terça-feira, agosto 07, 2007

Elizabeth Bishop

estava a ver um daqueles típicos filmes americanos sobre desavenças familiares e uma das protagonistas leu o seguinte poema:

One Art


The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

1 comentário:

Anónimo disse...

De facto, The art of losing isn't hard to master...



Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979), was an American poet and writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950. She enjoyed critical acclaim in her lifetime, and her poetry continues to be widely read and studied. She is considered one of the finest 20th century poets to have written in English.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts to William Thomas Bishop and Gertrude Bulmer Bishop. Elizabeth’s father, who was an executive of Bishop Contractors, a family-owned New England construction firm, died of Bright's disease when she was eight months old. In the wake of that event, Bishop’s mother descended into mental illness and was institutionalized in 1916, when Elizabeth was five. Although Bishop’s mother would live until 1934 in an asylum, Elizabeth would never see her again.

Elizabeth Bishop has become an iconic lesbian poet. She had affairs with women, and her long-term relationship with Brazilian socialite and architect Lota de Macedo Soares can be considered a civil partnership. Soares was descended from a prominent and notable political family; the two lived as a couple for fifteen years. However, in its later years the relationship deteriorated, becoming volatile and tempestuous, marked by bouts of depression, tantrums and alcoholism. Bishop committed adultery with another woman and ultimately left Lota and returned to the United States. Soares, suffering from depression, followed Bishop to America, and committed suicide in 1967.

In 1971, she began a relationship with Alice Methfessel who became her partner and her literary executor after her death.

Bishop often spent many years writing a single poem, working toward an effect of offfhandedness and spontaneity. Committed to a "passion for accuracy," she re-created her worlds of Canada, America, Europe, and Brazil. Shunning self-pity, the poems thinly conceal her estrangements as a woman, a lesbian, an orphan, a geographically rootless traveler, a frequently hospitalized asthmatic, and a sufferer of depression and alcoholism. "I'm not interested in big-scale work as such," she once told Lowell. "Something needn't be large to be good."
(Modern American Poetry e Wikipedia)

Nota: Curiosamente, ou não, a sua biografia brasileira é muito mais "soft". Fala em amizades...