Tristezas...

Ouvi alguém falar... alguém falar em público... alguém falar perante uma vasta plateia... alguém com responsabilidades institucionais falar... alguém que me trouxe à mente o nosso velho amigo... um velho amigo que transcrevo numa memória pré, pré-acordo ortográfico... um amigo que dá pelo nome de... Bernardo Soares:
"Não tenho sentimento nenhum politico ou social. Tenho, porém, num sentido, um alto sentimento patriotico. Minha patria é a lingua portuguesa. Nada me pesaria que invadissem ou tomassem Portugal, desde que não me incommodassem pessoalmente, Mas odeio, com odio verdadeiro, com o unico odio que sinto, não quem escreve mal portuguez, não quem não sabe syntaxe, não quem escreve em orthographia simplificada, mas a pagina mal escripta, como pessoa própria, a syntaxe errada, como gente em que se bata, a orthographia sem ípsilon, como escarro directo que me enoja independentemente de quem o cuspisse.
Sim, porque a orthographia também é gente. A palavra é completa vista e ouvida."

Quando oiço os debates e as entrevistas,

os (falsos) argumentos e os slogans com que amiúde somos bombardeados pelo nosso paupérrimo discurso político...
Quando oiço as palavras (sábias) de Mário Soares que afirma serem os políticos como os vinhos, e que estamos neste momento a viver uma produção generalizada de... vinho a martelo...
Quando oiço tudo isto, não posso deixar de me lembrar dos versos de Leonard Cohen em "Democracy":

"I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet"

E cuidado, pois amanhã celebra-se o 5 de Outubro, o que significa que as nossas trompas de eustáquio serão bombardeadas com banalidades e clichés, com os quais pretenderão fazer-nos esquecer as ruínas em que persistimos.
Boa semana!

Uma nova tradução de textos bíblicos

em língua inglesa, da autoria de Rober Alter, é abordada no The New Yorker.
Refira-se que Robert Alter, eminente scholar de estudos bíblicos, é o autor do clássico The Art of Biblical Narrative, um livro precioso que adquiri nos Estados Unidos em 1985, pouco depois de ele ter sido publicado, e que muito útil me foi para as minhas aulas, nomeadamente de Introdução aos Estudos Literários e de Literatura Norte-Americana.
A importância deste livro é reconhecida, por exemplo, por José Tolentino Mendonça na sua tese de doutoramento, publicada pela Assírio & Alvim.
Deixo-vos o texto que nos recorda quão profundo foi o eco que a King James Version teve nos nossos horizontes culturais:
'THE SUN (ALSO) RISES: HOW ALTER’S NEW TRANSLATION FARES IN LITERATURE
By Nathaniel Stein

This month, Robert Alter publishes a new translation of three Biblical books in “The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary.” Alter, a Hebrew literature scholar at the University of California who has previously translated the Psalms and the five books of Moses, offers a rich alternative to the familiar translation that is in many ways more faithful to the ancient rhythms and meanings. James Wood, in a 2007 review of an earlier Alter translation, noted that “the Psalms (like the book of Job) were relentlessly Christianized by the King James translators,” and praised Alter for “stripping the English of these artificial cleansers” and “[taking] us back to the essence of the meaning.”

But the various inaccuracies and other inadequacies of the King James Version, though they justify a new translation, are beside the point when it comes to that version’s aesthetic power. The K.J.V. is so ingrained—its poetry has so completely seeped into the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world—that a new rendering, however valuable, is a vaguely disconcerting experience. In the four centuries since its completion, the K.J.V. has become our lives’ background poetry, its phrases and rhythms echoing through the canon, having been endlessly plundered by writers in search of a turn of phrase, or of a certain resonance unattainable elsewhere.

Which suggests a fun exercise for quickly determining just how different Alter’s new version is. In a world that possessed only this new translation, how would some familiar works be different? How would those famous titles, epigraphs, and other allusions come out?

