A little habit I'd like to pick up from my friend Adriana, who blogs from Boulder. Just a poem a week, not much with hopes for a whole lot. This week, a poem from the Czech poet Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), from a little Penguin paperback I picked up while working at Meyer and Meyer Used Books in Moscow, ID, and that I'm now sending off on a belated whim to Joan, whose last name I think she shares, mostly at least, with Miroslav. -- Malcolm
Love
Two thousand cigarettes.
A hundred miles
from wall to wall.
An eternity and a half of vigils
blanker than snow.
Tons of words
old as the tracks
of a platypus in the sand.
A hundred books we didn't write.
A hundred pyramids we didn't build.
Sweepings.
Dust.
Bitter as the beginning of the world.
Believe me when I say
it was beautiful.
About the blog / Sobre o blog
A Stone's Throw is a journal of things seen, read, heard, thought upon and sometimes transfigured in and between Portuguese and English. / Um Tiro de Pedra e' um registro de coisas vistas, lidas, ouvidas, pensadas e, `as vezes, transfiguradas em e entre português e inglês.
Followers
Blog Archive
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2008
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October
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- Nas quintas, uma foto ou duas // Thursdays, a phot...
- A Poem a Saturday (well, almost)
- Jaula / Cage -- Astrid Cabral
- Open Letter to Senator Obama on U.S. policy in Lat...
- A poem a Saturday
- Importance/difference between having and being.
- " O espirito da Nova Inglaterra."
- The good news of the bad news
- A poem a Saturday
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October
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About Us
- Malcolm McNee
- I live in Western Massachusetts where, among other things, I teach Portuguese and Brazilian literary and cultural studies at Smith College.
2 comments:
Malcolm, Erô e Salmon,
bem vindos à blogosfera! Embora eu torcesse para que vocês fizessem um blog chamado Rhubarb Pie, gostei muito do A Stone's Throw, evocativo de um incisivo haikai (em que a pedra não cai sem querer: é jogada).
Por um mundo com mais poesia, quae sera sábado.
até mais!
Obrigado, Adriana! Batizar o blog nao foi facil -- pensamos no Rhubarb mas ai como traduzir -- tambem pensamos (eu principalmente) em algo como "o bicho preguica e outros bichos", mas achava melhor nao proclamar tao alto a minha simpatia pela preguica . . . o meu "spirit animal". A stone's throw veio completamente por acaso e gostei da associacao com a distancia -- distancia pouca -- que queremos vencer. E por coincidencia, me lembrou do poema de Oswald, plagiando Gandavao, descrevendo o bicho preguica, que mesmo andando o dia todo nao vence a distancia de "hum tiro de pedra" ....
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