the mid-west winter of the USA. i am seven years old. my toes are cold. too cold to tell the stories that keep me going in the summer. the blood in my toes tells me all the old stories. The stories that tell me i am a gypsy.

momma sez this is not true. how did you ever get such an idea. gypsies steal & make up lies about the future. how did you ever get such an idea, that you are a gypsy.

it is winter, my toes are cold all the way to my fingertips, and i tell my toes. don’t worry. i am a gypsy. i will find you shoes to make you warm, so you can keep telling me the stories.

in a building where many people live i look at galoshes outside the doors. one black pair after another they don’t belong to me i keep on walking down the halls, a red pair shouts, try me. they fit. almost. but i like my sandals better. the ones that i buy in a store. many many years later.

i am looking at my toes. in my sandals. where i sit by an ancient redwood tree. to keep the chainsaw from cutting it down. and my toes tell me the story of the redwood. and about surviving.

Lizbeth Padilla, poeta mexicana.

Posto aqui um poema da minha amiga de muitos anos, Lizbeth Padilla, poeta de renome no seu país. Este aqui saiu no seu livro, "El dolor de los iluminados" (México, Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, 2008):

LAS COSAS QUE MIRO

Las cosas que miro son cadenas que acaricio indolente
No sabria existir sin las piedras recogidas en los viajes
palos de lluvia que suenan durante el sueño
como tampoco sé mirar el mundo
sin que el silencio tense los cables
por donde aún se puede transitar

Todo grita la condición efímera del mundo
me aferro a velas apagadas
y sumerjo la voz en caracoles
como el instante se enrosca en su pequeñez

FRAGMENTO TRADUZIDO

Então, vamos lá...

Primeiro trecho (trecho que abre o capítulo 7 pp. 101-102) traduzido do livro de memórias da escritora mais reconhecida da geração Beat, Diane di Prima. Entre mais eu leio dela, e de suas amigas e colegas (as "personagens menores" como foram ironicamente denominadas por uma delas, Joyce Johnson) mais lamento não ter conhecido sua obra antes ... e mais agradecida fico por ter tido o incentivo de começar a conhecê-las agora:


“Quando eu falo, como por vezes faço, com outras pessoas sobre minha vida,quando perguntam, ou tentam descobrir o que significou para mim, naqueles tempos, decidir ser poeta, e daí, na seqüência, pôr isso em prática, agir nesse sentido, muitas vezes me dizem, ‘Ah é, sem dinheiro, mas ganhou fama; a fama precoce deve ter sido uma recompensa’. E eu os olho com estranheza, me perguntando como eles imaginam esses primeiros apartamentos, esses quartos vazios, essas caixas servindo de mesa e cadeira, e finalmente, um neném deitado em algum canto. Fama, eu pergunto tentativamente, tive fama?

O que eu sei é que escolher ser artista: escritor, bailarino, pintor, músico, ator, fotógrafo, escultor, você o diga, escolher ser qualquer um deles nesse mundo em que eu cresci, o mundo dos anos 40 e começo dos anos 50, era fazer a escolha mais completa que havia nesses tempos, viver uma vida de renunciante. Uma vida de sadhu, de santo itinerante, fora do marco das leis dessa cultura particular e peculiar.

Era um mundo em que a religião em si era suspeita, e por bons motivos. 'Religião' como a gente a conhecia, se limitava à modalidade judaico-cristã – ‘Protestante, católico ou judeu?’ nos perguntavam, ao entrar no hospital ou numa escola. E era um mundo que era impossível de aceitar com a consciência tranqüila. Não era aquilo que os liberais dos anos 40 ou 50 gostariam que a gente acreditasse, aquilo que eles tinham sonhado – um mundo onde o progresso era um dado e a sociedade humana em si um valor. Nós artistas renunciantes fora-da-lei – os que seriam renunciantes – não encontravam nela nenhum valor. Nesse impulso de ascender e progredir na América de 1950, onde não existia nada alem do mundo de cada dia, a maneira mais clara de afastar-se do materialismo era direcionar-se às artes.

Ser uma paria, um outsider, era essa a vocação. Nem fama, nem publicação. Manter as mãos limpas, não pertencer. Ao manter-se do lado de fora, a gente sentia que as guerras, as massacres, os erros não eram nossos.

(Me lembro de um jovem imigrante, anarquista, Francisco, um espanhol que como muitas outras pessoas nesses anos após a Segunda Guerra Mundial foi encarcerado, por estar na América sem papéis. Depois o deportaram para a Espanha de Franco, onde em pouco tempo foi assassinado. Mas quando estava na prisão em ou perto de Nova Iorque, as autoridades descobriram que ele era padeiro. Tentaram pôr ele para trabalhar na cozinha. Francisco se recusou, fazendo greve de um homem só. ‘Não farei nada’ ele disse, no seu inglês com forte sotaque, ‘que apóie esta casa’. Era o que todos sentíamos – tornou-se nosso grito de mobilização. E o continuou sendo, muito tempo após a desaparecimento de Francisco.)

FRAGMENTS FROM DIANE DE PRIMA'S MEMOIR, “RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN”

Logo traduzirei o trecho:

“When I talk, as I sometimes do, to others about my life, when they ask, or seek to discover what it meant to me to decide back then to be a poet and then as it were follow through, act on it, become ‘A Writer’, they often say, ‘Ah well, no money of course, but the fame, the early fame must have been a recompense’. And I look at them strangely, wondering what they see, how they imagine those early flats, bare rooms, crates for tables and chairs, and eventually a baby in some corner. Fame, I say tentatively, was there fame?

What I do know is that choosing to be an artist: writer, dancer, painter, musician, actor, photographer, sculptor, you name it, choosing to be any of those things in the world I grew up in, the world of the 40s and early 50s, was choosing as completely as possible for those times the life of the renunciant. Life of the wandering sadhu, itinerant saint, outside the confines of the laws of that particular and peculiar culture.

It was a world in which religion itself was suspect, and with good reason. ‘Religion’ as we knew it was limited to the Judeo-Christian mode- ‘Protestant, Catholic or Jew?’ we would be asked on entering a hospital or a school. And it was a world one could not embrace with good conscience. Not what the agnostic liberals of the 40s and 50s would have liked us to believe, what they had dreamed – a world where Progress was a given and human society somehow a good in itself. We outlaw artist renunciants – would-be-renunciants – saw no ‘good’ in it at all. In the striving, get ahead thrust of America 1950, where nothing existed beyond the worlds of the senses, the clearest way to turn from materialism was to turn to the arts.

To be an outcast, outsider was the calling. Not fame, or publication. Keeping one´s hands clean, not engaging. By staying on the outside we felt they weren’t our wars, our murders, our mistakes.

(I remember a young anarchist immigrant, Francisco from Spain, imprisoned as so many were in those years after World War II, for being in America with no papers. Later he was deported to Franco’s Spain, where he was quickly killed. While in prison in or near New York, the authorities, having found out that Francisco was a baker by trade, tried to set him to work in the kitchen. Francisco staged a one-man sit-down strike. ‘I will do nothing’ he said in his thickly-accented English, ‘to support this house’. It was what we all felt – it became a rallying cry. And remained so, long after Francisco was no more.)”