Edward Lucie-Smith
Nació en Jamaica en 1933. Se mudó a Reino Unido en 1948 y estudió en Oxford. Más tarde se trasladó a Londres donde lideró el grupo literario The Group. Es un autor prolífico (poesía, novela, historia, arte, biografía) y es un afamado crítico de arte.
John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith es un británico escritor, poeta, crítico de arte, curador, locutor y autor de catálogos de exposiciones.
Obras
Poesía y Ficción:
The Fantasy Poets: Number Twenty Five (1954)
A Tropical Childhood and Other Poems (1961)
Confessions & Histories (1964)
Penguin Modern Poets 6 (1964) with Jack Clemo and George MacBeth
A Game of French and English (1965) poems
Jazz for the NUF (1965)
Mystery in the Universe: Notes on An Interview with Allen Ginsberg (1965)
The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse (1965), editor
A Choice of Browning's Verse (1967)
Five Great Odes by Paul Claudel (1967), translator
Borrowed Emblems (1967)
Jonah: Selected Poems of Jean-Paul de Dadelsen (1967), translator
Silence (1967), poetry
The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse (1967), editor
The Little Press Movement in England and America (1968)
More Beasts for Guillaume Apollinaire (1968)
Snow Poem (1968)
Towards Silence (1968)
Egyptian Ode (1969)
Holding Your Eight Hands (1969; science fiction verse anthology), editor
Six Kinds of Creature (1969)
Six More Beasts (1970)
British Poetry since 1945 (1970 anthology), editor
The Rhino (1971) with Ralph Steadman
A Garland from the Greek (1971)
French Poetry Today: a bilingual anthology (1971), editor, with Simon Watson Taylor
Primer of Experimental Poetry 1, 1870–1922. Volume I (1971) editor
Two Poems of the Night (1972), with Ralph Steadman
The Well-Wishers (1974)
Joan of Arc (1976)
The Dark Pageant (1977)
One Man Show (1981), with Beryl Cook
Private View (1981), with Beryl Cook
Bertie and the Big Red Ball (1982), with Beryl Cook
Beasts with Bad Morals (1984)
Poems for Clocks (1986)
Changing Shape: New and Selected Poems (2002)
No Ficción:
Rubens (1961)
What Is a Painting? (1966)
Liverpool Scene: Recorded Live along the Mersey Beat (1967) editor
Sergei De Diaghileff (1929) (1968) with Anthony Howell
Thinking about Art: Critical Essays (1968)
Movements in Art since 1945 (1969)
Art in Britain 1969–70 (1970) with Patricia White
A Concise History of French Painting (1971)
Eroticism in Western Art (1972) revised as Sexuality in Western Art , 1991
Symbolist Art (1972)
Movements in Modern Art (1973) with Donald Carroll
The First London Catalogue (1974)
Late Modern: The Visual Arts Since 1945 (1975)
The Invented Eye: Masterpieces of Photography, 1839–1914 (1975)
The Waking Dream Fantasy and the Surreal in Graphic Art 1450–1900 (1975) with Aline Jacquot
The Burnt Child: An Autobiography (1975)
World of the Makers: Today's Master Craftsmen and Craftswomen (1975)
How the Rich Lived: The Painter as Witness 1870–1914 (1976) with Celestine Dars
Fantin-Latour (1977)
Art Today: From Abstract Expressionism to Superrealism (1977)
Joan of Arc (1977)
Toulouse-Lautrec (1977)
Work and Struggle: The Painter as Witness, 1870–1914 (1977), with Celestine Dars
Outcasts of the Sea: Pirates and Piracy (1978)
A Concise History of Furniture (1979)
A Cultural Calendar of the 20th Century (1979)
Super Realism (1979)
Art in the Seventies (1980)
The Story of Craft: The Craftsman's Role in Society . Phaidon, Oxford, 1981; ISBN 0714820377
The Art of Caricature (1981)
The Body Images of the Nude (1981)
The Sculpture of Helaine Blumenfeld (1982)
A History of Industrial Design (1983)
The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms (1984)
Nudes and Flowers: 40 Watercolours by David Hutter (1984)
Steve Hawley (1984)
Art of the 1930s: The Age of Anxiety (1985)
American Art Now (1985)
Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists (1985)
The Male Nude: A Modern View (1985) with François De Louville (this book features Hockney , Kitaj & Shaw ), et al.
