Monday, May 17, 2010

A song, a poem, and a sunset

Three little quiet, Sunday gems from a dear University friend, Ana Maria Correa, who is a never-ending scholar, artist, poet, and translator of languages...

A song. Please listen.

A poem:

For the first time
you'll be aware of gravity
like a thorn in your heel, 
and your shoulder blades will ache for want of wings. 
Call yourself alive? I promise you 
you'll be deafened by the sound of dust falling on furniture.
~ "Temptation", Nina Cassian (translated by Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant)

And an interview with Jorge Luis Borges. To take a brief quote from the page:

“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory… The work of a poet never ends...he's always working, even when he dreams.” In the same clip, Kral, standing outside Borges’ apartment in 1998, recalls visiting the writer there many years before. “Borges, who had so intensely loved books and for whom literature was alive, advised us not to read any book we didn’t enjoy,” he says. “Reading it by force did no good to the book, the author or ourselves.”


I hope you had a lovely weekend; I miss you.
Essss


Ocean Beach, sunset

5 comments:

  1. Good advice by Borges. He's amazing. Thanks (to you and Ana Maria) for resurrecting that section of the interview so I could see it.

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  2. I agree, but I think TS Eliot said something along the lines of, What we like is not always what we ought to like... And I agree with that too.

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  3. Jessica, true dat. I'm still reading those short stories by Colum McCann and they're so much sadder than anything I feel comfortable reading but so beautifully written that I feel transformed. I'm making myself continue, and it's been incredible.

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  4. I forgot I need to look those up! There are quite a few books that were a bit beyond my "liking" when I started, that I'm so glad I finished...maybe remembering that will get me through Ulysses--which I've been in the middle of for about 3 years now.

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