Di seguito tutti gli interventi pubblicati sul sito, in ordine cronologico.
 
 

Ho cercato e ho trovato qui parte dei versi della poesia ritrovata di Ted Hughes scritta alla morte per suicidio della moglie Sylvia Plath. Ma non è tutta qui, essendo di 150 versi. Se qualcuno la trovasse la recepisco volentieri. Le fredde note dell'inglese portano nelle biografie, alla morte della poetessa: "She committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning at age 30". Non so se mi piace o no. Ma l'idea che "commettere" sia il verbo a locuzione per "suicidarsi" mi sembra che molto aggravi di volontarietà il gesto. E da un punto di vista della responsabilità non mi dispiace.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1318398/Ted-Hughess-letter-Unearthed-poets-lament-Sylvia-Plaths-suicide.html

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Sto leggendo un libro molto bello della brava traduttrice Susanna Basso, Sul tradurre. Esperienze e divagazioni militanti (Bruno Mondadori). Grazie al prestito di un amico di ottime letture. All'improvviso mi imbatto in questa citazione e ne rimango folgorato.

Lìtost è una parola intraducibile in altre lingue. La sua prima sillaba, che si pronuncia lunga e accentata, suona come il lamento di una cane abbandonato. Per il significato di questa parola cerco invano un equivalente in altre lingue, sebbene io non riesca a immaginare come senza di esso si possa comprendere l'animo umano. Farò un esempio: lo studente faceva il bagno con una sua amica studentessa nel fiume. La ragazza era sportiva, mentre lui nuotava malissimo. Non sapeva respirare sott'acqua, nuotava adagio, con la testa spasmodicamente eretta sulla superficie. La ragazza era follemente innamorata di lui ed era così piena di tatto che nuotava con il suo stesso ritmo. Ma quando il bagno stava ormai per finire, volle dare per un attimo libero corso al suo istinto sportivo e si diresse con rapide bracciate verso la riva opposta. Lo studente si sforzò di nuotare, ma inghiottì acqua. Si sentiva umiliato, smascherato nella sua inferiorità fisica e provò lìtost.

Il brano è di Kundera e proviene da Il libro del riso e dell'oblio. Il motivo per cui la Basso lo cita è in quella parolina intraducibile. Invidia, un tipo di invidia. Un tipo intraducibile di invidia. E quello che mi è piaciuto è il tipo intraducibile di sentimenti che ci attraversano davanti alle cose e solo un po', solo certe volte alcuni scrittori (e alcuni traduttori) sanno restituirci. In questa scena ho sentito la pelle d'oca delle cose belle ma incongrue. Cose che sai e che non sai dire a parole. Cose che sai. Brividi che hai. Hai provato. Una volta. Nella vita.

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Gabriella risponde all'appello inviandoci Last Letter nella sua versione completa. Grazie

“Last Letter” by Ted Hughes

What happened that night? Your final night.
Double, treble exposure
Over everything. Late afternoon, Friday,
My last sight of you alive.
Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray,
With that strange smile. Had I bungled your plan?
Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed?
Had I rushed it back to you too promptly?
One hour later—-you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you.
I would have turned from your locked red door
That nobody would open
Still holding your letter,
A thunderbolt that could not earth itself.
That would have been electric shock treatment
For me.
Repeated over and over, all weekend,
As often as I read it, or thought of it.
That would have remade my brains, and my life.
The treatment that you planned needed some time.
I cannot imagine
How I would have got through that weekend.
I cannot imagine. Had you plotted it all?

Your note reached me too soon—-that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office
And added to your load. I moved fast,
Through the snow-blue, February, London twilight.
Wept with relief when you opened the door.
A huddle of riddles in solution. Precocious tears
That failed to interpret to me, failed to divulge
Their real import. But what did you say
Over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you, and leave you
To blow its ashes off your plan—-off the ashtray
Against which you would lean for me to read
The Doctor’s phone-number.
                                                 My escape
Had become such a hunted thing
Sleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted,
Only wanting to be recaptured, only
Wanting to drop, out of its vacuum.
Two days of dangling nothing. Two days gratis.
Two days in no calendar, but stolen
From no world,
Beyond actuality, feeling, or name.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their bloody tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

                                       That night
My dellarobbia Susan. I moved
With the circumspection
Of a flame in a fuse. My whole fury
Was an abandoned effort to blow up
The old globe where shadows bent over
My telltale track of ashes. I raced
From and from, face backwards, a film reversed,
Towards what? We went to

Rugby St

Where you and I began.
Why did we go there? Of all places
Why did we go there? Perversity
In the artistry of our fate
Adjusted its refinements for you, for me
And for Susan. Solitaire
Played by the Minotaur of that maze
Even included Helen, in the ground-floor flat.
You had noted her—-a girl for a story.
You never met her. Few ever met her,
Except across the ears and raving mask
Of her Alsatian. You had not even glimpsed her.
You had only recoiled
When her demented animal crashed its weight
Against her door, as we slipped through the hallway;
And heard it choking on infinite German hatred.

That Sunday night she eased her door open
Its few permitted inches.
Susan greeted the black eyes, the unhappy
Overweight, lovely face, that peeped out
Across the little chain. The door closed.
We heard her consoling her jailor
Inside her cell, its kennel, where, days later,
She gassed her ferocious kupo, and herself.

Susan and I spent that night
In our wedding bed. I had not seen it
Since we lay there on our wedding day.
I did not take her back to my own bed.
It had occurred to me, your weekend over,
You might appear—-a surprise visitation.
Did you appear, to tap at my dark window?
So I stayed with Susan, hiding from you,
In our own wedding bed—-the same from which
Within three years she would be taken to die
In that same hospital where, within twelve hours,
I would find you dead.
                                                  Monday morning
I drove her to work, in the City,
Then parked my van North of

Euston Road

And returned to where my telephone waited.

What happened that night, inside your hours,
Is as unknown as if it never happened.
What accumulation of your whole life,
Like effort unconscious, like birth
Pushing through the membrane of each slow second
Into the next, happened
Only as if it could not happen,
As if it was not happening. How often
Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver—-
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

At what position of the hands on my watch-face
Did your last attempt,
Already deeply past
My being able to hear it, shake the pillow
Of that empty bed? A last time
Lightly touch at my books, and my papers?
By the time I got there my phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,
Already filled with the snowlit morning light.
I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.
And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://lovingsylvia.tumblr.com

 

 

 

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Fosse stato lunedì tu avresti avuto la faccia di chi non ha dormito. Una faccia felice, quella che avevi a tredici anni dopo una partita di pallone, una cena con la fettina panata e le patate fritte tagliate grosse. Un nodo alla gola fatto di stanchezza, la televisione accesa e dopo non ricordi più. Quello che non ricordi è la mano che ti alza e ti guida verso il letto. Una mano che non c'è più. Né di lunedì mattina né di domenica sera. Né mai.

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Trovo, ancora nel libro di Susanna Basso - Sul tradurre, una frase che mi intriga. E' da Hilary Mantel di cui ignoro tutto. La frase in inglese suona così: But this story can be told only once, and I need to get it right. La Basso la traduce così: Ma questa storia può essere raccontata una volta sola, e ho bisogno che sia la volta buona. Mi sembra che renda perfettamente l'idea che va cercata, o che io cerco, meglio, nella e della lettura nella e della scrittura. Only once - Get it right.