GALERIA (53)

Robert Alexander Schumann (1810 - 1856)

Para ler em voz alta (47)

Alma minha gentil, que te partiste
Tão cedo desta vida, descontente,
Repousa lá no Céu eternamente
E viva eu cá na terra sempre triste.

Se lá no assento etéreo, onde subiste,
Memória desta vida se consente,
Não te esqueças daquele amor ardente
Que já nos olhos meus tão puro viste.

E se vires que pode merecer-te
Alguma cousa a dor que me ficou
Da mágoa, sem remédio, de perder-te,

Roga a Deus, que teus anos encurtou,
Que tão cedo de cá me leve a ver-te,
Quão cedo de meus olhos te levou.

LUÍS DE CAMÕES [s.d.]

Galeria (52)

Henry Graham Greene (1904 - 1991)

Para ler em voz alta (46)

Leaves from eternity are simple things
To the worlds gaze where to a spirit clings
Sublime and lasting – trampled underfoot
The daisy lives and strikes its little root
Into the lap of time – centuries may come
And pass away into the silent tomb
And still the child hid in the womb of time
Shall smile and pluck them when this simple rhyme
Shall be forgotten like a church-yard stone
Or lingering lye unnoticed and alone
When eighteen hundred years our common date
Grows many thousands in their marching state
Aye still the child with pleasure in his eye
Shall cry the daisy a familiar cry
And run to pluck it – in the selfsame state
As when time found it in his infant date
And like a child himself when all was new
Wonder might smile and make him notice too

JOHN CLARE [1835]

Galeria (51)

Joan Greenwood (1921 - 1987)

Galeria (50)

Joachim Clemens Fest (1926 - 2006)

Começos... (43)

I left Athens at mid-day in the Automatrice, a reasonably fast Diesel train which for four hours trundled along beside the sun-glittering Gulf of Salamis, through pale green valleys hemmed in by low, treeless hills of grey limestone, past dust-grey villages set among the dark spear-like cypresses. The light was white and intense, the magical light of Hellas which shadows impartially the fluting of a Doric column or the hard lines of a peasant’s face. We passed Megara, near which the hero Theseus kicked the giant Sciron into the sea (where he turned into a tortoise), and then after miles of gnarled olive-trees, slowed and stopped at New Corinth.
I had over an hour to wait at the squalid railway station, which seemed as if designed to destroy all romantic preconceptions of Greece. On the dirty, paper-littered platform sat sad-eyed women in drab, shapeless clothes, and a few listless men, cloth-capped and collarless. Among them was a sullen youth with a strained, handsome face, who looked older than his years. He had lost a leg in the Civil War and hobbled painfully on crutches. A few meagre-looking fowl pecked between the tracks, and a small ragged boy moved along the platform with a trayful of “souflakia” – fragments of meat on wooden skewers; but he had few costumers.
So this was Greece.

LEONARD COTTRELL, The Bull of Minos [1953]