Poezje

by W.H. Auden, Leszek Elektorowicz (translator), Czesław Miłosz (translator)

Reprezentatywny wybór wierszy jednego z najwybitniejszych poetów XX wieku. Poezja Audena (1907-1973) - który po lewicowych fascynacjach w młodości, po duchowym przełomie dawał w swoich wierszach wyraz doświadczeniom metafizycznym i religijnym.

Genres: Poetry

294 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Poems, published in such collections as Look, Stranger! (1936) and The Shield of Achilles (1955), established importance of British-American writer and critic Wystan Hugh Auden in 20th-century literature.

In and near Birmingham, he developed in a professional middle-class family. He attended English independent schools and studied at Christ church, Oxford. From 1927, Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship despite briefer but more intense relations with other men. Auden passed a few months in Berlin in 1928 and 1929.

He then spent five years from 1930 to 1935, teaching in English schools and then traveled to Iceland and China for books about his journeys. People noted stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and variety in tone, form and content. He came to wide attention at the age of 23 years in 1930 with his first book, Poems ; The Orators followed in 1932.

Three plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood in 1935 to 1938 built his reputation in a left-wing politics.

People best know this Anglo for love such as "Funeral Blues," for political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939," for culture and psychology, such as The Age of Anxiety , and for religion, such as For the Time Being and "Horae Canonicae." In 1939, partly to escape a liberal reputation, Auden moved to the United States. Auden and Christopher Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship to 1939. In 1939, Auden fell in lust with Chester Kallman and regarded their relation as a marriage.

From 1941, Auden taught in universities. This relationship ended in 1941, when Chester Kallman refused to accept the faithful relation that Auden demanded, but the two maintained their friendship.

Auden taught in universities through 1945. His work, including the long For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror , in the 1940s focused on religious themes. He attained citizenship in 1946.

The title of his long The Age of Anxiety , a popular phrase, described the modern era; it won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. From 1947, he wintered in New York and summered in Ischia. From 1947, Auden and Chester Kallman lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relation and often collaborated on opera libretti, such as The Rake's Progress for music of Igor Stravinsky until death of Auden.

Occasional visiting professorships followed in the 1950s. From 1956, he served as professor at Oxford. He wintered in New York and summered in Ischia through 1957. From 1958, he wintered usually in New York and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria.

He served as professor at Oxford to 1961; his popular lectures with students and faculty served as the basis of his prose The Dyer's Hand in 1962.

Auden, a prolific prose essayist, reviewed political, psychological and religious subjects, and worked at various times on documentary films, plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his controversial and influential career, views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive, treating him as a lesser follower of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, to strongly affirmative, as claim of Joseph Brodsky of his "greatest mind of the twentieth century."

He wintered in Oxford in 1972/1973 and summered in Kirchstetten, Austria, until the end of his life.

After his death, films, broadcasts, and popular media enabled people to know and ton note much more widely "Funeral Blues," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "Refugee Blues," "The Unknown Citizen," and "September 1, 1939," t

Reviews

[Pilar · Rating 2 out of 5]

En una primera lectura pensé que esto estaba fuera de mi alcance. Tardé en darme cuenta de que con Auden hay que pasar de la traducción. No me atrevería a decir que es mala, y es que la traductora ya se excusa en el prólogo, pero creo que es demasiado literal allí donde tendría que parafrasear y parafrasea allí donde debería traducir literalmente.

A pesar de mi desconcierto, perseveré, y más después de adentrarme en "El arte de leer", los ensayos literarios que buscan arrojar claves sobre la lectura de su poesía. Me gusta su exactitud, la severa métrica, la musicalidad, pero no le encuentro ni pies ni cabeza. La antología es muy completa pero es una lectura ardua en la que apenas hay imágenes: los temas universales típicos como la alegría, el amor, el deseo o el dolor parecen ser un asunto privado, todo es pura experiencia del intelecto, que exige un formación de la que carezco, así que quizá, en otra vida...

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incidentally, Auden's ‘Poems 1928’ were printed privately. What does the reader find? He sees that in this volume the poems are neither arranged in a discernible pattern, nor is there any continuity in the volume.

