Αφού δεν μπορείς να τρέξεις, άκου.

Παραλλάσσω την προτροπή του old boy Αφού δεν μπορείς να τρέξεις, κοίτα.
"Αν για παράδειγμα το σταμάτα - ξεκίνα και οι ώρες στο αυτοκίνητο σού κάνουν τα νεύρα τσατάλια, σπάσου μεν γιατί δεν γίνεται κι αλλιώς, αλλά δες το κι ως ευκαιρία να αξιοποιήσεις την αναγκαστική ακινησία" ... ακούγοντας.

Ο Hector Elizondo διαβάζει το τέλος από «Το Μαργαριτάρι» του Τζων Στάινμπεκ.
Ακούστε τον:



Kino and Juana walked through the city as though it were not there. Their eyes glanced neither right nor left nor up nor down, but stared only straight ahead. Their legs moved a little jerkily, like well-made wooden dolls, and they carried pillars of black fear about them. And as they walked through the stone and plaster city, brokers peered at them from barred windows and servants put one eye to a slitted gate and mothers turned the faces of their youngest children inward against their skirts. Kino and Juana strode side by side through the stone and plaster city and down among the brush houses, and the neighbors stood back and let them pass. Juan Tomas raised his hand in greeting and did not say the greeting and left his hand in the air for a moment uncertainly.
In Kino's ears the Song of the Family was as fierce as a cry. He was immune and terrible, and his song had become a battle cry. They trudged past the burned square where their house had been without even looking at it. They cleared the brush that edged the beach and picked their way down the shore toward the water. And they did not look toward Kino's broken canoe.
And when they came to the water's edge they stopped and stared out over the Gulf. And then Kino laid the rifle down, and he dug among his clothes, and then he held the great pearl in his hand. He looked into its surface and it was gray and ulcerous. Evil faces peered from it into his eyes, and he saw the light of burning. And in the surface of the pearl he saw the frantic eyes of the man in the pool. And in the surface of the pearl he saw Coyotito lying in the little cave with the top of his head shot away. And the pearl was ugly; it was gray, like a malignant growth. And Kino heard the music of the pearl, distorted and insane. Kino's hand shook a little, and he turned slowly to Juana and held the pearl out to her. She stood beside him, still holding her dead bundle over her shoulder. She looked at the pearl in his hand for a moment and then she looked into Kino's eyes and said softly, "No, you."
And Kino drew back his arm and flung the pearl with all his might. Kino and Juana watched it go, winking and glimmering under the setting sun. They saw the little splash in the distance, and they stood side by side watching the place for a long time.
And the pearl settled into the lovely green water and dropped toward the bottom. The waving branches of the algae called to it and beckoned to it. The lights on its surface were green and lovely. It settled down to the sand bottom among the fern-like plants. Above, the surface of the water was a green mirror. And the pearl lay on the floor of the sea. A crab scampering over the bottom raised a little cloud of sand, and when it settled the pearl was gone.
And the music of the pearl drifted to a whisper and disappeared.--

Πηγή: John Steinbeck, THE PEARL, read by Hector Helizondo, PENGUIN AUDIOBOOKS, (2 MC).

Διαβάστε το και στα ελληνικά, σε μετάφραση του Κώστα Νεστορίδη, εδώ.

Αιδοίων ταξινόμηση κατά Henry Miller

Σε συνέχεια των ηδέων αφιερωμάτων, αφ’ ενός του Μαύρου Γάτου, Το αιδοίο (ή «Φοβάμαι μη σού κάνω κακό») , και αφ’ ετέρου του Thas, Υάλω ίσος, υγρομέτωπος , παραθέτω και την άποψη του Henry Miller.

Ο Ian McShane διαβάζει ένα απόσπασμα από τον «Τροπικό του Αιγόκερω» του Χένρυ Μίλλερ.
(Σημειώνεται ότι το κείμενο είναι οδυνηρά συντετμημένο.)
Ακούστε τον:



Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus.
This is all a figurative way of speaking about what is unmentionable.
What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt.
What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
But this is not the way it looked to the men of Homer's time who were on the spot.
Nobody knows how the god Priapus looked when he was reduced to the ignominy of balancing a corkscrew on the end of his weeny. Standing that way in the shadow of the Parthenon he undoubtedly fell a-dreaming of far-off cunt; he must have lost consciousness of the corkscrew and the threshing and reaping machine; he must have grown very silent within himself and finally he must have lost even the desire to dream.
This is how things stood on the first day of sexual intercourse in the old Hellenistic world. Since then things have changed a great deal. It is no longer polite to sing through your weeny, nor is it permitted even to condors to shit purple eggs all over the place. All this is scatological, eschatological and ecumenical. It is forbidden. Verboten. And so the Land of Fuck becomes ever more receding; it becomes mythological. Therefore am I constrained to speak mythologically.
Christ is dead and mangled with quoits.
The vultures have eaten away every decomposing crumb of flesh.
There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk: there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of saps: there are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive: there are also masochistic cunts which close up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside: there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in ecstasy:
And there is the one cunt which is all, and this we shall call the super-cunt.
There is only the sustained feel of fuck, the fugitive in full flight, the nightmare smoking his quiet cigar.
Little Nemo walks around with a seven day hard-on and a wonderful pair of blue balls bequeathed by Lady Bountiful. It is Sunday morning around the corner from Evergreen Cemetery. It is Sunday morning and I am lying blissfully dead to the world…
My balls ache with the fucking that is going on, but it is all going on beneath my window, on the boulevard where Hymie keeps his copulating nest. I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me.
And now I'm on the same bed and the light that's in me refuses to be extinguished. The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery grounds. They are having sexual intercourse. God bless them, and I am in the Land of Fuck.
Vacuity is a discordant fulness, a crowded ghostly world in which the soul goes reconnoitering.

