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Thursday 30 April 2009

LA NIÑA DE LOS PEINES



Pastora Pavón


Garcia Lorca:
“voice of the shadows, voice of tin, voice of moss...”.

In 1996 her voice was declared a part of Andalusian cultural heritage by the Cultural Council of the Regional Government of Andalucía. Pastora Pavón is now considered the best and most important cantaora of all time. Her singing, which she described as “singing with a foundation”, is the mirror through which all other cantaoras look at themselves.
Pastora Pavón Cruz, known as La Niña de los Peines Seville, Spain-10 February ,1890-November- 26-1969
She is considered the most important woman flamenco singer of the 20th century She was a sister of singers Arturo Pavón and Tomás Pavón, also an important flamenco singer, and aunt to Arturo Pavón, the first flamenco pianist. Both brothers, Pastora and Tomás, together with singer Manuel Torre,, were the inspiring models for the next generation of singers like Antonio Mairena, Pepe de la Matrona or Fosforito , who led the movement towaBorn in the famous quarter of Alameda de Hércules, in Seville, she started singing for the public as at the age of 8, in the Seville Spring Fair . Later, when she was singing at Café de la Marina, a café cantante in Madrid, she acquired the nickname La Niña de los Peines (The Girl of the Combs, a nickname she never liked), as she usually sang a stanza in tangos style with the following lyrics:

Peinate tú con mis peines
Mis peines son de canela


Comb with my combs
My combs are made of cinammonrds












Tuesday 28 April 2009

SEAMUS HEANEY

Seamus Heaney born 13 April 1939 is an Irish poet, writer and lecture and who was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He currently lives in Dublin



small bird

chirp-chirruped:

yellow neb,

a note-spurt.



Blackbird over

Lagan water.

Clumps of yellow

whin-burst!

Wednesday 22 April 2009

LAJOS PARTI NAGY

















Lajos Parti Nagy

He was born (1953) in Szekszárd, Hungary. teacher of literature and history from Pécs University before going on to edit the Pécs-based journal of contemporary, Hungarian literature, Jelenkor (The Present). He began his literary career as a poet and has been writing prose and drama since the early 1990s. He written and adapted a number of works for the stage as well as his own original pieces, (adaptations of works by Caragiale, Hauptmann, Kroetz, McDonagh and Moliere). He lived in Berlin in 2001-2002 on a DAAD scholarship Lajos Parti Nagy , contributed to the reinvention of the Hungarian, literary language and his works always present something new and memorable. His recent works ,Hősöm tere (My Hero's Square - published in German in 2000 as Meines Heldenplatz), Grafitnesz (Graffitness - poems, 2003) and A fagyott kutya lába (The Frozen Dog's Leg - short stories, 2006). Kossuth Prize and the Hungarian Literary Prize.


Speaking in terms


Speaking in terms

of perspective,

infinity

finally turns

the parallel

of our lines

into a point,

but in terms of

railway sleepers,

endlessly linked

and kept apart

we are both

running on

our own.

Monday 20 April 2009

INDIAN CONTEMPORARY POETRY


















THE POET


by P. Lal


For all his wild hair like an aureole, Stammer at parties, slipping from a tram,
Putting off the mending of a sole,
And putting on a mock-heroic Damn!,
He notices the spider’s intestines
Claim harlot, smuggler and blackmarketeer,
And in the clicking grin his eye divines
A moody world of artifice and fear.

Above all, this: When a woman turns
Black clouds of hair, with a rhythmic hand
Weaving their silk in the possessive sun,
He sees her common eyes stretch to a land
O lost, lost; as when repentance yearns
For hope,and love, and finds that there is none.

Purusottama Lal born 1929, in Punjab - India. Poet, essayist, translator, professor and publisher. Founder and publisher of Writer's Workshop in Calcutta where he lives presently.
Under the name of P. Lal, he has written eight books of poetry, over a dozen volumes of literary criticism, a memoir, several books of stories for children, and dozens of translations from other languages, chiefly Sanskrit, into English. He has also edited a number of literary anthologies.

Thursday 16 April 2009




Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar, Chosôn dynasty (1392–1910)Unidentified artist (late 15th–16th century)KoreaThe title identifies the work as one of the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a poetic theme traditionally associated with the Northern Song painter Song Di


This painting takes as its inspiration a poem, inscribed in Chinese characters in the upper right corner after the four-character title:


On the frozen frontier is a hail of arrows,

Along the Golden River [Jinhe] there are no rice fields.

Brothers one and all, flying down in skeins,

After ten thousand li, they arrive at Xiao and Xiang.

The distant waters shine like reels of silk

The level sands are white as glinting frost

.At the ferry quay, no one is about,

Close to the setting sun, the geese descend ever more gracefully.


(Translation by Roderick Whitfield)–ca.

