Ian McDonald
Ian McDonald (nacido el 18 de abril de 1933) es un escritor del Caribe -que se describe como "de Antigua por ascendencia, de Trinidad y Tobago por nacimiento, de Guyana por adopción, y de las Indias Occidentales por convicción." Su ascendencia por parte de su padre es de Antigua y Kittitian, y Trinidad y Tobago en el lado de su madre. Su novela El árbol picaflor, publicado por primera vez en 1969, es considerado un clásico de la literatura del Caribe .
Ian McDonald nació el 18 de abril de 1933, en San Agustín, Trinidad, donde su madre, Thelma McDonald (de soltera Seheult), y sus abuelos nacieron y donde su padre, John Archie McDonald (nacido en St. Kitts y cuyos padres Nacieron en Antigua), fue director agrícola de Gordon Grant Limited. Su tío era Mariscal del Aire Sir Arthur McDonald de la Real Fuerza Aérea. Tiene cuatro hermanas - Heather Murray, Gillian Howie, Robin McDonald y Monica Purkis - y un hermano, Archie McDonald.
Recibió su educación secundaria en el Colegio Real de la Reina (1942-1951) en Puerto España, donde obtuvo distinciones en Historia e Inglés en el Certificado de la Escuela Superior. Asistió a la universidad de Clare, Universidad de Cambridge (1951-1955), donde obtuvo una licenciatura con honores de Licenciatura en Historia y más tarde recibió su MA. Fue elegido Presidente de la Universidad de Cambridge Sociedad de las Indias Occidentales.
Carrera en Guyana
En 1955 se trasladó a la entonces Guayana Británica con el Grupo Booker de Empresas. Ha vivido y trabajado en Guyana desde entonces.
Pasó una carrera larga en la industria azucarera. Su primer trabajo fue Secretario del Comité del Grupo B de Bookers. Luego se convirtió en Secretario de la Compañía de Bookers Sugar Estate, donde se convirtió en Director Administrativo. Cuando Booker fue nacionalizada en 1976 se quedó con la Guyana Sugar Corporation, donde ocupó el puesto de Director de Marketing y Administración de 1976 a 1999 cuando se retiró de GuySuCo. Su conocimiento de la comercialización de azúcar regional e internacional, en particular, fue construido a lo largo de 52 años y en su campo ha representado a Guyana y CARICOM en innumerables ocasiones en conferencias y foros internacionales. A nivel regional que ocupó el cargo de Presidente de Comercialización de la Asociación Azucarera del Caribe de 1990 a 1999. En noviembre de 1995 pronunció un discurso y presentó un documento sobre "Las industrias azucareras del Caribe Inglés" a la Internacional Organización de azúcar en Londres.
Fue nombrado para el cargo de director general de la Asociación Azucarera del Caribe, con efectos 1 de enero 2000 localizaron en Georgetown, Guyana. Se retiró el 31 de mayo de 2007, después de 52 años de servicio.
Fue miembro del Comité Asesor Nacional de Negociaciones Externas de Guyana.
Publicaciones:
Sugar in BG: Challenge and Change (1965) – New World Publication, Georgetown.
The Tramping Man – one-act play first staged in 1969. Published by UWI's School of Continuing Studies in a collection of eight Caribbean plays entitled... a time and a season .
Poetry Introduction 3 (1975) – London: Faber and Faber.
Selected Poems – Labour Advocate, Georgetown, 1984.
Editor: AJS at 70 – Autoprint, Georgetown, Guyana 1984.
Mercy Ward (1992) – collection of poems published by Peterloo Poets, UK, ISBN 978-0905291956 .
Essequibo (1992) – collection of poems published by Peterloo Poets, UK, and Story Line Press, US (winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature 1992), ISBN 9781871471342 .
Monograph, Bedrock of a Nation: Cultural Foundations of West Indian Integration – for West Indian Commission, 1992.
Contribution as Editorial Assistant: Time For Action: Report of the West Indian Commission , 1992.
Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (1992) – edited jointly with Stewart Brown, published by Heinemann.
Jaffo The Calypsonian (1994) – collection of poems; Peepal Tree Press, UK.
Between Silence and Silence – collection of poems; Peepal Tree Press, 2003 (winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature 2004).
