Alan Rickman's "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"

 Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

Wedding of reality with the demon of what is impossible

 "World history compels us to recognize Man's continuous, inexhaustible capacity to invent unrealizable projects. In the effort to realize them, he achieves many things, he creates innumerable realities that so-called Nature is incapable of producing for itself. The only thing that Man does not achieve is, precisely, what he he proposes to - let it be said to his credit. This wedding of reality with the demon of what is impossible supplies the universe with the only growth that it is capable of. For that reason, it is very important to emphasize that everything - that is, everything, worthwhile, everything truly human - is difficult, very difficult; so much so, that it is impossible."

José Ortega y Gasset, in The Misery and the Splendor of Translation

Downtown

 

"I loved Mor, but I never appreciated her enough. I never really understood how wonderful it was to always have someone to talk to who would know what you were talking about, and someone to play with who understood the kind of things I wanted to play."

Jo Walton, in Among others

A pensar em ti, C.

Feita de maresia

Mar, metade da minha alma é feita de maresia

Pois é pela mesma inquietação e nostalgia,

Que há no vasto clamor da maré cheia,

Que nunca nenhum bem me satisfez.

E é porque as tuas ondas desfeitas pela areia

Mais fortes se levantam outra vez,

Que após cada queda caminho para a vida,

Por uma nova ilusão entontecida.

E se vou dizendo aos astros o meu mal

É porque também tu revoltado e teatral

Fazes soar a tua dor pelas alturas.

E se antes de tudo odeio e fujo

O que é impuro, profano e sujo,

É só porque as tuas ondas são puras.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Feel it still

E yo lo creo

 Un año después, eso de vivir en los Países Bajos. Me preguntan como me siento, que lo debo escribir. Pero el problema es que… No vivo aquí hacia un año. Vivo aquí hacía tres, creo. Ni lo sé, que de mala soy con datas. Pero eso sí sé qué aún no me siento en casa. Todo suele ser complicado, a veces, complicado de llorar en un novelo todo el día echada sobre el sofá. No es que no comprenda de donde viene eso, que lo comprendo, que tiene que ver con mi separación de T., y todo que ha pasado desde entonces, más Covid, esa puta mierda que fue como un stop en todas nos vidas. Nada hace mucho sentido, hoy. Con la excepción, talvez, de ello. Sin excepción. Ello me hace sentir que todo lo ha valido a peña, incluso esa dolor y esa duda, esas culpas que cargué por demasiado tiempo. Y que me puedo poner rara, que puedo escribir en Español mesmo se quiera, que no es ni mi lengua nativa ni nada, pero yo puedo hacer todo lo que me die las ganas, cuando me die las ganas, porque está bien. Que yo viva feliz, que me lo merezco, y que no pasa nada. No pasa nada, me dice ello, e yo lo creo.

I miss you

"To see you when I wake up

Is a gift I didn't think could be real

To know that you feel the same as I do

Is a three-fold utopian dream Y

ou do something to me that I can't explain"

I call it home

If home is where the heart is,
then as a traveler,
my home is nomadic.

Diasporic static,
shock me with these memories.
I feel it all.

I take home with me.
I could never be alone.

As an immigrant,
I'm always home, I'm always home.

I hope for the world
to feel what I'm feeling.
Their love is a one in a million.

I know my heart is not a house,
but I call it home.

I call it home.

I call it home.

I call you home.

Slam poetry, Ginny and Georgia series

“La pena es pura y es sagrada” 

in La ridícula idea de no volver a verte, Rosa Montero (quoting Paul Theroux)

I walked a mile with pleasure

Pelo caminho

Tradução por Rita Pereira

Atravessei a estrada com o Prazer,

E ele não se calou nem um segundo;

Falou tanto e ainda assim,

Deixou-me ignorante, e iracundo.

Atravessei a estrada e veio a Mágoa,

Que, calada, não me disse nada.

Mas ah, as coisas que aprendi com ela

Até ao final dessa jornada!

Old with the new - Prodigy medley

XIV

Me falta tiempo para celebrar tus cabellos.
Uno por uno debo contarlos y alabarlos:
otros amantes quieren vivir con ciertos ojos,
yo sólo quiero ser tu peluquero.

En Italia te bautizaron Medusa
por la encrespada y alta luz de tu cabellera.
Yo te llamo chascona mía y enmarañada:
mi corazón conoce las puertas de tu pelo.

Cuando tú te extravíes en tus propios cabellos,
no me olvides, acuérdate que te amo,
no me dejes perdido ir sin tu cabellera

por el mundo sombrío de todos los caminos
que sólo tiene sombra, transitorios dolores,
hasta que el sol sube a la torre de tu pelo.

Pablo Neruda, in Cien Sonetos de Amor

"The way he desirously looked at me as though he were dying of thirst and I were a glass of cold sour-cherry sherbet."

Orhan Pamuk, in My Name is Red

Nobody is normal

 

"A melancolia é impossível de combater porque, a partir do momento em que nos aventuramos no mundo, teremos sempre saudades de tudo. De tudo. Do que fizemos e do que não fizemos, de quem se cruzou no nosso caminho e de quem jamais conseguiremos encontrar."

João Tordo, in Biografia Involuntária dos Amantes

Cover me in sunshine

Tell me that the world's been spinning since the beginning

And everything will be alright

“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” 

Oscar Wilde

Alone

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—

Edgar Allan Poe

Baby I need your loving

 

Miniatures

"Mother, my neck aches and all is still."

Orhan Pamuk, My name is red

“I seldom have as much pleasure in reading nonfiction as I do in a poem or a story. I can admire a well-made essay, but I’d rather follow a narrative than a thought, and the more abstract the thought the less I comprehend it. Philosophy inhabits my mind only as parables, and logic never enters it at all. Yet my grasp of syntax, which seems to me the logic of a language is excellent. So I imagine that this limitation in my thinking is related to my abysmal mathematical incompetence, my inability to play chess or even checkers, perhaps my incomprehension of key in music. There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don’t understand. And incomprehension is boredom.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, in Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

Don't wanna know

 

 "Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?"

Orhan Pamuk, My name is red

When You Really Love Someone

"It don't make sense but it makes a good song"

Black Princess

Loss is a funny thing. 

It creeps up on you when you least expect it, surging up like a wave that never showed on the horizon: a sudden tide of the coldest feelings, beginning from the base of your stomach and ascending all the way up to your head, dizzy and breathless, surprised by the change of temperature your tears will cause. Unstoppable. If you're lucky, you've found someone to share it with, someone who will not ask questions when he sees the wave rippling its way over you, someone who will drop the grocery bags on the floor and hug you tightly, without a word, because you're drowning.

I'm trying my best not to think of you, to pretend you didn't exist, or that you still do, that you're just there behind the table, the black spot I catch out of the corner of my eye, wrapped up in your usual furry and grumpy self. Denial is not a fine balance, it's a eschewed state of suffering, caught between escaping the guilt and remembering someone we loved so much that we loved them daily, without big shows of affection or second thought, with every day grievances and a little bit of impatience. The kind of love that does not presuppose an ending, or that we cannot talk about with our friends, because they will not understand it. Without you, I feel more alone than I ever did - and although I know you're not coming back, I will keep leaving the back door open. Until one day (I hope soon) when I don't think of you anymore when I close it.

Loss is a funny thing.

Woman take it slow and it'll work itself out fine

 

 "When I share myself in the intimacy of love, I do not lose my identity into my lover, but the part I share reflects all of me"

Thomas P. Kasulis (quoted in "How the World Thinks", by Julian Baggini)