Anarcas, hippies, contestatários e contras

Respeito e atraem-me as figuras do contra, os rastas, os posters de protesto, o barulho, o estar-fora-da-sociedade e contra tudo, a voz de protesto e o inconformismo. De tudo o que li, tirando talvez a atração pela morte que invade cada linha da Plath, Philip Larkin é o mais contestatário de todas as palavras. Ele, de fato e gravata, olhar cinzento, transparente na rua cinzenta, quem passa e não se vê. Ninguém esteve mais fora (cá dentro) e ninguém mais assassinou o próximo burguês com maior frieza. Engraçado e irónico que Larkin seja considerado hoje o poeta favorito dos ingleses, ele que é tudo menos favorito, quem sabe talvez seja pelos palavrões.

Ele próprio sem história, Oxford, bibliotecário. Nascido em 1922, em 1982 foi feito Professor. Tinha passado já por várias bibliotecas mas acabou na da Universidade de Hull. Recusou ser o poeta laureado e nunca casou. Morreu de cancro em 1985, aos 63 anos.

This be the verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have kids yourself.

Home is so sad
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the confort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

XXII
One man walking a deserted platform;
Dawn coming, and rain
Driving across a darkening autumn;
One man restlessly waiting a train
Whie round the streets the wind runs wild,
Beating each shuttered house, that seems
Folded full of the dark silk of dreams,
A shell of sleep cradling a wife or child.

Who can this ambition trace,
To be each dawn perputually journeying?
To trick this hour when lovers re-embrace
With the unguessed-at heat riding
The winds as gulls do? What lips said
Starset and cockcrow call the dispossessed
On to the next desert, lest
Love sink a grave round the still-sleeping head.

Mr Bleaney
This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him. Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land?
Tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand'
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags -
'I'll take it. So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits - what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why

He kept on plugging at the four aways -
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister's house in Stoke.

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.

Estes poemas vieram de Uma Antologia publicada em 1989 pela Fora do Texto. Tradução, boa, por Maria Teresa Guerreiro. Hoje pode comprar-se Janelas Altas, na sempre óptima Cotovia.