The Humming-Bird Tree , novel – ;Heinemann, 1969; Macmillan, 2004; filmed by the BBC in 1992.
AJ Seymour, Collected Poems 1937–1989 (edited with Jacqueline de Weever), New York: Blue Parrot Press, 2000.
Foreword to Selected Poems of Martin Carter , first published Demerara Publishers, 1989; revised edition, Red Thread Women's Press, 1997.
They Came in Ships (compiled and edited with Lloyd Searwar, Laxshmi Kallicharan and Joel Benjamin), anthology of Guyanese East Indian Writings – Peepal Tree Press, 1998.
Poems by Martin Carter (edited jointly with Dr. Stewart Brown) – Macmillan, September 2006.
Contributed to Caribbean Despatches – Macmillan, 2006.
Contributed to Penguin Book of Short Stories and the Faber Book of West Indian Stories .
Editor of Kyk-Over-Al (jointly with AJS 1984–1989) and jointly with Vanda Radzik from 1996 to 2000.
Weekly columns written for Stabroek News – "Ian on Sunday", from 1986 to date.
Poems contributed to various magazines including BIM , Kyk-Over-Al , The Caribbean Writer , Caribbean Review of Books , Poui , The New Voices , The Trinidad and Tobago Review , The Jamaica Journal , Kaie and magazines in Britain and America including Planet , Outposts , Voices , and the Graham House Review .
Cricket at Bourda (2007) – compiled with Paul Chan-A-Sue; Sheik Hassan Printery, Georgetown.
Report of the Governance Committee on West Indies Cricket (2007) – joint author with Hon. PJ Patterson and Sir Alister McIntyre.
Selected Poems – Macmillan, 2008.
The Bowling Was Superfine – West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket – edited jointly with Stewart Brown, 2010; paperback 2012, ISBN 978-1845230548
Mercy Ward – Guyana Classics series, Caribbean Press, December 2010.
Selección y versión al español de Jorge Valdés Díaz-Vélez
http://circulodepoesia.com/2016/11/tres-poetas-de-trinidad-y-tobago/
Beaucaillou
El viento sopla en el fino cabello gris de mi madre;
ella habla de Beaucaillou, su caballo veloz.
Recuerda cuando ella era niña
el hermoso caballo en su carruaje reluciente:
el resoplido, el paso, el tintineo,
y su padre riendo, aplaudiendo,
gritando: “¡A casa, Beaucaillou, a casa!”
Y el viento soplando en su rojo, salvaje cabello.
Beaucaillou
The wind blows my mother´s thin gray hair;
she speaks of Beacaillou, her swift horse.
When she was a girl she recalls
the fine horse in his gleaming trap:
the snort and stamp and jingle
and her father laughing, clapping,
shouting, “Home, Beaucaillou, home!”
And the wind blowing in her red, wild hair.
Mi amor por la poesía, por Ian McDonald
Existe un gen poesía que se salta generaciones, pero perdura. Mi bisabuelo, Edward Baynes Dacres nació en 1790, entre otras cosas era un poeta. Entre las otras cosas era un soldado, un juez de paz en Jamaica y un sirviente civil colonial en las Antillas Menores cuyo nombramiento incluía la Presidencia de Montserrat. En su ardiente juventud conoció a una joven italiana que era novicia en un convento, cortejó y se casó con ella y con ella tuvo ocho hijos que sobrevivieron a la infancia. Se retiró en Antigua con su esposa y familia y muere allí en 1863. Mucho antes, él había traducido las epístolas de Ovidio en dos volúmenes, y en 1819 publicó un poema largo y ambicioso en dos cantos y setenta y cuatro estrofas ‘Childe Harold in the Shades’. An Infernal Romaunt.
Mi tío abuelo, Donald McDonald, empresario de Antigua y legislador, en 1917 publicó un folleto titulado Songs of an Islander. Y mi abuela, Hilda McDonald, primera mujer miembro de la Asamblea legislativa de Antigua, se carteaba con los famosos editores de las Indias Occidentales Frank Collymore (BIM) y Arthur Seymour (KYK_OVER_AL) y publicó un folleto de poemas titulado Sunflakes y Stardust, que contiene un poema especial que me encantó cuando yo era un muchacho y todavía lo hace:
EVENSONG
Sunset had called in her colours,
But not yet was it dark,
The pool lay a mirror of silver.
