MERVYN PEAKE [4.184]

Mervyn Laurence Peake 

(9 de julio de 1911 - 17 de noviembre de 1968), escritor, artista, poeta e ilustrador británico.

Se le conoce principalmente por los libros de Titus (también llamados trilogía de Gormenghast), que conforman la terna: Titus Groan, Gormenghast y Titus solo. Las tres obras existentes de esta saga son sólo el comienzo de lo que Peake concebía como un ciclo mucho más extenso, que habría de contar las peripecias de su protagonista Titus Groan durante toda su vida, pero la muerte sorprendió al autor antes de que pudiera terminarlo. La obra, inacabada, se considera a menudo, erróneamente, como una trilogía. Es frecuente también la comparación de su obra con la de J. R. R. Tolkien, contemporáneo suyo, aunque lo cierto es que el tratamiento surreal de sus historias está más influido por la temprana admiración que profesó a Charles Dickens y Robert Louis Stevenson que a los estudios de Tolkien sobre mitología.

Peake también escribió poesía, versos disparatados o absurdos, historias cortas para adultos y niños, obras de teatro en vivo o en la radio, y "Mr. Pye", una novela en que Dios se burla de las pretensiones de evangelización.

Empezó a hacerse relativamente conocido por sus trabajos como pintor e ilustrador durante los años 30 y 40, cuando residía en Londres y se dedicaba a retratar a famosos de la época. Aunque Peake obtuvo un escaso reconocimiento su obra fue muy valorada por sus colegas, entre los que se encontraban amigos personales como Dylan Thomas y Graham Greene. Hoy día pueden verse sus obras en el National Portrait Gallery y en el Imperial War Museum.

Bibliografía

Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939)

Shapes and Sounds (1941)

Rhymes without Reason (1944)

Titus Groan / Titus Groan (1946)

The Craft of the Lead Pencil (1946)

Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions) (1948)

Drawings by Mervyn Peake (1949)

Gormenghast / Gormenghast (1950)

The Glassblowers (1950)

Mr Pye (1953)

Figures of Speech (1954)

Titus solo / Titus Alone (1959)

The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb (1962)

Poems and Drawings (1965)

A Reverie of Bone and other Poems (1967)

Selected Poems (1972)

A Book of Nonsense (1972)

The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1974)

Mervyn Peake: Writings and Drawings (1974)

Twelve Poems (1975)

Boy in Darkness (primera edición por separado, 1976)

Peake's Progress (1978)

Ten Poems (1993)

Eleven Poems (1995)

The Cave (1996)

Igual que un gran mercado…

Igual que un gran mercado atrae a los excéntricos

soy como una ciudad levantada en arcilla

donde los locos medran, ya que bajo mi piel,

en cualquier soportal o calleja secreta

que serpea en mis huesos de medianoche, ellos

acechan harapientos, esperando impacientes

la orden de tomar mi esternón, y asolar

la capital con vivas a la revolución.

En momentos de penumbra

Es en momentos de penumbra cuando distingo

desamparados monstruos descollando en mi mente.

Si la tierra estuviera alumbrada con lámparas

se me vería siempre junto a ellos.

Incluso a pleno sol les escucho clamar

a las puertas de mi cerebro, con radiantes

harapos envolviendo sus cuerpos magullados,

y en su frente un rubí como una herida.

Lo inmenso es lo que nunca aprenderemos

Lo inmenso es lo que nunca aprenderemos.

Pues no se nos enseña a nacer ni a morir

ni cómo arder

de amor

qué penoso nuestro regreso obligatorio

a esas pequeñas cosas de las que somos dueños.

TRADUCCIONES DE JORDI DOCE

Las cosas más vastas son aquellas que no podemos aprender.

No nos enseñan a morir, ni a nacer,

ni a arder

de amor.

Qué digno de lástima es nuestro regreso forzoso

a las pequeñas cosas que podemos dominar.

