Will Stone
Nacido en 1966 en Reino Unido, divide su tiempo entre Inglaterra y Bélgica. Licenciado en Traducción Literaria por la Universidad de East Anglia (Norwich) ha traducido al inglés a los poetas Franco-belgas Émile Verhaeren y Georges Rodenbach.
En el año 1999 Menard Press publicó su primera colección de traducciones del francés, Les Chimères de Gérard de Nerval. En 2005 publicó Arco Al silenciada, sus poemas seleccionados de Georg Trakl. Otras traducciones de poetas como Baudelaire, Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, Rodenbach, Stramm y Schiele han aparecido en revistas y los dos últimos, junto con Trakl, publicados en el importante Music While Drowning – Tate anthology of German Expressionist Poetry (2003).
Su primer libro de poemas, Glaciation, se publicó en 2007 y al año siguiente fue galardonado con el prestigioso Premio Internacional de Poesía Glenn Dimplex. Publicó su segundo libro de poemas, Drawing in Ash, en 2011. Un tercer libro, The Sleepwalkers será publicado próximamente.
REGENERACIÓN
Primero nos mostraron unas fotos.
Ruinas de hogares del suburbio,
salones abiertos al cielo
con lo que parecía gente viviendo dentro,
como si no hubiera ocurrido nada.
Algunos junto a una chimenea
o alrededor de la televisión,
sus rostros de cera fingiendo
caricias de los dedos
de ese fuego de fantasía.
Otros sentados a una mesa
metiendo cucharadas
de polvo y ceniza en sus bocas.
Bajo el entramado de vigas del vestíbulo
dialogan seriamente un médico y un cura.
En la puerta de al lado,
reza un niño en pijama
junto a su lecho, embrión de fe
indefenso bajo un millón de estrellas.
Al fondo, ese nimbo omnipresente,
vigilado por ventanas tullidas,
amenaza el poco espacio que queda,
como un péndulo oscuro,
el puño del político encima del estrado.
(de su libro Glaciation)
*Traducción de PEDRO SÁNCHEZ SANZ.
http://traducciones.lagallaciencia.com/
REGENERATION
First we were shown pictures.
Ruins of suburban homes,
rooms open to the sky,
with what looked people inside
living on as if nothing had happened.
Some gathered round a fireplace
or television,
their waxen faces pretending
the fantasy fire's fingers
touched them.
Others sat at a a table spooning dust
and ash into their mouths.
In the rafter-strewn hallway
a priest and a doctor in earnest dialogue.
Next door a child in pyjamas
praying by his bed, an embryo of faith
exposed to a billion stars.
In the back ground always that nimbus shape
watched by cripple windows,
bullying the remaining space,
dark pendulum,
a politician's fist above the podium.
EL FINAL DE NIETZSCHE*
Sí, ese del sillón soy yo,
mi cara dócilmente encendida de locura.
Los perros corren con los huesos que desecho
y estas viejas tontas me los devuelven.
Se inclinan sobre mí, alborotando.
Pero yo aún soy Dionisos
y con una mano terriblemente delgada
que emerge de la manta
digo adiós al mundo que roí hasta los huesos.
¿Y qué son mis ojos ahora?
La sombra de humedad que rápidamente
se esfuma de la piedra.
¿Y qué es mi corazón?
Un guijarro en un charco negro
en el lado de la montaña
que nunca toca el sol.
¡Idiotas!
Y la estupidez que está por venir,
monos de cuerda golpeando la piel del tambor
y mi rostro que aparece de nuevo
bajo la escarcha
deteniendo el deshielo.
*Traducción de PEDRO SÁNCHEZ SANZ.
Sí, ese del sillón soy yo,
mi cara dócilmente encendida de locura.
Los perros corren con los huesos que desecho
y estas viejas tontas me los devuelven.
Se inclinan sobre mí, alborotando.
Pero yo aún soy Dionisos
y con una mano terriblemente delgada
que emerge de la manta
digo adiós al mundo que roí hasta los huesos.
¿Y qué son mis ojos ahora?
La sombra de humedad que rápidamente
se esfuma de la piedra.
¿Y qué es mi corazón?
Un guijarro en un charco negro
en el lado de la montaña
que nunca toca el sol.