In contrast, ‘Poems 1930’ was the first volume to be published. This volume consists of thirty poems, nine of which had appeared in ‘Poems 1928’ and ‘Paid on Both Sides’. The leitmotifs of psychic weakness and failure have a significant place in these lyrics. The images of the earlier poems, the feud, war-sports images, the biological-geological allegories, the feeling that there is something wrong with love --- are all brought into focus.

The fusion of these images suggests that they form an analysis of bourgeois society, of capitalist England. Though there are enough ambiguities and obscurities in the poems of this volume, yet there are elements that provide a structural basis. There is no narrative classification nor any clear evolution; the poems are apparently arranged according to the principles of variety and contrast.

Poem IV, entitled 'We All Make Mistakes' presents a touching caricature of a member of the imperialist class or a rich capitalist who conceals his apparent show of confidence and certainty a whole world of uncertainties. The hidden weaknesses of the subconscious which have been only vaguely suggested in this poem are revealed explicitly as symptoms of a failing will in poem IX. This short lyric evidences Auden's success in altering a psychological dialectic into a lyric of power and beauty.

Poem XVI entitled '1929' presents a panoramic view of the nauseating individuals of a diseased society. It is a long preoccupied lyric with four clear divisions in which the slow moving rhythm of the lines and the typical images of disease and decay combine to heighten the effect of serious reflection, reminding us at places of similar effects in Eliot's The Waste Land.

Poem XXIX is an example of a harmonious synthesis between Auden's message and his poetic art. The Poem XXX, entitled 'Petition' is marked with evocative style. This sonnet with its own structure of couplets of near-rhyme ending is a suitable epilogue to the volume in as much as it presents a catalogue of the psychic evils and also asserts a hope in the possibility of social regeneration and the attainment of psychic balance.

It leaves us at a point where it becomes quite clear that Auden is firmly hopeful of a secular redemption which will replace "the house of the dead" by "new styles of architecture" and "a change of heart."

[Fernanda Espinoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pero qué lindo escribe Auden

[Monique Gerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,7!
Depois de uma longa jornada de começos e desistências, resolvi recomeçar a leitura do zero! Fui surpreendida! Alguns poemas são lindíssimos. Meus preferidos foram "uma viagem", "Em louvor do calcário", "bosques" e "palavras".

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

XI
Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to the wood,
An industry already comatose,
Yet sparsely living. A ramshackle engine
At Cashwell raises water; for ten years
It lay in flooded workings until this,
Its latter office, grudgingly performed;
And further here and there, though many dead
Lie under the poor soil, some acts are chosen
Taken from recent winters; two there were
Cleaned out a damaged shaft by hand, clutching
The winch the gale would tear them from; one died During a storm, the fells impassable,
Not at his village, but in wooden shape
Through long abandoned levels nosed his way
And in his final valley went to ground.

Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock, Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed:
This land, cut off, will not communicate,
Be no accessory content to one
Aimless for faces rather there than here.
Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall,
They wake no sleeper; you may hear the wind Arriving driven from the ignorant sea
To hurt itself on pane, on bark of elm
Where sap unbaffled rises, being spring;
But seldom this. Near you, taller than grass,
Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.
[48]

[Miguel Aranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lo he leído en la edición bilingüe de Visor. Aparte de encontrar tantos poemas que me han impresionado (dos muy accesibles pueden ser la "Oda al hombre común" o "La caída del imperio romano"), me ha sorprendido lo tan y tan influyente que ha sido en la poesía española, por ejemplo, desde el 50 al 80, como mínimo, y en la canción norteamericana, desde Bob Dylan a Leonard Cohen pasando por Joni Mitchell.

Hace poco estuve leyendo a Wallace Stevens, otro grandísimo poeta, pero es cierto modo un poeta particular, que aun coincidiendo en muchas cosas de su estilo no ha ejercido la influencia de Auden.

[Júlia Gusmão · Rating 3 out of 5]

Li a edição bilíngue e consegui me sentir analfabeta em dois idiomas. Alguns poemas me envolveram demais ("No, Plato, No" talvez seja um dos meus favoritos da vida inteira), já outros comunicam algo que simplesmente não consegui acessar. Aí vão 3 estrelas que representam tão somente uma experiência individual minha, mas me pus no dever de reler a coletânea inteira em algum momento.

[Suzammah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just not my cup of tea.

[Midori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Auden's poems are so wonderful.

[Guilherme Paes]

Sem avaliação, porque preciso reler