Trad. Leandro Fanzone

Mientras la batalla se acerca mi cuerpo 

se doblega

Mientras la batalla se acerca mi cuerpo se doblega

exultante desde el cénit mientras caigo

al techo de acero sobre la cima de sus torretas.

Desplegado sobre los tanques como juguetes me expando

en los humos calientes de la guerra, y mientras mueren los hombres

los acojo en mi sonrisa de amargura.

Recorriendo la masacre sinsentido, yazgo

espacioso mientras los incontables muertos

de los campos de batalla y las ciudades se alzan ante mí.

Muerte, sin rival en nuestro siglo;

muerte, para cuyo beso nocturno tu hijo se crió.

(c. 1945)

Rata muerta

Si fuera granjero te llamaría plaga

pues serías el villano de mi siembra

y roerías mis ganancias, pero no soy granjero

sino el que atraviesa sus campos

y cuando me encontré tu cuerpo tieso

yaciendo solo y escarchado, las bolas de tus ojos

vidriosos y tus patitas delanteras así suplicantes

cruzadas en tu pecho y rosadas como dedos humanos,

y cuando vi tu mortandad en la congelada

luz de una mañana de invierno, yo, deshumanamente,

desgranjeramente, y sobre todo, imprácticamente,

sentí que también las ratas tienen derecho a vivir

y supe que había belleza en tu cuerpo

espolvoreado con centelleantes perlas de una escarcha luminosa

y belleza en tus manitas cruzadas

sobre tu pecho antes de morir esta mañana.

(1944)

Poesía de guerra entre la I y la II Guerras Mundiales, Periódico de Poesía,  N° 99, Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM), mayo, 2017

Traducción de Miriam Castillo Castro

As Battle Closes In My Body Stoops

As Battle Closes In My Body Stoops

Exulting from the zenith as I fall

To the steel ceiling of their turret tops.

Spread-eagled over tanks like toys I sprawl

On the hot fumes of war, and as men die

I gather them into my smile of gall.

Lolling on senseless massacre I lie

Capacious while the innumerable dead

From battlefields and cities rise to me.

Death, the unrivalled of our century;

Death, for whose midnight kiss your child was bred.

Dead Rat

Were I a farmer I would call you vermin

Because you'd be the villain of my crops

And gnaw my wealth, but I am not a farmer,

But only one that walks the farmer's fields,

And so when I came on your stiffen'd body

Lying alone and flowered with frost, your eyeballs

Glazed and your little front paws so beseeching

Crossed on your breast and pink like human fingers,

And when I saw your deadness in the frozen

Light of the winter morning, I, unmanly,

Unfarmerly, and most impractically

Felt that rats even have a right to live

And knew that there was beauty in your body

Dusted with starry marvels of bright frost,

And beauty in the little hands you crossed

Upon your breast before you died this morning.

Mervyn Peake, el otro ilustrador de 'Alicia' y un escritor recuperado

Sus ilustraciones son un verdadero tesoro, pero Mervyn Peake es además un escritor y poeta. 

Foto: Mervyn Peake, el otro ilustrador de 'Alicia' y un escritor recuperado

TO LIVE IS MIRACLE ENOUGH

To live at all is miracle enough.

The doom of nations is another thing.

Here in my hammering blood-pulse is my proof.

Let every painter paint and poet sing

And all the sons of music ply their trade;

Machines are weaker than a beetle’s wing.

Swung out of sunlight into cosmic shade,

Come what come may the imagination’s heart

Is constellation high and can’t be weighed.

Nor greed nor fear can tear our faith apart

When every heart-beat hammers out the proof

That life itself is miracle enough.

THE CONSUMPTIVE, BELSEN 1945

Dying girl at Belsen , 1945, in charcoal.

If seeing her an hour before her last

Weak cough into all blackness I could yet

Be held by chalk-white walls, and by the great

Ash coloured bed,

And the pillows hardly creased 

By the tapping of her little cough-jerked head–

If such can be a painter’s ecstasy,

(Her limbs like pipes, her head a china skull)

Then where is mercy?

VAN GOGH

Dead, the Dutch Icarus who plundered France

And left her fields the richer for our eyes.