For starters: “The Sun Also Rises,” taken from Ecclesiastes 1:5, would be “The Sun Rises.” Here is the King James Version:

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose… The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to its circuits… All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come thither they return again.
And here is Alter’s:

A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets, and to its place it glides, there it rises.
It goes to the south and swings round to the north, round and round goes the wind, and on its rounds the wind returns.

All the rivers go to the sea, and the sea is not full.

To the place that the rivers go, there they return to go.
Richard Wright, who actually used the American Standard Version of the Book of Job for the epigraph to his Native Son—”Even today is my complaint rebellious / My stroke is heavier than my groaning”—would compromise only slightly with: “Even now my complaint is defiant, / His hand lies heavy as I groan.” The opening quotation of Oliver Stone’s movie “Platoon” also would remain relatively unscathed—”Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth” would be “Rejoice, young man, in your youth.”

But not everyone would escape so easily. Melville’s sub-sub-librarian of “Moby-Dick,” who “appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever,” would have substituted his “Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; / One would think the deep to be hoary” with the rather less satisfying “Behind him glistens a wake, / he makes the deep seem hoary.” Saul Bellow, whose thorns in “Herzog” “crackled”—echoing King James’s Ecclesiastes (“For like the crackling of thorns beneath the pot, so is the laughter of the fool”)—would have had to settle for a mere “sound of thorns beneath the pot.”

In the end, though, this cursory test tends to reveal the similarities of these two versions more than the differences. Later in Bellow’s book, Herzog’s parodic “time to speak and a time to shut up” would remain intact. So would T. S. Eliot’s “There will be a time to murder and create” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (So, for that matter, would John Grisham’s title “A Time to Kill.”) That’s because, unlike Eliot and Bellow, Alter finds little to warp and bend in the famous opening of Ecclesiastes’s third chapter. He leaves the haunting rhythm of the King James Version essentially unchanged:

Everything has a season, and a time for every matter under the heavens.
A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.
A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to rip down and a time to build.
A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance.
A time to fling stones and a time to gather stones in. A time to embrace and a time to pull back from embracing.
A time to seek and a time to lose. A time to keep and a time to fling away.
A time to tear and a time to sew. A time to keep silent and a time to speak.
A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace.'

Contagem decrescente

para a saída do meu romance, Inveja (Uma novela académica), sob a chancela da Assírio & Alvim. Dia 19 é a data prevista.
A capa (radicalmente adequada à fealdade do tema) reproduz um quadro do pintor Mário Rita.
Yvette Centeno fez uma recensão do romance na revista Colóquio Letras (Setembro/Dezembro).
Deixo-vos apenas a referência e a breve citação de um passo do generoso texto da Professora na contra-capa.
Bom fim de semana!

Que tal uma reflexão sobre estes números?

Arts degrees become the preserve of the wealthy
Study shows wealthiest students dominate humanities and academics fear tuition fee rises will deepen problem
Fears are growing of a "gentrification" of arts and humanities degrees as new figures reveal that the courses have become the preserve of wealthy students.

Statistics released to the Observer by the Sutton Trust, an influential education charity, show that 31% of those who graduated in 2008 with degrees in history or philosophy were the children of senior managers – the socio-economic group with the highest income. Across all English university courses, an average of 27% of graduates were from this group.

Language graduates were also disproportionately from the wealthiest homes, with 30% from the highest income group. In comparison, non-arts and humanities courses – with the exception of medicine and dentistry – had far fewer students from the highest-income group. Just 17% for education, 22% for computer sciences and 23% for business studies were from the wealthiest homes. For medicine and dentistry, the proportion was 47%.

The data are part of a forthcoming study in conjunction with the London School of Economics that was done before changes that could further deter low- and middle-income students from applying for arts and humanities courses.

When Lord Browne, the former BP chief executive, publishes his review into university funding next month, he is expected to recommend to ministers that tuition fees – currently £3,290 a year for undergraduates – should rise to as much as £5,000 or £7,000 from 2013.

