Gregory O'Donoghue
Gregory O'Donoghue (1951-2005) fue un poeta irlandés.
Nació en Cork en 1951, hijo del poeta y dramaturgo Robert O'Donoghue. Estudió literatura Inglesa en la Universidad College Cork y fue parte de lo que Thomas Dillon Redshaw ha calificado de "esa notable generación", que también incluye a Theo Dorgan, Maurice Riordan, Gerry Murphy, Thomas McCarthy, Greg Delanty y Seán Dunne. Después de completar una maestría, estudió un doctorado en la universidad de Ontario, Canadá, donde más tarde enseñó.
O'Donoghue publicó su primer libro Kicking (1975), cuando tenía 24 años y se convirtió en el poeta más joven en ser incluido en el libro de Faber verso irlandés. En 1980 cruzó el Atlántico para instalarse en Lincolnshire, en el Reino Unido, donde trabajó en los trenes de mercancías entre el sur de Derbyshire y Kings Cross, Nottingham y Skegness. Su libro Making Tracks (Dedalus 2001) fue influenciado en gran medida por esta experiencia.
O'Donoghue es a menudo visto como un poeta de la experiencia de la emigración irlandesa.
OBRA:
Poesía
Kicking, The Gallery Press, Dublin 1975
The Permanent Way, Three Spires Press, Cork 1996
Making Tracks, Dedalus, Dublin 2001
Ghost Dance, Dedalus, Dublin 2006
Traducciones
A Visit to the Clockmaker by Kristin Dimotrova (in collaboration with Dimitrova) Southword Editions, Cork 2005
The Belling by Lazlo Lator (in collaboration with divers hands) Southword Editions, Cork 2005
Beliefs
after Kristin Dimitrova
Old people say that whenever
someone lights a cigarette from a candle
a sailor dies.
Among sailors, I suppose,
there is a belief that when they shave
in a odd direction, an academic dies.
So they try not to shave.
The point is that we think
About each other.
Creencias
Los viejos dicen que cada vez
que alguien enciende un cigarrillo con una vela
un marinero muere.
Entre marineros, me supongo,
tienen la creencia que cuando ellos se afeitan
a contrapelo, un académico muere.
Así que ellos intentan no afeitarse.
La cuestión importante es que pensamos
los unos en los otros.
Traducción: Carlos Bruno
MOONS
sherpa
– the cat – has a
half-moon on her neck.
has two
moons in her full eyes: yellowed pages,
i think some secrets
only the middle ages
could have dreamed the demons lodged there.
when she
sneaks around my study
all the wallpictures turn their eyes,
the table shudders when her half-moon steals from
my water-colour of the courtesan
to the woman bathing.
LOUIS LE BROCQUY’S ‘FANTAIL PIGEONS’
The first pigeons I remember rustled
inside baskets at a seaside station
where someone told us the way-out
scenario of their release and homing.
Before I learned the ring-, the turtle-dove
are pigeons, I guessed by the bill,
the high eye in the mild skull,
the Holy Ghost was an albino pigeon.
Years on, as freak April snow
curled into another station,
a porter filled me in on pigeons:
when they circle above the east platform
a widow will board the next train;
if over the northside shed,
misery will alight from the dawn express;
so on – but only when the snow has fallen.
*
It all came back as I focused on the spray
of thrashing feathers, colour-flutters,
the rush of tumbling heads in ‘Fantail Pigeons’.
Where only one foot emerges (sfumato)
and the shapings of one whole torso – a dash
of dark and carmine at its breast.
And the heads – there are two or three, five:
a pigeon lit upon hanging on thermals,
or lofting, or wheeling; its radiance held.
NOCTURNE
Midnight. Only myself and a white-haired woman
have been set down at a dismantled rural station.
I watch her cross the tracks and fade
up a slope, vanish in a blur of conifers.
Lingering near the solitary building –
abandoned sandstone that tells me to move on,
that here is nowhere, that I’m travelling –
I listen, savouring the night stillness.
It is the aftertraces of flaring spirits
who’ve leapt after diminishing carriages,
it must be these making the quietness quicken.
And I’m numbed a moment at seeming to see
the snow-haired woman returning; it’s only
a chalky cat stealing in a crouch across
the moonlight, unless I am doubly mistaken.
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