Where writhes the cypress under burning skies,

Or where proud cornfields broke at his advance,

Now burns a beauty fiercer than the dance

Of primal blood that stamps at throat and thighs.

Pirate of sunlight! and the laden prize

Of coloured earth and fruit in summer trance

Where is your fever now? and your desire?

Withered beneath a sunflower’s mockery,

A suicide you sleep with all forgotten.

And yet your voice has more than words for me

And shall cry on when I am dead and rotten

From quenchless canvases of twisted fire.

THE COLT

Arabia is in your eye

That stares defiance;

And in your brandished mane, and in

Your arrogant stance.

You arch your throat; all Barbary

Is there; your raised

Forefoot descends like lightning and

England is bruised.

OUT OF THE CHAOS OF MY DOUBT

Out of the chaos of my doubt

And the chaos of my art

I turn to you inevitably

As the needle to the pole

Turns . . . as the cold brain to the soul

Turns in its uncertainty;

So I turn and long for you;

So I long for you, and turn

To the love that through my chaos

Burns a truth,

And lights my path.

IF TREES GUSHED BLOOD

If trees gushed blood

When they were felled

By meddling man,

And crimson welled

From every gash

His axe can give,

Would he forbear,

And let them live?

THE VASTEST THINGS ARE THOSE WE MAY NOT LEARN

The vastest things are those we may not learn.

We are not taught to die, nor to be born,

Nor how to burn

With love.

How pitiful is our enforced return

To those small things we are the masters of.

CROCODILES

She stared at him as hard as she

Could stare, but not a single blush

Suffused his face like dawn at sea

Or roses in a bush -

For crocodiles are very slow

At taking hints because their hide's

So thick it never feels de trop,

And tender like a bride's.

AUNTY FLO

When Aunty Flo

Became a Crow

She had a bed put in a tree;

And there she lay

And read all day

Of ornithology.

OF PYGMIES, PALMS AND PIRATES

Of pygmies, palms and pirates,

Of islands and lagoons, 

Of blood-bespotted frigates, 

Of crags and octoroons, 

Of whales and broken bottles, 

Of quicksands cold and grey, 

Of ullages and dottles, 

I have no more to say.

Of barley, corn and furrows,

Of farms and turf that heaves 

Above such ghostly burrows 

As twitch on summer eves 

Of fallow-land and pasture, 

Of skies both pink and grey, 

I made my statement last year 

And have no more to say.

THE TROUBLE WITH GERANIUMS

The trouble with geraniums

is that they’re much too red!

The trouble with my toast is that

it’s far too full of bread.

The trouble with a diamond

is that it’s much too bright.

The same applies to fish and stars

and the electric light.

The troubles with the stars I see

lies in the way they fly.

The trouble with myself is all

self-centred in the eye.

The trouble with my looking-glass

is that it shows me, me;

there’s trouble in all sorts of things

where it should never be.

I HAVE MY PRICE

I have my price - it's rather high

(about the level of your eye)

but if you're nice to me I'll try

to lower it for you -

To lower it!

To lower it!

Upon the rope they knit

from yellow grass in Paraguay

where knitting is taboo.

Some knit them purl, some knit them plain

some knit their brows of pearl in vain.

Some are so plain, they try again

to tease the wool of love!

O felony in Paraguay

there's not a soul in Paraguay who's worth the dreamingof.

They say,

who's worth the dreaming of.

I CANNOT GIVE THE REASONS

I cannot give the reasons,

I only sing the tunes:

the sadness of the seasons

the madness of the moons.

I cannot be didactic

or lucid, but I can

be quite obscure and practic-

ally marzipan

In gorgery and gushness

and all that's squishified.

My voice has all the lushness

of what I can't abide

And yet it has a beauty

most proud and terrible

denied to those whose duty

is to be cerebral.

Among the antlered mountains

I make my viscous way

and watch the sepia mountains

throw up their lime-green spray.

All material © The Mervyn Peake Estate.

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