PHILIP LARKIN: THE PAST IS PAST AND THE FUTURE NEUTER

DECEPTIONS

    

    

"Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain
consciousness until the next morning. I was horrified to
discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable,
and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt."
   

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor

    

    

   

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,

Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.

The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief

Worry of wheels along the street outside

Where bridal London bows the other way,

And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,

Forbids the scar to heal, and drives

Shame out of hiding.  All the unhurried day,

Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

     

Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare

Console you if I could.  What can be said,

Except that suffering is exact, but where

Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?

For you would hardly care

That you were less deceived, out on that bed,

Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair

To burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.

    

Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985 / West Midlands / England)
The Less Deceived, 1950

   

DECEPÇÕES

   

Mesmo de longe, provo o mal azedo
que ele te fez tragar, com hastes finas,
na estampa ocasional do Sol. E o medo
brusco, dos carros, fora, onde te esmaga
Londres, noivando em direção oposta.
Irrespondível luz cultiva a chaga
e nega a teu pudor uma coberta.
Ficou-te, ao lento dia, a alma exposta,
qual gaveta de facas, toda aberta.
Não sei te consolar, nem ousaria.
Cortiços te enterraram. Que dizer?
Só que a dor é exata. Valeria
julgar, onde foi lei desejo rude?
Pois pouco importarias de saber
que te frustraste menos, nessa cama,
que ele a subir pelos degraus, sem ar,
da mansarda infeliz da plenitude.
    

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived, 1950
Tradução de Paulo Mendes de Campos, in O Pasquim

   

   

   

      

IF, MY DARLING

If my darling were once to decide
Not to stop at my eyes,
But to jump, like Alice, with floating skirt into my head,

She would find no table and chairs,
No mahogany claw-footed sideboards,
No undisturbed embers;

The tantalus would not be filled, nor the fender-seat cosy,
Nor the shelves stuffed with small-printed books for the Sabbath,
Nor the butler bibulous, the housemaids lazy:

She would find herself looped with the creep of varying light,
Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles
Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate;

Delusions that shrink to the size of a woman's glove,
Then sicken inclusively outwards. She would also remark
The unwholesome floor, as it might be the skin of a grave,

From which ascends an adhesive sense of betrayal,
A Grecian statue kicked in the privates, money,
A swill-tub of finer feelings. But most of all

She'd be stopping her ears against the incessant recital
Intoned by reality, larded with technical terms,
Each one double-yolked with meaning and meaning's rebuttal:

For the skirl of that bulletin unpicks the world like a knot,
And to hear how the past is past and the future neuter
Might knock my darling off her unpriceable pivot.
    

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived, 1950

    

[Post original: http://comunidade.sol.pt/blogs/josecarreiro/archive/2010/07/26/larkin.aspx]