¡Idiotas!
Y la estupidez que está por venir,
monos de cuerda golpeando la piel del tambor
y mi rostro que aparece de nuevo
bajo la escarcha
deteniendo el deshielo.
*Traducción de PEDRO SÁNCHEZ SANZ.
NIETZSCHE AT THE END
Yes, that’s me in the armchair,
my face obediently lit by madness.
Dogs run with any bone I give up
and these silly old women fetch them back.
They lean in on me, fussing.
But I am still Dionysus
and with a terrifyingly thin hand
emerging from the blanket
I wave the world I gnawed white away.
What are my eyes now?
The shadow of moisture fading
too quickly from stone.
What is my heart?
A pebble in a black pool
on the side of the mountain
that never sees the sun.
Idiots!
And the stupidity that must come,
clockwork monkeys beating the skin drum
and my face seen again beneath the ice
interrupting every thaw.
GLACIATION – After Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’
Once handed over by the deities to death,
we truly began to live, glacial.
Now, cut off in our ice holes
we listen to the creeping snout,
the slow cracking of human hearts,
lashed rafts almost submerged by pain,
that somehow are carried down
between steep walls of rock,
before whose primeval malevolence
the earlier explorer turned insane.
Birds cry out sadly as they wheel again
back and forth over the sucking abyss,
over the monstrous plaster limb of ice.
Here where firs are snapped like twigs
and huge boulders weigh their anchors
to set out on endlessly repeated summer nights,
or in winter when fresh shale and rock
peppers the dull blue ice, and wolves
drag tattered scraps of carrion about.
Against the waxing moon they unleash
their white snarls, then sated run into the forest,
the dark dust spaces, to sleep side by side
licking each others bloody faces.
And the huge cables quiver mournfully
on their towers, where in clusters
the little cars huddle together.
But they are lifeless, deserted
and all around tall firs sag with snow.
There is no way through.
Only the relentless flow of unseen rivers
in deep icy fissures, where the leathery bodies
of the ancients are strangely preserved.
Crows form a thicket on a lonely mountain road.
At the cars approach they rise with reluctance.
In the slipstream the fur of the carrion faintly stirs.
A hungry prey is hunted by hungrier wolves.
We do not see the kill, nor the ice move
and in summer’s thaw leave its passengers
polished skulls in clear rock pools.
Vainly the climber hacks into the ice wall
and the explorer sinks his nation’s flag.
Nothing remains of their inexplicable straining.
Only the ice moves, a snake slowed by feeding.
The ice moves and shackled, relentless,
slave winds groom her awful surface.
HARROWING
Do you see the old moon waiting,
a tired gull tethered to the harrow
above the dawn reluctant field.
Do you see the rabid activists,
book brandishers, men of power
burning crude effigies for the crowd
and how even this evil is absorbed
by the eye blink of a deer in a glade?
Do you see the unblemished children
prodding the ditch with sticks?
They are finding out what it feels
to sink down an escalator in the mall
into the cutlasses of neon,
the vacancy encrusted men and women,
finery of the pit where coinage entrails
spill themselves unashamed.
Do you see this and weep for another age
which is only a mocking fantasy,
a tail pinned on the donkey,
a desperate raking of coals, brief glow,
piano played by the tramp’s filthy nails,
or another rower whipped aboard
your heart’s slow slave ship.
Feel the prow dip and drink,
only momentum and more funerals,
the warmth of child and mother
slipping away into jaundiced snow.
GUIDED TOUR OF THE RUINS
Gather round, ladies and gentlemen,
and behold, for this was their city
their profound well, reflecting
a sad constellation of cheap tin stars.
Nourished on the hampers of decadence,
still they breathed in night’s mint air
and under the elaborate tortures
of their own design, finally confessed…
Let us begin downtown, when,
on gala night, the hysterical movie star
was suddenly impaled
on a lance of white-hot realisation.
How she struggled to swab her wound
as the onyx limousine pulled away.
Let us remember, ladies and gentlemen,
the day when all finally awake
and fight to take cuttings
from madmen’s brains.
Imagine, if you will, how worms feel
when finally the rotten apple gives.
Imagine the hardest winter,
imagine the longest scream
quite unable to fade, for that is how
this generation lived…