WILLIAM MATTHEWS [16.821]

WILLIAM MATTHEWS

Poeta y ensayista.

Fecha de nacimiento: 11 de noviembre de 1942, Cincinnati, Ohio, Estados Unidos

Fecha de la muerte: 12 de noviembre de 1997, Nueva York, Estados Unidos

Nacido y criado en Cincinnati, Ohio, Matthews asistió al Berkshire School y más tarde obtuvo un título de licenciatura de la Universidad de Yale, así como una maestría de la Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill.

Además de servir como escritor en residencia en el Boston Emerson College, Matthews ocupó diversos cargos académicos en instituciones como la Universidad de Cornell, la Universidad de Washington en Seattle, la Universidad de Colorado en Boulder y la Universidad de Iowa. Se desempeñó como presidente en escritura de programas asociados y de la Sociedad de Poesía de América. En el momento de su muerte era profesor de Inglés y director del programa de escritura creativa en el City College de Nueva York. Una serie de lectura ha sido nombrado por él en el City College de Nueva York. Sus hijos son Sebastián Matthews y Bill Matthews.

Bibliografía 

The Parataxic Mode: Concerning Defoe's Use of Irony in Moll Flanders (1966, MA Thesis, UNC)

Broken Syllables (pamphlet, 1969)

Ruining the New Road (1970)

The Cloud (1971)

Matthews' Compleat Palmistry (1971)

Sleek for the Long Flight: New Poems (1972)

Sticks and Stones (1975)

Rising and Falling (1979)

Flood (1982)

Good (1983)

A Happy Childhood (1984)

Foreseeable Futures (1987)

Sleek For the Long Flight (1988)

Blues if You Want (1989)

Curiosities (Poets on Poetry) (essays, 1989)

Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991 (1992)

The Mortal City: 100 Epigrams of Martial (translator/editor, 1995)

Time & Money: New Poems (1996)

After All: Last Poems (1998)

The Poetry Blues: Essays and Interviews (ed. Stanley Plumley)

The Satires of Horace (editor/translator, 2002)

Sebastian Matthews, Stanley Plumly, eds. (2004). Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-618-35007-0.

Traducciones Javier Acosta

(de «Poemas de una línea»)

Sueño

Frontera sin país.

Vida espiritual

Para estar caliente, construye un iglú.

Amanecer

Insomnio, viejo árbol, ¿cuándo me dejarás caer?

Eyaculación precoz

Lo siento, este poema ha terminado.

The Bear at the Dump

 Amidst the too much that we buy and throw

away and the far too much we wrap it in,

the bear found a few items of special

interest--a honeydew rind, a used tampon,

the bone from a leg of lamb. He’d rock back

lightly onto his rear paws and slash

open a plastic bag, and then his nose--

jammed almost with a surfeit of rank

and likely information, for he would pause--

and then his whole dowsing snout would

insinuate itself a little way

inside. By now he’d have hunched his weight 

forward slightly, and then he’d snatch it back,

trailed by some tidbit in his teeth. He’d look

around. What a good boy am he.

The guardian of the dump was used

to this and not amused. “He’ll drag that shit

every which damn way," he grumbled

who’d dozed and scraped a pit to keep that shit

where the town paid to contain it.

The others of us looked and looked. “City

folks like you don’t get to see this often,"

one year-round resident accused me.

Some winter I’ll bring him down to learn

to love a rat working a length of subway

track. “Nope," I replied. Just then the bear

decamped for the woods with a marl of grease

and slather in his mouth and on his snout,

picking up speed, not cute (nor had he been

cute before, slavering with greed, his weight

all sunk to his seated rump and his nose stuck

up to sift the rich and fetid air, shaped

like a huge, furry pear), but richly

fed on the slow-simmering dump, and gone

into the bug-thick woods and anecdote.

Schoolboys with Dog, Winter

It’s dark when they scuff off to school.

It’s good to trample the thin panes of casual

ice along the track where twice a week

a freight that used to stop here lugs grain

and radiator hoses past us to a larger town.

It’s good to cloud the paling mirror

of the dawn sky with your mouthwashed breath,

and to trash and stamp against the way

you’ve been overdressed and pudged

into your down jacket like a pastel

sausage, and to be cruel to the cringing

dog and then to thump it and hug it and croon

to it nicknames. At last the pale sun rolls

over the horizon. And look!

The frosted windows of the schoolhouse gleam.

from Foreseeable Futures, 1987

Onions

How easily happiness begins by   

dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter   

slithers and swirls across the floor   

of the sauté pan, especially if its   

errant path crosses a tiny slick

of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto   

or chutney (from the Sanskrit

chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions   

go limp and then nacreous

and then what cookbooks call clear,   

though if they were eyes you could see

clearly the cataracts in them.

It’s true it can make you weep

to peel them, to unfurl and to tease   

from the taut ball first the brittle,   

caramel-coloured and decrepit

papery outside layer, the least

recent the reticent onion

wrapped around its growing body,   

for there’s nothing to an onion

but skin, and it’s true you can go on   

weeping as you go on in, through   

the moist middle skins, the sweetest

and thickest, and you can go on   

in to the core, to the bud-like,   

acrid, fibrous skins densely   

clustered there, stalky and in-

complete, and these are the most   

pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare

and rage and murmury animal   

comfort that infant humans secrete.   

This is the best domestic perfume.   

You sit down to eat with a rumour

of onions still on your twice-washed   

hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual   

endurance. It’s there when you clean up   

and rinse the wine glasses and make   

a joke, and you leave the minutest   

whiff of it on the light switch,

later, when you climb the stairs.