Browne is likely to propose generous help for poor students, but academics fear that a rise in fees could turn poorer teenagers away from degrees in the arts and humanities in favour of career-oriented courses.

Next month the government will announce its comprehensive spending review, which will cut billions of pounds of Whitehall money from university coffers. Officials are said to be considering slashing the universities' £4.7bn teaching budget by 75%. This would hit arts and humanities courses hardest because universities have been told to protect "strategically important" subjects such as science, technology, engineering and maths. Academics have warned that arts and humanities could end up only in high-ranking institutions that admit fewer low-income students.

The Sutton Trust data, which uses official figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, show that in all English universities, 19% of students come from the four socio-economic groups with the lowest income – mainly made up of those whose parents are in manual or unskilled jobs. Only 15% of those who graduated in 2008 with degrees in languages, history or philosophy had parents who were in these groups. Computer science, in contrast, had 28%.

Lee Elliot Major, director of research and policy at the Sutton Trust, said he was concerned that state schools were "so preoccupied with core exam results and league-table rankings" that less time was being devoted to the "cultural enrichment often required to excel in more creative subjects".

Ucas figures show that while 9% of students in all degree subjects come from independent schools, the figure is 23% for language degrees and between 12% and 20% for history, classics and archaeology degrees.

The Sutton Trust believes disproportionately low numbers of low-income students enrol on arts and humanities courses, fearing they may be less employable than if they take other subjects.

Professor Ben Knights, director of the Higher Education Academy's English subject centre, said many in his field were worried about the social class mix.

Cuts to higher education could see arts and humanities courses confined to universities that were "solidly funded and have a lot of research prestige". Knights added: "Other universities could do other subjects. There could be a progressive gentrification of arts and humanities." A study in 2006 showed that 43% of language lecturers were based in the UK's 20 most research-intensive universities. Professor Michael Kelly, director of the Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies subject centre, said several language departments were scaling back in anticipation of cuts. "My expectation is that a swingeing cut to higher education funding would... [leave] languages looking quite vulnerable in a number of institutions."

Este artigo, retirado do The Guardian, é assinado por Jessica Sheperd.

Um dos meus heróis,

entre os muitos e distintos que integram o grupo dos Founding Fathers, é, sem sombra de dúvidas, John Adams, nomeadamente pela fortuna e pela arte de ter partilhado a vida com uma mulher superiormente inteligente, Abigail Adams.
As cartas trocadas entre ambos devem ser de leitura obrigatória.
Recorde-se, por exemplo, a ironia da que ela lhe destinou a 31 de Março de 1776: I long to hear that you have declared an independency - and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, ... Do not put so much unlimited powers into the hands of the Husbands.

Lembre-se também a resposta de Adams a 14 de Abril: We have been told that ... Children and Apprentices were disobedient - that schools and Colleges were grown turbulent - that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes were insolent to their Masters. But your letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.
O sentido de humor, presente em ambos, é algo a reter.
Uma série sobre a figura de John Adams começou agora a ser emitida pela Fox.
Quem tiver acesso a canais por cabo poderá vê-la aos Domingos, pelas 21.30h. O primeiro episódio foi ontem, ignoro quando será de novo emitido. Fiquem atentos.
A não perder!

Delette

Orwell explicou, com lucidez, de que forma o totalitarismo consolidava o poder através do apagamento da memória. Que não se tratava de um mero exercício ficcional, comprova-o este famoso exemplo em que Trotsky, já caído em desgraça pelo estalinismo, é apagado da fotografia em que surgia junto ao palanque em que Lenine discursava.
Que não vivemos num regime totalitário é uma evidência.
No entanto, o exercício de apagamento da História também é uma realidade em democracia e... uma tentação para muitos governantes.
Por que motivo terá sido removido do You Tube o video do jovem que parodiava a Ministra?
Dificilmente esqueceremos, porém o rosto deste jovem!
Provavelmente, mais depressa esqueceremos o rosto de uma Enid Blyton de segunda.