"(…) La vida primer és avorriment, després por."
Larkin, Philip. La vida amb un forat a dins. Poesia
escollida.
Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 2021.
The Life with a Hole in it. Traducció de Marcel Riera.
Col.lecció Poesia dels Quaderns Crema, 71
::: Què en diu l’editorial...
La vida amb un forat a dins aplega una àmplia selecció dels poemes que Philip Larkin va publicar en vida—pertanyents als reculls El vaixell del nord (1945), La menys enganyada (1955), Les noces de Pasqua (1964) i Finestrals (1974)—, així com altres composicions de joventut que van aparèixer en publicacions literàries o peces tardanes. Més de trenta anys després de la seva mort, aquest volum trasllada al català l’obra d’un dels poetes més populars de la tradició anglosaxona amb fidelitat, riquesa de recursos i ofici.
aquest miracle de vidre, cada habitació del qual
omple la llum com si fos música, i el teu rostre irradia
amb la suavitat d’un pètal (...).
II - El vaixell del nord
This miracle of glass, whose every hall
The light as music fills, and on your face
Shines petal-soft (...).
II- The North Ship
XXIV- El vaixell del nord.
Llocs, éssers estimats – La menys enganyada
El següent, si us plau – La menys enganyada.
Desitjos – La menys enganyada
Cap a l’església – La menys enganyada
Tres temps – La menys enganyada
Primavera – La menys enganyada
Sense res a dir – Les noces de Pasqua
Dies - Les noces de Pasqua
En Dockery i el seu fill- Les noces de Pasqua
(Pàg. 231)
A la una, a les dues i…. - Finestrals
Que aquest sigui el vers – Finestrals
(Pàg. 251)
Que llunyana - Finestrals
Calés – Finestrals
La vida amb un forat a dins – Finestrals.
(Pàg. 319)
(…) El primer dia
després d’una mort, la nova absència
és sempre igual; hauríem de tenir més cura
dels altres, hauríem de ser amables
quan encara hi som a temps.
La segadora de gespa - Tots els poemes
Només tens una vida, I val més que no la deixis anar… - Tots els poemes.
Cant – Tots els poemes
Mare, estiu, jo – Tots els poemes
Llarga i darrera – Tots els poemes
El primer cop que ens vam trobar de cara… - Tots els poemes.
La vista – Tots els poemes
(...) There is regret. Always,
there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.
XXIV – The North Ship
No, I have
never found
The place where I could say
“This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay,”
Nor met that special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name;
To find such seems to prove
You want no choice in where
To build, or whom to love;
You ask them to bear
You off irrevocably,
So that it’s not your fault
Should the town turn dreary,
The girl a dolt.
Yet, having missed them, you’re
Bound, none the less, to act
As if what you settled for
Mashed you, in fact;
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled-for to this day
Your person, your place.
Places, loved ones. – The Less Deceived
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,
Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste
Refusing to make haste!
Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, thought nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,
Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it’s
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last
We thing each one will heave to an unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No water breed or break.
Next, please – The Less Deceived.
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flag-staff-
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivions runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes away form death -
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs.
Wants – The Less Deceived.
(…) But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure (…).
Church going – The Less Deceived
This empty street, this sky to blandness scoured,
This air, a little indistinct with autumn
Like a reflection, constitute the present -
A time traditionally soured,
A time unrecommended by event.
But equally they make up something else:
This is the furthest future childhood saw
Between long houses, under travelling skies,
Heard in contending bells -
An air lambent with adult enterprise,
And on another day will be the past,
A valley cropped by fat neglected chances
That we insensately forbore to fleece.
On this we blame our last
Threadbare perspectives, seasonal decrease.
Triple Time – The Less Deceived
(…) Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth’s most multiple, excited
daughter; (…)
Spring – The Less Deceived
For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble–close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.
So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slowly dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,
Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.
Nothing to be said - The Whitsun Weddings
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Days - The Whitsun Weddings
(…) Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
Dockery and son - The Whitsun Weddings
(…) that will be England gone,
The
shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete any tyres.
Most things are never meant.
This won’t be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.
Going, going… - High Windows
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
The may no
t meant to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
This be the verse - - High Windows
(…) This is being young:
Assumption of the startled century (…)
How distant – High Windows
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
“Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.”
So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.
By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life
- In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can’t put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.
I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
Money – High Windows.
Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the worlds’ for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you’ll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.
The life with a hole in it – Hight Windows.
(…)The
first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
The Mower - The Complete Poems
“You’ve only one life and you’d better not lose it,
No good protesting that you didn’t choose it;
Whoever’s responsible, you’ll have to pay,
And you’re only alive for a Year and a Day.