Πηγή: Henry Miller, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, read by Ian McShane, PRELUDE Audiobooks (2 MC), Abridged Version

Εχετε ασθενή μνήμη; Παίξτε το “Jewel Game”!

Ο Κιμ και το αγόρι παίζουν το «Παιχνίδι των πολύτιμων λίθων» υπό την εποπτεία του Λέργκαν Σάαμπ.

Απόσπασμα από το βιβλίο «Κιμ» του Ράντγιαρντ Κίπλινγκ.
Διαβάζει ο Madhav Sharma.
Ακούστε τον:

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“Not yet - not yet. In a little while he will go away again. But now he is at school - at a new madrissah - and thou shalt be his teacher. Play the Play of the Jewels against him. I will keep tally.”
The child dried his tears at once, and dashed to the back of the shop, whence he returned with a copper tray.
“Give me!” he said to Lurgan Sahib. “Let them come from thy hand, for he may say that I knew them before.”
“Gently - gently,” the man replied, and from a drawer under the table dealt a half-handful of clattering trifles into the tray.
“Now,” said the child, waving an old newspaper. “Look on them as long as thou wilt, stranger. Count and, if need be, handle. One look is enough for me.” He turned his back proudly.
“But what is the game?”.
“When thou hast counted and handled and art sure that thou canst remember them all, I cover them with this paper, and thou must tell over the tally to Lurgan Sahib. I will write mine.”
...
They were a most mad ten days, but Kim enjoyed himself too much to reflect on their craziness. In the morning they played the Jewel Game - sometimes with veritable stones, sometimes with piles of swords and daggers, sometimes with photographs of natives. Through the afternoons he and the Hindu boy would mount guard in the shop, sitting dumb behind a carpet-bale or a screen and watching Mr. Lurgan's many and very curious visitors.
At the end of the day, Kim and the Hindu boy - whose name varied at Lurgan's pleasure - were expected to give a detailed account of all that they had seen and heard - their view of each man's character, as shown in his face, talk, and manner, and their notions of his real errand.

Πηγή: Rudyard Kipling, KIM, read by Madhav Sharma, NAXOS Audiobooks (2 MC)

Ακούτε Θέατρο; Δευτέρων Ρόλων συνέχεια (06)

Bastards!






Ο Robert Lindsay, ως Edmund, στην τηλεοπτική παραγωγή του Βασιλιά Ληρ με τον Lawrence Olivier (1983).


Ακούστε τον Kenneth Branagh σε ραδιοφωνική παραγωγή του 1993, με την Rennaissance Theatre Company. Ληρ, ο John Gielgud.
Ακούγεται και ο Richard Briers ως Γκλώστερ.



King Lear, Act I, Sc. II

EDMUND
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word,--legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
Enter GLOUCESTER
GLOUCESTER
Kent banish'd thus! and France in choler parted!
And the king gone to-night! subscribed his power!
Confined to exhibition! All this done
Upon the gad! Edmund, how now! what news?
EDMUND
So please your lordship, none.

Aux baisers qu’on n’osa pas prendre

Les Passantes
Ποίημα του Antoine Pol (1888-1971)

Το ποίημα μελοποίησε και τραγούδησε ο Georges Brassens (1921-1981).
Ακούστε τον:



Je veux dédier ce poème
A toutes les femmes qu'on aime
Pendant quelques instants secrets
A celles qu'on connait à peine
Qu'un destin différent entraîne
Et qu'on ne retrouve jamais

A celle qu'on voit apparaître
Une seconde à sa fenêtre
Et qui, preste, s'évanouit
Mais dont la svelte silhouette
Est si gracieuse et fluette
Qu'on en demeure épanoui

A la compagne de voyage
Dont les yeux, charmant paysage
Font paraître court le chemin
Qu'on est seul, peut-être, à comprendre
Et qu'on laisse pourtant descendre
Sans avoir effleuré la main

A celles qui sont déjà prises
Et qui, vivant des heures grises
Près d'un être trop différent
Vous ont, inutile folie,
Laissé voir la mélancolie
D'un avenir désespérant

Chères images aperçues
Espérances d'un jour déçues
Vous serez dans l'oubli demain
Pour peu que le bonheur survienne
Il est rare qu'on se souvienne
Des épisodes du chemin

Mais si l'on a manqué sa vie
On songe avec un peu d'envie
A tous ces bonheurs entrevus
Aux baisers qu'on n'osa pas prendre
Aux cœurs qui doivent vous attendre
Aux yeux qu'on n'a jamais revus

Alors, aux soirs de lassitude
Tout en peuplant sa solitude
Des fantômes du souvenir
On pleure les lèvres absentes
De toutes ces belles passantes
Que l'on n'a pas su retenir

Kubla Khan

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Ακούστε τον Richard Pasco να διαβάζει το ποίημα:

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... και τον John Nettles:



In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Διαβάστε την μετάφραση του Γ. Ν. Πολίτη στο Αλωνάκι της Ποίησης.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Ακούστε τον Dylan Thomas να διαβάζει το ποίημα:

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... και τον Richard Burton (1925-1984):

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And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Through they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.