Tuesday 14 April 2009

HAGIWARA SAKUTARO


















At dayFor all the startling beauty and originality of his work, Hagiwara remains a poet of the dark; a native of that extraordinary world where Dylan Thomas' question ("Isn't life a terrible thing, thank God") really needs no answer. Shiveringly sensitive to loveliness in all its million modes, he finds it not only in its familiar haunts but even in such unexpected subjects as a rotten clam or the dead body of an alcoholic. A man intensely aware that the sun, that symbol of Japan, rises as much to cast shadows as to give light, his early self-portrait establishes the tone of all his later work:

Sad in the ailing earth,
Tongue-tender with despair,
Green moves through grief's grimace;
And, sick and lonely, there
In the gloom of the under world
,At the bottom of the world, a face.

The Most Primitive Feeling

In the depths of this jungle one can see
Fronds of the great
Gum-trees lounging leadenly:
Like ears of elephants
Their leaves luxuriate.
In this damp and dim-lit place,
Towing their shadows like a trawl,
All kinds of fern embrace
Wetly. All kinds of plants
Sprawl out upon each other. All
Kinds of reptiles, kinds of snake,
Frog, lizard, salamander, newt
Maul in the clammy gloom to make
Slithering absolute.
From the sad longing of mid-day
For what did Adam yearn,
To what dank dawn look back?
The feeling of primitiveness
Is like a cloud, an endless
Endlessly darling love.
It flows away
Past reasonings of return,
Endless and endlessly.
On the far-off other bank
Of the river of memory,
There is no glade nor grove
Nor landing place nor plank
To pin this feeling down.

Sunday 12 April 2009

EZRA POUND




Canto XLIX: For the Seven Lakes

For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:

Rain; empty river; a voyage,

Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight

Under the cabin roof was one lantern.

The reeds are heavy; bent;

and the bamboos speak as if weeping.


Autumn moon; hills rise about lakes

against sunset

Evening is like a curtain of cloud,

a blurr above ripples; and through it

sharp long spikes of the cinnamon,

a cold tune amid reeds.

Behind hill the monk's bell

borne on the wind.

Sail passed here in April; may return in October

Boat fades in silver; slowly;

Sun blaze alone on the river


.Where wine flag catches the sunset

Sparse chimneys smoke in the cross light


Comes then snow scur on the rive

And a world is covered with jade

Small boat floats like a lanthorn,

The flowing water closts as with cold. And at San Yin

they are a people of leisure.


Wild geese swoop to the sand-bar,

Clouds gather about the hole of the window

Broad water; geese line out with the autumn

Rooks clatter over the fishermen's lanthorns,


A light moves on the north sky line;

where the young boys prod stones for shrimp.

In seventeen hundred came Tsing to these hill lakes.

A light moves on the South sky line.


State by creating riches shd. thereby get into debt?

This is infamy; this is Geryon.

This canal goes still to TenShi

Though the old king built it for pleasure


K E I M E N R A N K E I

K I U M A N M A N K E I

JITSU GETSU K O K W A

T A N FUKU T A N K A I



Sun up; work

sundown; to restdig

well and drink of the water

dig field;eat of the grain

Imperial power is? and to us what is it?


The fourth; the dimension of stillness.

And the power over wild beasts.


Thursday 9 April 2009

TRANSLATION OF THE NIGTH
























Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.

Born in March 4, 1901, Tananarive, Madag.he died in June 22, 1937, place Tananarive) Malagasy writer. Largely self-educated, he earned his living as a proofreader for a publishing concern. He wrote seven volumes of poetry in French, of which Near-Dreams (1934) and Translation of the Night (1935) are considered the most important. The mythical and surrealistic world created in his poems is intensely personal and dominated by visions of death, catastrophe, and alienation. Harassed by French authorities and addicted to drugs, he committed suicide. He is regarded as the father of modern literature in his native land.


"And the drum is ready
when gladioli crown
the horns of the delivered calf
who bounds
and grazes the hills of grass.

There it will resound,
and its incantations will become dreams ...

from Translated from the Night:#3


9



The secret hives are aligned
near the lianas of heaven,
among the luminous nests.

Gather nectar there, bees of my thoughts,
little bees winged with sound
within the pregnant cloud of silence;
laden yourself with resin
perfumed with stars and wind:
we will seal all the gaps
communicating with the tumult of life.


Laden yourself also with stellar pollen
for the prairies of the earth;
and tomorrow, when there will be wreathed
the wild roses of my poems,
we will have celestial rose hips
and sidereal seeds.

Wednesday 1 April 2009

PLACES WHERE I NEVER BEEN

















Probably never see, so I let my imagination go where they are .....

Madagascar

Is legendary wildlife and flora,Isolated from the continents 160 million years ago, Madagascar followed a unique evolutionary path into enormous tortoises elephant birds, and lemurs. Lemurs were the highest primate formon the island until the Malagasy people, of Afro-Polynesian ancestry,arrived a mere 2000 years ago. Though divided into at least 18 tribes or clans, the Malagasy share a belief in the power of dead ancestors.This belief explains the importance of tombs and funerals. Although the form differs among the clans, it is after the first burial that the Malagasy honour their dead. The best-known ceremonyis the famadihana of the Merina people, a joyful occasion to communicate with a loved one whose remains are exhumed and wrapped in a new shroud. Some of the world’s most unusual birds are found only on Madagascar – gorgeous ground-rollers,the diverse vanga family, the couas.