Michael Leonard: Paintings (1985) with Lincoln Kirstein
American Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical (1986), with Paul J. Smith
Sculpture Since 1945 (1987)
The Self Portrait: A Modern View (1987), with Sean Kelly
The New British Painting (1988), with Carolyn Cohen and Judith Higgins
The Essential Osbert Lancaster: An Anthology in Brush and Pen (1988) editor
Impressionist Women (1989)
Art in the Eighties (1990)
Art Deco Painting (1990)
Fletcher Benton (1990) with Paul J. Karlstrom
Jean Rustin (1990)
Harry Holland: The Painter and Reality (1991)
Keith Vaughan 1912–1977: Drawings of the Young Male (1991)
Wendy Taylor (1992)
Andres Nagel (1992)
Alexander (1992)
Art and Civilization (1992)
The Faber Book of Art Anecdotes (1992), editor
Luis Caballero: Paintings & Drawings (1992)
20th Century Latin American Art (1993)
British Art Now – A Personal View (1993), with Zsuzsi Roboz and Max Wykes-Joyce
Fritz Scholder , A Survey of Paintings 1970–1993 (1993)
Race, Sex and Gender in Contemporary Art: The Rise of Minority Culture (1994)
Elisabeth Frink : A Portrait (1994)
John Kirby: The Company of Strangers (1994)
American Realism (1994)
Art Today (1995)
Panayiotis Kalorkoti , Reflections of Grizedale (Acrylics, Watercolours, Etchings) (1995)
Visual Arts in the 20th Century (1996)
Leonardo Nierman : 1987–1994 Painting/Sculpture/Tapestry (1996)
Albert Paley (1996)
Ars Erotica: An Arousing History of Erotic Art (1997)
Dunbar Mining The Surfaces (1997)
Glenys Barton (1997), with Adrian Flowers and Robin Gibson
Impressionist Women: Reality Observed (1997)
Adam: The Male Figure in Art (1998)
Chadwick (1998)
Zoo: Animals in Art (1998)
Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists (1999)
Sean Henry – the Centre of the Universe (1999), with Beatrice F. Buscaroli
Women and Art: Contested Territory (1999), with Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago: An American Vision (2000)
Flesh and Stone (2000)
Sergio Ceccotti , Editions Lachenal & Ritter, Paris, 2001.
Art Tomorrow (2002)
Roberto Marquez (2002)
David Remfry : Dancers (2003), with Dore Ashton and Carter Ratcliff
Color of Time: The Photographs of Sean Scully (2004), with Arthur C. Danto and Mia Fineman
Censoring the Body (2007) ( ISBN 1905422539 ) [ 4 ]
"Byzantium & Beyond: The paintings of Dave Pearson" (2012), with Margaret Mytton
“La Cámara es un ojo inventado”
Edward Lucie-Smith
LLUVIA NOCTURNA
La lluvia cae en cadena
como cuentas de rosario.
Erosiona noche, roca,
todas las cosas sucumben
bajo ella.
No puedo decir si está
arrastrando el tiempo, ni
si esto es el tiempo, tangible
como el agua.
Ha retornado la fiebre
como un río congelado.
Me estoy disolviendo, solo,
en la cama.
Mi carne se está volviendo
como esos húmedos sacos
abandonados ahí
afuera, en la oscuridad
del jardín, y que se hunden
muy lentamente en la tierra.
*Traducción de PEDRO SÁNCHEZ SANZ.
Del libro The Well-Wishers (1974).
http://traducciones.lagallaciencia.com/
NIGHT RAIN
The rain falls in strings, beads
to be counted. It wears
out the night and the rock;
all things succumb to it.
I cannot tell if time
is being washed away,
or if this is time, made
tangible as water.
My fever has returned,
like an icy river.
In bed alone, I am
dissolving. Flesh becomes
like the wet sacks out there
abandoned in the dark
of the garden, lapsing
slowly into the earth.
A LITTLE ODE
One door slams,
Another opens.
Things happen
In ways we cannot know.
How did we come to where we stand
On mountaintop,
In valley,
High or low?
Is there some turning clockwork
We obey?
Or do we have a say
In all this wandering?
Can we be sure,
Amidst our blundering,
That we’re self-guided?
Or are we the derided
Toys of fate?
That’s not the thing to ask.
Life gives us its own task.
What one asks is:
How did it taste?
Did it bring dark or light,
Joy or fright,
Gain or waste?
How went the day?
AMBITION
Ambition took her
To that high window –
She flew through it,
And broke.
You could say
Ambition broke her,
Shattered her plan
To be the first…
The first in eons
To lift the lid
Of Pandora’s box.
‘Free us! Free us!’
A buzzing swarm
Of women’s secrets.
Too heavy for one,
So she looked about
For a man of power.
Wrong choice.
He picked her up
And threw her away.
Caravaggio Dying
Potto Ercole, July 1610, aged 36
1
It goes. The fever leaves me. Even thirst
Is merciful and goes. My clumsy tongue
No longer bursts my lips. I’ve lost my anger.
It left, and left me empty. I greet smiling
My new-found death.
Oh true, I might have died
A little sooner. At Naples last October
A dagger missed. So now the fever strikes.
It doesn’t matter. Arrest, loss of goods,
Which met me here in Porto Ercole,
The Pope’s pardon that I came in hope of,
And the Grand Master’s enmity I ran from,
Are like the flea-stricken bed.
I cannot budge for them. No-one supposed,
Not even I, I’d live to be much older.
What’s left? What I have painted, scattered in
Rome’s palaces and churches, Naples, Malta –
Some of my latest, done in Sicily,
Already gnawed by salt air, candlesmoke.
Perhaps they’ll be forgotten. All will rot
Sooner or later, just as bodies rot.
My images visit me. As children come
To watch a father’s deathbed, they are with me.
2
My own head. Seen in mirrors. Cleanly axed.
By the frame’s edge. Then. in my pictures painted:
Young, wigged with snakes and screaming – staring
gorgon
Made for a prince to stare at. Leering image
To freeze the great and mighty in their places.
Later, my own head for Goliath’s painted.
Held in the tender hand of a young David,
Beard drenched with sweat, cheeks sunk, eyes flutter
open –
So I have looked, stumbling from a shared bed,
Humbled by the boy’s easy, lewd surrender.
My vices. Framed on walls. A naked urchin,
Mocking my namesake Michelangelo,
Sprawled on a cloth and insolently caressing
A ram, my lustful symbol. I got credit
For new invention, painting this St John –
At least my Baptist speaks of wilderness
(St John, St John, into what wilds you drove me,
Cursed me as Neptune did the wise Ulysses).
Another boy, one plumed with borrowed wings
A Roman, offering wares. Giustiniani
Who bought it from me said he liked it best
Of all his pictures. ‘Sir, a noble liking!’
Was what I told him. ‘Lie in my soiled bed.
You know love-making makes me sweat in rivers.
Press your nose down upon that crumpled sheet
The boy bestrides. I think you’ll smell sweat still.’
But still he bought it. Now this keyhole shows him
My conquest of Amore Vincitore
3
Still other images. Enough to show
It was not only boys and women called me
Out into taverns, brothels, Roman alleys.
A fortnight’s painting paid for a month’s brawling;
Sometimes amidst the brawling was a picture.
I wore a sword and used it. All my natures
Unleashed in turn, and then in turn depicted.
Three card-players. Two cheat, and one is cheated –
Ail three myself. The Saviour calling Matthew.
I’m Matthew hearing the voice, drawn out of doors,
And I’m the indifferent watchers. One dark theme
Often returned to. See it my Judith,
Her stern brows set, her sharp blade cleaving through
The sinewy neck. The dark blood, jetting out,
Stains Holofernes’ pillow. His face twisting ...
I saw that face I’d painted, as my knife
With an oiled smoothness gently, gently glided
Into the soft flesh of Ranuccio’s groin.
Ranuccio whom I killed. I think that we
Quarrelled for a dark purpose. As I killed him
I suddenly felt a long release and sweetness
I’d never had with either boy or woman.
I’d have felt the same with his knife sheathed in me.
4
St John. St john. It was Ranuccio
made you my patron, and you led me far
To bring me here. Such lonely wilderness.
A heavy punishment for a sly picture.
To Naples, first, escaping. then to Malta,
Summoned by the Grand Master of your Order.
I was a knight, too, when I did this portrait.
A Knight of Grace. I scapegrace. Do saints laugh?
I could have sworn I heard your naked laughter.
You owe me something for your altarpiece
There in Valetta. theme: your decollation.
Payment: a golden collar and two slave-boys.
A high, blank wall; an eager shining platter.
You, prison-worn, being butchered.
I did not mock you then. Forgive me for it.
And then I fell from grace. De Wigancourt
Put all his holy bravos on my back.
And so to Sicily. From house to house
Shadowed and hunted. Sheltered for my genius.
