one in two

"I shook his hand for the first time in the spring of 1967. I was a second-year student at Columbia then, a know-nothing boy with an appetite for books and a belief (or delusion) that one day I would become good enough to call myself a poet, and because I read poetry, I had already met his namesake in Dante's hell, a dead man shuffling through the final verses of the twenty-eighth canto of the Inferno. Bertran de Born, the twelfth-century Provencal poet, carrying his severed head by the hair as it sways back and forth like a lantern — surely one of the most grotesque images in that book-length catalogue of hallucinations and torments. Dante was a staunch defender of de Born's writing, but he condemned him to eternal damnation for having counseled Prince Henry to rebel against his father, King Henry II, and because de Born caused division between father and son and turned them into enemies, Dante's ingenious punishment was to divide de Born from himself. Hence the decapitated body wailing in the underworld, asking the Florentine traveler if any pain could be more terrible than his."

primeiro capítulo de Invisible, P. Auster.

ler mais aqui. saber mais ali.


"I saw in truth, and still I seent to see it, a trunk without a head going along even as the others of the dismal flock were going. And it was holding the cut-off head by its hair, dangling in hand like a lantern. And it gazed on us, and said, "O me!" Of itself it was making for itself a lamp; and they were two in one, and one in two." do Canto 28, Inferno.

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o novo de Paul Auster que me vai ocupar os intervalos. lançado em Outubro lá e cá. um dos autores mais atraentes dos lançamentos, conferências, entrevistas e radio shows. para trás ficaram Svevo, Os Cavalos de Lobo Antunes e mais algum que me escapa agora. acho fascinante o número de críticos que desprezam Paul Auster livro após livro, tendo em conta os truckloads de má ficção que por lá cresce e se multiplica. one works hard to make it look easy. i'm a tremendous believer in clarity. diz ele. allows the reader, in some sense, if you can do it well, ideally to forget that the media of expression is language. you do not even thinking about the words any more. story teller, o Lobo Antunes não deve gostar.