Without spot or mark.
When out from the green mirrored mangroves
Came a wonder of white,
A great heron wandering homewards,
Before it was night
The moon and the reeds and the heron,
And the first white star,
Shone clear in the pool’s bright mirror,
As I watched from afar
The spell of that moment still holds me,
The mirror, the star, and the bird,
The beauty beyond all imagining,
The silence where no whisper stirred
And my heart sings aloud to its Maker,
In thanks and delight,
Who gave me the moment of beauty,
Before it was night.
[Hilda McDonald]
He heredado el gen. Y cuando era aún muy pequeño, poemas en forma de canciones de cuna me leyeron a mí todas las noches. Las primeras líneas que conservo de memoria -casi ochenta años más tarde, me encuentro con las palmas de las manos juntas, como decimos las oraciones y rezo:
“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild
Look upon this little child
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to Thee”
En las estanterías de la biblioteca de la casa de mis padres encontré clásicos ingleses y yo leía a Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Tennyson y Browning en mi infancia en mi casa en Trinidad. La escuela Queens Royal College en Puerto España, nos bendijo con los maestros que amaban la palabra escrita y con gen poético que valoro mucho más allá que al oro. Aquiles Daunt que me enseñaba latín. "Amaba a Virgilio." Y, sobre todo, para mí a John Hodge que está delante de mí ahora vívidamente. Escribí sobre él en mi poema "La universidad'.
HODGE
Imagine! Such an ordinary Englishman,
John Hodge, thousand year oldish name:
Good earth tilled for Saxon centuries
Under open skies and slow rain.
Plaster patches on his ill-shaved throat,
He taught Literature for the Scholarship.
One day without any reason: Hopkins!
Hopkins wasn’t on the syllabus.
‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom
Of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-dawn falcon…’
The words flashed and sung and silvered
The grey sky of school-imprisoned boys
Waiting for picnic and the weekend girls
****
That Sunday on the beach at Blanchisseuse,
Watching the high waves leap and shine,
The gleaming, marvelous words came back
And back and back again and back
Suddenly took flame and flight.
The double-dawning of the Jesuit priest
Could not get out of my head at all
Words sang as birds sing striding in the air
And the high waves arched and shone.
My eyes dazzled in the white noon blaze
Off the sea of heaven and the heavenly sea
****
Monday the dusty room was new
The old Englishman with the spectacles,
The stolid agricultural name we knew,
Had changed the angle of how the world is seen.
Talk once was meant for only living,
To get through ordinary days,
Perform the basic chores of time:
Plain statements telling truth and lies –
Not conversations with the Gods
Explaining how one views Their work.
Ill-shaven, homley Englishman,
John Hodge, I praise you down the years.
The complex value of the word was born,
Roots began to branch and sing:
At Balanchisseue waves curled and shone
And language took ecstatic wing.
Por todos estos años grandes escritos de Derek Walcott me acompañan -de su poema escrito por Joseph Brodsky, "Bosque de Europa:
Forest of Europe:
what’s poetry; if it is worth its salt,
But a phrase man can pass from hand to mouth.
From hand to mouth, across the centries,
The bread that lasts when systems have decayed
En cuanto a escribir poemas, he estado haciéndolo durante más de sesenta años. Han ido apareciendo en las revistas literarias del Caribe y en otros lugares desde la década de 1950. En 1975, Faber and Faber publicó 11 poemas junto con poemas de otros poetas en
Poetry Introduction 3.
En 1983 un pequeño folleto de veinticinco poemas fue publicado en Guyana por el Labour Advocate. Desde entonces he publicado cinco poemarios: Mercy Ward (Peterloo Poets, 1988). Essequibo (Peterloo Poets, 1992), Jaffo the Calypsonian (Peepal Tree, 1994), between Silence and Silence (Peepal Tree, 2003) and The Comfort of All Things (Moray House Trust, 2012). Selected Poems was published by Macmillans in 2008..
Durante las últimas décadas la musa me había visitado intermitentemente. Con todo, he estado escribiendo, tratando de escribir, poemas desde que era un adolescente.