Great pictures for small, churches. Lazarus
Raised and not raised. I neither lived nor died.
Then this last voyage here. Arrest. Mistaken.
The thieving captain gone with all my baggage.
The blank sea-mirror held to my black anger.
A fever caught me. On this July day
They’ll bundle me underground in an hour or two,
Or I’ll be swollen like a corpse from Tiber.
How does it feel, this change? As I imagined.
I raise my arms as Paul does in my picture
Painted nine years past for the Cerasi chapel –
Lying on his back, cast doen by revelation,
Hands clenched, soul clenched. The vision
going,
And sight quite gone. The, brute world that has thrown
me
Waits, like my horse, till I resume my journey.
SILENCE
Silence: one would willingly
Consume it, eat it like bread.
There is never enough. Now,
When we are silent, metal
Still rings upon shuddering
Metal: a door slams, a child
Cries; other lives surround us.
But remember, there is no
Silence within; the belly
Sighs, grumbles, and what is that
Loud knocking, that summoning?
A drum beats, a drum beats. Hear
Your own noisy machine, which
Is moving towards silence.
LOVERS
Et ego confiteor! tua sum nova praeda, Cupido;
porrigimus victas at tura iura manus.
Ovid: Amores, I, ii
1.
Clothes on a chair, torn off
Pell-mell, in the hurry
To be joined, and get to
Our business. Lax, slack
Pieces of cloth, the shed
Husk that the world looked at.
The constructed being
So lightly got rid of,
I marvel at all the years
Spent making it. But
Later, dressing, I see
How we are both transformed,
That the material
Clingingly moulds us, and
The voice and face alter
As the armour fastens.
2.
Locked, rocking together
In the animal act,
Limbs tensed, mouthing the old
Banned ritual words... Soon
Memory will soften
The harshness of loving.
Our bodies will slip, roll
Numbly apart, hands linked
Perhaps, or thighs brushing
One over another.
These are the times we hold
Easily in mind: not
The immediate, hard
And dangerous minute,
When the self drowns, and the
Stifled cry wrenches out.
3.
Someone else’s sweat, still
Pungent on the pillow.
The sheets rumpled; each fold
Seeming to remember
The act that created it.
I ;lie upon a chart,
A record of movements,
Intertwinings, knottings
Of limbs. And our whispers
Have died in the hollow
Dark of the room. Absence...
Then the blackness fills up.
You people it; your selves,
Guessed at, are around me.
My hands reach out, surprised
That they do not find you.
4.
No sooner over, the
Partner gone, the flesh still
Wrenched and weary, than a
Voice begins and images
Burn on the screen of the
Closed eyelid. To be thus,
And thus. The bowels shake
With impossibly wild
Spasms, and the fibres groan.
Now, waking in the dawn,
I am calmer, and have
Time to listen to the
City which moves towards
Another part of its
Cycle. And there, far off,
The crowing of a cock.
5.
The ghost of your body
Clings implacably to
Mine. When you are absent,
The air tastes of you, and
Last night the sheets had your
Texture. Then, when I looked
In this morning’s mirror,
I found a bruise which had
Suddenly risen through
The milky flesh, a black
Star on the breast, surely
Not pinned there before (I
Count my wounds, and record
The number). How did it
Arrive? The ghost made it.
I turn, hearing you laugh.
6.
The body burning bright
Like a light bulb. Fever
Thinning its substance. I
Do not know if the flesh
Shines because of what we
Did together, but the
Heat of fever is now
Entirely yours, your own
Ambassador, as if
You filled my veins with a
Reminder; as if, too,
My blood became yours - I
Keep it on sufferance
Only. Make a cut and
Let it drain out. You
Rise from the red, embodied.
7.
The rain falls in strings, beads
To be counted. It wears
Out the night and the rock:
All things succumb to it.
I cannot tell if time
Is being washed away,
Or if this is time, made
Tangible as water.
My fever has returned,
Like an icy river.
In bed alone, I am
Dissolving. Flesh becomes
Like the wet sacks out there
Abandoned in the dark
Of the garden, lapsing
Slowly into the earth.
8.
Ah, how I want to make
Every inch of skin,
Each muscle and organ
Mine! My name, thought of, or
Casually spoken,
Must seize your joints. Any
Hint of my presence must
Bring dryness to the tongue,
A cracking of knuckles.
Let these be the signals
That travel between us.
Do not ask if they go
Already from you to
Me. The hand shakes, forming
The words of the poem