Agha Shahid Ali
(1949-2001). Nació en Delhi, India, obtuvo un doctorado en lengua inglesa por la Universidad Estatal de Pensilvania y una maestría en artes por la Universidad de Arizona. Fue poeta y traductor. Entre sus libros se incluyen The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist’s Map of America Poems, The Country Without a Post Office y Call Me Ismael Tonight.
BIBLIOGRAFÍA
Poesía
Bone-Sculpture, Writers Workshop (Calcutta, India), 1972.
In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems, Writers Workshop (Calcutta, India), 1979.
The Half-Inch Himalayas, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1987.
A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, Sun/Gemini Press (Tucson, AZ), 1987.
A Nostalgist’s Map of America, Norton (New York, NY), 1991.
The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems, Viking Penguin (New Delhi, India), 1992.
The Country Without a Post Office, Norton (New York, NY), 1997.
Rooms Are Never Finished, Norton (New York, NY), 2001.
Call me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals, Norton (New York, NY), 2003.
The Veiled Suite: Collected Poems, Norton (New York, NY), 2009.
Otros
T.S. Eliot as Editor, University of Michigan Research Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1986.
(Translator) The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Peregrine Smith (Salt Lake City, UT), 1992.
(Editor) Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, afterword by Sara Suleri Goodyear, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 2000.
BOOKS
Contemporary Poets, sixth edition, St. James Press, 1996.
El país sin oficina de correo
Me llevan por el Paraíso en barca por un río de Infierno:
fantasma exquisito, es de noche.
El remo es un corazón que rompe las olas de porcelana.
Soy todo lo que perdiste. No me perdonarás.
Mi recuerdo sigue interponiéndose en tu historia.
No hay nada que perdonar. No me perdonarás.
Escondí mi dolor, incluso de mí mismo: sólo a mí mismo lo revelé.
Hay que perdonarlo todo. No puedes perdonarme.
Si al menos hubieras podido ser mía de algún modo,
¿qué no habría sido posible en este mundo?
Cita preliminar de Salman Rushdie, Shalimar el payaso
Trad. Miguel Sáenz
Barcelona, Mondadori, 2005
Gacela
La única lengua de pérdidas que queda en el mundo es el árabe.
Estas palabras me las dijeron en una lengua no árabe.
Ancestros, me han dejado una parcela en el cementerio familiar.
¿Por qué debo mirar en sus ojos para hallar oraciones en árabe?
Majnun, con sus vestidos rotos, todavía llora por Laila[i].
Ay, tal es la locura del desierto, su loco árabe.
¿Quién escucha a Ismael? Aun ahora él grita:
Abraham, arroja tus cuchillos, recita un salmo en árabe.
Desde el exilio Mahmud Darwish le escribe al mundo:
Todos ustedes pasarán por entre las fugaces palabras del árabe.
El cielo está atónito, se ha tornado un techo de piedra.
Te digo que debe llorar. Así que arrodíllate, ora que llueva en árabe.
En una muestra de miniaturas, una caligrafía tan delicada:
¡Estampados de Cachemira atados al cabello de oro del árabe!
El Corán profetiza un fuego de hombres y piedras.
Bien, ahora todo se ha hecho realidad, como fue dicho en árabe.
Cuando Lorca murió, dejaron los balcones abiertos y vieron:
sus casidas trenzadas en el horizonte en nudos del árabe.
La memoria ya no está confusa, tiene una patria.
Dice Shammas[ii]: parcele cada confusión en un gracioso árabe.
Donde hubo casas en Deir Yassein, verás densos bosques.
Ese pueblo fue arrasado. No quedan trazas de árabe
Yo también, ay Amichai, vi los vestidos de hermosas mujeres
y todo lo demás, al igual que tú, en muerte, hebreo y árabe.
Me piden que les diga lo que Shahid significa.
Escuchen: quiere decir “El amado” en persa, “testigo” en árabe.
Otro País
Arundhathi Subramaniam, poeta, ensayista y compiladora
A Pastoral
on the wall the dense ivy of executions
—ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
by the gates of the Villa of Peace,
our hands blossoming into fists
till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we’ll enter
our last world, the first that vanished
in our absence from the broken city.
We’ll tear our shirts for tourniquets
and bind the open thorns, warm the ivy
into roses. Quick, by the pomegranate—
the bird will say—Humankind can bear
everything. No need to stop the ear
to stories rumored in branches: We’ll hear
our gardener’s voice, the way we did
as children, clear under trees he’d planted:
“It’s true, my death, at the mosque entrance,
in the massacre, when the Call to Prayer
opened the floodgates”—Quick, follow the silence—
“and dawn rushed into everyone’s eyes.”
Will we follow the horned lark, pry
open the back gate into the poplar groves,
go past the search post into the cemetery,
the dust still uneasy on hurried graves
with no names, like all new ones in the city?
“It’s true” (we’ll hear our gardener
again). “That bird is silent all winter.
Its voice returns in spring, a plaintive cry.
That’s when it saw the mountain falcon
rip open, in mid-air, the blue magpie,
then carry it, limp from the talons.”
Pluck the blood: My words will echo thus
at sunset, by the ivy, but to what purpose?
In the drawer of the cedar stand,
white in the verandah, we’ll find letters:
When the post offices died, the mailman
knew we’d return to answer them. Better
if he’d let them speed to death,
blacked out by Autumn’s Press Trust
not like this, taking away our breath,
holding it with love’s anonymous
scripts: “See how your world has cracked.
Why aren’t you here? Where are you? Come back.
Is history deaf there, across the oceans?”
Quick, the bird will say. And we’ll try
the keys, with the first one open the door
into the drawing room. Mirror after mirror,
textiled by dust, will blind us to our return
as we light oil lamps. The glass map of our country,
still on the wall, will tear us to lace—
We’ll go past our ancestors, up the staircase,
holding their wills against our hearts. Their wish
was we return—forever!—and inherit(Quick, the bird
will say) that to which we belong, not like this—
to get news of our death after the world’s.
(for Suvir Kaul)
"A Pastoral" from The County Without a Post Office.
Ghazal
Feel the patient’s heart
Pounding—oh please, this once—
—JAMES MERRILL
I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time.
A refugee, I’ll be paroled in real time.
Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire?
A former existence untold in real time ...
The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?
What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?
Each syllable sucked under waves of our earth—
The funeral love comes to hold in real time!
They left him alive so that he could be lonely—
The god of small things is not consoled in real time.
Please afterwards empty my pockets of keys—
It’s hell in the city of gold in real time.
God’s angels again are—for Satan!—forlorn.
Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time.
And who is the terrorist, who the victim?
We’ll know if the country is polled in real time.
“Behind a door marked DANGER” are being unwound
the prayers my friend had enscrolled in real time.
The throat of the rearview and sliding down it
the Street of Farewell’s now unrolled in real time.
I heard the incessant dissolving of silk—
I felt my heart growing so old in real time.
Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned.
What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time?
Now Friend, the Belovèd has stolen your words—
Read slowly: The plot will unfold in real time.
(for Daniel Hall)
NOTES: Yaar: Hindi word for friend.
Agha Shahid Ali, “Ghazal” from Rooms Are Never Finished.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario