Rabbit running till the very end

FOTO: www.popculturemadness.com

Morreu John Updike. Pouco dado a entrevistas, valia sempre a pena lê-las, veja-se a última ao The Telegraph: «The Descent of Man».

Um dos mais apropriadamente chamados grande escritores americanos, com sublinhado no americano. Escreveu um dos meu livros preferidos.

Tornou-se uma companhia frequente nestes últimos anos a sua crítica de arte na New York Review of Books que muita falta me fará. Creio que os seus últimos textos foram escritos precisamente para a New York Review e vale a pena relê-los.

O último texto desta longa série artística discute, o mais apropriadamente possível, a velha e mesmo desusada questão, de se há algo de especificamente americano na arte americana, deixando-nos como resposta - The Clarity of Things.

Mas o derradeiro texto de Updike na Review é uma viagem poética e uma lamentação sobre as consequência de a Irlanda de se ter transformado num tigre céltico. Gosto sobretudo do finale. Aqui a deixamos:

A Wee Irish Suite



By John Updike




Paris–Dublin, at Night


Cobwebs of orange pinpricks tinge the void


beneath our roaring wings; myriad lives


give off their sullen glow. A brighter gnat,


a helicopter beaming traffic news,


slides sideways through the thickest of the swarm;


thin filaments connect the villages


that mar the perfect earth like jellyfish


who poison with their glow pure ocean depths.






The fertile fields of France, black lakes, give way


to Channel nothingness, an interval


too brief before the luminescences


of England spill bacillae everywhere.


The Irish Sea kills all, till Dublin's squares


of seaside lanterns shock us back to life.




Portrush, Northern Ireland



Smoking in this room, a notice at


the Royal Court Hotel proclaims, can lead


to a deep cleaning charge of £50.


The sea we see through rain-bespattered doors


that would, in summer, slide to give dead-white


new-marrieds access to a feeble sun


supplies, like loads of eternal laundry,


onrolling breakers cresting into foam.





In restaurants with themed cuisines, the young


of Anglo-Ireland make gay with their Guinness


and a dated rock's background of drowned-out noise,


but bare the still disconsolate dry wit


of the colonized. These people had a war,


and peace partakes of the sea's tedium




New Resort Hotel, Portmarnock



Too many plugs and switches in the room.


The reading lights are dim, however, and


the flat black plasma television screen


ignores the hand remotes, as does the safe


the combination I distrustfully


punch in. Too many outlets for the well-


connected businessman, too much Preferred


Lifestyle, here in formerly homely Eire.





The Celtic tiger still has crooked teeth,


the twinkle of the doomed-to-come-up-short.


Success's luxuries pair awkwardly


with golf's grim thrashing out upon the links,the shabby,


shaggy dunes where newborn rich


land helicopters, then can't find their balls.