Selected Poems
Ian McDonald
Born in St. Augustine, Trinidad, in 1933, Ian McDonald was educated at Queens Royal College, Port-of-Spain, and Cambridge University. Since 1955 he has lived in Guyana and worked in the sugar industry, recently retiring as CEO of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean. A tennis champion, he captained Cambridge and subsequently Guyana and the West Indies in the Davis Cup and played at Wimbledon. In 1984 he became editor of Kyk-Over-Al. He has edited, jointly with Jacqueline de Weever, The Collected Poems of A. J. Seymour and, jointly with Stewart Brown, Poems by Martin Carter. He was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature in 1992 and 2004 and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of the West Indies in 1997. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1970. He has published short stories, four poetry collections, and his play The Tramping Man is often staged. His award-winning novel The Humming-Bird Tree was first published in 1969; in 1992 it was made into a BBC film.
Shortlisted for the 2009 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize
The Edge of Night
Watchman by the seawall koker
twenty years I met him on my walks
seawind and sunset I see recalling him.
He smoked his curly pipe, we talked
fireflies sparking in the low, protected fields.
I often thought what a life he’s lived
but what a life is any life that’s lived.
He was old when he began this job
guardian of the tidal gates of town.
Got away from a rum-soaked father’s home
wandered far to other lonely lands
and home again he never built a home
or had one woman or concerned himself with God
“Ah live from then to now an’ don’ remember how.”
Eyes far away as stars beyond our counting
an old man stranded on the edge of night.
Long ago he was a forest guide
went with Museum teams in Essequibo
and made a name for his strange collections.
One day he brought for their inspection
a black and shiny scorpion whose helmet-head was gold
They honoured him, he was named discoverer
the keepsake plaque engraved in Latin script.
I tell him it is beautifully done
he gestures, the sea in tumult rises at our feet.
The Bone-Trip
Bone-trip, he called it, his brutal name
for dying: “The bone-trip is always hard.”
I remember his face lit by fire,
cracked into a thousand creases
as he bent over, hardening nails:
he repaired boots for working men in Gentle Street.
One day his smiling partner wasn’t there.
“Well, bruds gone to make his bone-trip now.”
Wiped his sweaty face with rag,
went on nailing the rough, strong boots.
Cruel, I remember thinking, fifty years ago.
And it is now, my God, now, it is now.
By Ian McDonald
The Caribbean Review of Books, May 2009
Rumshop Girl
Walked the burnt red roads, looping the green hills
Like red ropes around nine green tons of cane.
Thirsty hours on the road under the honey sun.
Came up to a rumshop on the bright-stoned way.
Ordered hard yellow cheese, thick slices of earth
brown bread,
Four tall beers dewed with cool keeping.
Life was good. Kicked my boots off under the counter.
It was a joy when the big girl came
With dancing step, full of sweet eyes,
Black face full of dark shining, breast stuffing her blouse.
It was marvellous how she leaned them on the counter
Like fat young pullets, how her thighs bounced.
She clapped down the plate with a sideways look
And poured the cold beers for me with a lazy smile.
While I gulped the beer, cold as creeks,
She stood arms akimbo, making her dark sweet-eyes.
Good to be hungry and eat that cheese, that soft bread.
Good to be thirsty and drink the cold-dewed beer in a gulp.
Good to be a man and see the girl, arms akimbo, make her
eyes sweet for me.
The sun floods the red road outside;
Smell of warmed flowers, song of corn-birds, dream
in the air.
What joy to live! Far, far away is death.
Suddenly the girl laughs. I laugh also, we do not speak.
Decorated for a Kiss
I come to her house for love with a basket of red petals.
Man-friend tell me what a fool to go to the girl:
Come, man, come fish shark, strong white shark,
At midnight, come fish, golden snapper along the warm
black rocks.
But I decide my mind and come to her for love.
Her dress is patterned with blue dragonflies.
She has put a red bead in each ear.
Green lizards run in her eyes.
Her body has the scent of sun-dried khus-khus grass—
The sweet fibres she has put between the linen
since midday.
She has washed her mouth with milk,
She has rubbed her lips with bay leaves,
Made her limbs clean with water from a green calabash.
Now she offers me a few plums and palm-wine from a gourd
of scarlet leather.
.
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