“Your spring Is so lovely, you don’t realise:
Yo gaze at the world with great big eyes;
These are the days when you will, as a rule,
Feel like a genius and thing like a fool.
“Then comes the summer; you think you’re mature,
And possibly marry, you’re so very sure;
Or perhaps you scorn others, and travel among
The sweeping giraffes, in the lands of the sun.
“Autumn perhaps is the greatest of fun:
You lose your belied in the things that you’ve done;
The bank clerk reflects that his pay isn’t large:
The professor’s had up on a serious charge.
“Winter creeps out of his legendary lair,
But it isn’t so bad, ‘cos you’re only half there,
Just a failing machine that awaits termination,
A pest to yourself and your nearest relation.
“That is your Year; on the Day you deny
Your whole way of life; see The Truth; and then dies;
You cannot convey and there’s no one to hear
So you give up the struggle and just disappear.
“Yes, living is hard, but there were others before;
So sit on your hands and hold your jaw;
Make a fool of yourself, for nobody minds;
And soon enough for you they’ll pull down the blinds”
You’ve only one life and you’d better not lose it… - The complete poems
(..) Bought a paper printed on human skin
That told the living to keep smiling and the dead to grin,
Sat in the cinema and saw the News
Thought it was a horror film and looked down at my shoes.
Picked up a revolver and put it down again,
Travelled eighty miles in an express train,
Saw a poster staring with a picture of a bomb
Saw It was the station I’d started from.
Dreamed I was walking through a field of corn
And it was all men and women, chained where they were
born,
The blades of the reaper turned in the sun
And nothing I could do would help anyone (…).
Chant – the Complete poems
(…) Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can’t confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.
Mother, summer, I – the Complete poems
(…) Those long last childhood
Nothing provides for.
What can it do each day
But hunt that imminent door
Through which all that understood
Has hidden away?
Long last – the Complete poems
When first we faced, an touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.
The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.
Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself –no cost,
No past, no people else at all-
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?
When first we faced, and touching showed… - the Complete poems
(…) Where has it gone, the lifetime?
Search me. What’s left is drear.
Unchilded and unwifed, I’m
Able to view that clear:
So final. And so near.
The View – the Complete poems.
Obro aquest recull poètic amb un nul coneixement de l'autor i amb total ignorància del què m'hi trobaré. I resulta que descobreixo un autor, Philip Larkin que ofereix una poètica de la quotidianitat. Escriu sobre el que té més a mà: la grisor, el desencant,... en definitiva, escriu sobre la rutina de la vida.
Així els versos em semblen ganivets i les estrofes bufetades. I malgrat tot, poden suggerir bellesa en el lector atent i receptiu. Evidentment que aquesta bellesa no rau en el fons -el contingut- ans en la visió tan particular amb la que Larkin ens declama el seu peculiar carpe diem.
I descobreixo així que els versos d'aquest poeta anglès em transmeten molt més que no pas algunes altres poètiques més canòniques. Potser perquè la poesia de Larkin es fixa en la gent corrent, en les seves esperances però també en les seves misèries?.
El pas del temps i l'aprofitament de la vida constitueixen la columna vertebral temàtica dels seus poemes que enriqueix a partir d'una constel·lació d'arguments variats: les oportunitats perdures, la solitud, els paisatges (desencisadors) de la ciutat, la natura com a mesura impertèrrita del pas del temps, les convencions socials, la banalitat, la imminència de la mort... tot plegat al servei d'una dissecció de la vida.
Tot això ens ho relata amb una poètica directa, en certa manera fins i tot rude. Però sigui pels temes tractats, sigui pel punt de vista usat, tot plegat és força proper i realista. Potser aquest punt de vista és el que suggereix una bellesa innata en una poesia tant poc ortodoxa.
I quan dic poc ortodoxa és perquè Larkin no sembla mostrar gàire preocupació per l'aspecte formal (que no vol dir que no la tingui). Ofereix poemes completament afins a la norma poètica a la vegada que composicions completament allunyats fins i tot de qualsevol mena de formalitat poètica i que s'identifiquen més a proses poètiques que no pas a versos.
En definitiva, si no heu llegit res de Philip Larkin us el recomano. És una poesia molt particular, diferent. Abrupte, poc còmoda, però del tot afí al dia a dia que la majoria de nosaltres ens toca viure.
::: Altres n'han dit...
Trapezi (A Mondrià), Tempus legendi (A. Ruíz), El Periódico Mediterraneo (E. Gras).
::: Enllaços...
Philip Larkin, el seu perfil, l'estil i la temàtica, evolució, l'autor sobre la seva quotidianitat, la seva vida.
