: : : : - When Are We Going To See Each Other, She Asks After A Year And A War, I Say When Is The War

“تقول : متى نلتقي أقول : بعد عام و حرب تقول : متى تنتهي الحرب أقول : حين نلتقي - When are we going to see each other, she asks After a year and a war, I say When is the war going to end, she asks When we see each other, I say.”

— Mahmoud Darwish

ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI. Dettaglio da Giuditta e la sua serva

“The first declension is the first taught in nearly every Latin text. Most first declension nouns are feminine- queen (regina), woman (femina), goddess (dea), girl (puella). Only a few masculine nouns- poet (poeta), farmer (agricola), and sailor (nauta)- are included in this declension. Why would the “masculine in sense” nouns such as agricola (farmer), nauta (sailor), poeta (poet) be included in a feminine declension? … Was it perhaps because the “masculine in sense” nouns related somehow to taming nature (natura also feminine)? Most things having to do with the earth (terra, provincia) are first-declension feminine nouns, and certainly agricola and nauta are intimate with the earth. And life itself (vita) is feminine. But what does that say about the Roman view of the poet (poeta)?”

— Ann Patty, Living With a Dead Language (via provst)

In evening’s dome each bird is a point of memory. It’s amazing sometimes how the years’ fervor returns, returns without a body, returns for no reason at all, how beauty, so brief in its violent love, saves us an echo as night falls.

And so, what can you do but stand there slack-armed, your heart overloaded and that taste of dust that was a rose or a road— Flight outflies the wing. Without humility you know this remnant was wrung from the dark by the work of silence, that the branch in your hand, the dark tear are your inheritance, the man with his story, the lamp shining its light.

— Julio Cortázar, “Resumen en otoño” (tr. Stephen Kessler)

En la bóveda de la tarde cada pájaro es un punto del recuerdo. Asombra a veces que el fervor del tiempo vuelva, sin cuerpo vuelva, ya sin motivo vuelva; que la belleza, tan breve en su violento amor nos guarde un eco en el descenso de la noche.

Y así, qué más que estarse con los brazos caídos, el corazón amontonado y ese sabor de polvo que fue rosa o camino— El vuelo excede el ala. Sin humildad, saber que esto que resta fue ganado a la sombra por obra de silencio; que la rama en la mano, que la lágrima oscura son heredad, el hombre con su historia, la lámpara que alumbra.

Mahmoud Darwish (محمود درويش‎, 1941 – 2008), “A Lover from Palestine” (Ashiq min filastin), 1966