Heaven E-Book

Manuel Vilas

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death.Manuel Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map and between romances. His instinct for rhythm gives the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also resolutely Spanish in how they speak - bluntly, humorously - always alert for the fantastic.This is the first translation of Vilas's two major collections Heaven (El cielo, 2000) and Heat (Calor, 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death and sex, they go off into free-wheeling megalomaniacal flights of fantasy. The translator, James Womack, has won prizes for his versions of Vilas and of the Russian poet Mayakovsky.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Heaven (2000)

Rosaries & Flick-knives

A Hundred Years Later

Rosaries, Flick-Knives

Macbeth

Storm in the Air

The Last Man

Story of a Chambermaid

Insomniac Whims

The Last Swimmers

Thirty-Six Years Old

Brandeso-Station

Summer Night

Insomniac Memories

A Poor Man’s Biarritz

Story of a Chambermaid

Costa Dorada

Man in Love

The Swimmer

The Swimmer

Trainee Vampire

The Swimmer

Mallorca

Heaven

Beech Grove

The Unknown Man

Light

Heat (2008)

Rain

HU-4091-L

The Tree of Life

Brotherhood

Mazda 6

Cocaine

AIDS

Blood Alcohol

Walk on the Wild Side

Our Air

Amor mío

The Kids Are Alright

The Crematorium

Communion Rail

Acknowledgements

About the Author

MANUEL VILAS

Heaven

Translated by James Womack

Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.

This new eBook edition first published in 2020.

Cover: Juan Gris, Paysage et maisons à Céret, 1913 © UtCon Collection / Alamy.

Text copyright © Manuel Vilas and James Womack, 2020. The right of Manuel Vilas and James Womack to be identified as the author and translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN 978 1 78410 887 8

Mobi ISBN 978 1 78410 888 5

PDF ISBN 978 1 78410 889 2

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

HEAVEN

(2000)

Tus ojos me recuerdanlas noches de verano.                A. Machado

Rosaries and Flick-Knives

A Hundred Years Later

(Madrid, June ’98)

No, you look, look at all the life here, look as much as you want. Look at the cities filled with slaves, with wretched men.I am just a student of philosophyabout to do the state exam, who spends his summer reading, slowly, all of your books.I never went to Germany, although I did learn Greek – but I forgot it; I forgot it because I had to find a wayto earn a living: now it is thinking that supports me. And I am here, in a room,facing your thousands of words, words that no one believes in, ruined words, words that will help me, if I remember them well, to win a spot as a teacher in a provincial schoolsomewhere in Spain, in a country that you – I’m sure you had your reasons –that you did not care to visit, to know, to travel across, to put your finger into.No, believe me, there are no Spanish geniuses in this philosophy textbook.

I was in your country once, years ago, on a package tour:my whole life has been done on the cheap, but I loved it like you saidwe should love all that flows from usin a constant exhalation; and I was not fooled,and rejected all vice, all drugs, the sandals the slave wears.

The world, the world you fell in love with, is over: nature is a ruined old dame, melancholic, stinking and unpleasant;the mountains threw out their guardian angels, who died; life itself lost the will to live, and is sick,bedridden in a nursing home.

A hundred years have gone by and you have not returned, you will never return;you fucked up there, but knew you would fuck up: like a leisure-class anarchist, like a raving bourgeois who inhalesa new, pagan and seditious immortality.

And tell me if that is not in itself the drama: you leftand have no reason to live again, trapped in the lie that is death; how clumsy our desires are, and our thoughts, and our theories, and the hours we spent on the hard thought that leadsto a single enormous utopia; and time went by, and your life went by as well.

And my life goes by, less stressed than yours, which is why I am here, today,moaning about it. The Greeks came to you, the arrogant-in-will, the death of God… and women, all of them in love with your cruel talent,and you felt them up with the rough hand of Dionysus;and then there was the pure disdain for everything that came before you,everything derived from the most perfect minds of the past; but what about me? What is left for meapart from your work in paperback editions, with underlinings where I thought I found something important: ideas that, tomorrow –if I am lucky and they ask me about yourather than about Aristotle, or Aquinas, or even poor old Kant – I’ll have to explain as though I were hard-working, prudent, honourable?

Rosaries, Flick-Knives

I took a trip to Lourdes in France, in July ’98;that radiant time, days of cold beer and wretched lovers on the Paris highway.                                   There are no casinos in Lourdes,but there are a hundred hotels for the pilgrims who come to pray and beg,like me, for a long life, bullish health, and for the Virgin to make a mistake and allow the irreverent sinnerthe cure of his soul, or his body, or of both at once, together in their platonic marriage.

Lourdes is the mall of every temple, the placewhere they sell rosaries, flick-knives, unhappy souvenirs, blue virgins, two-way mirrors which pretend to show the incarnation of the Holy Ghost – in classic bad taste and with a mysticism proper to a Spanish raffle –cloaks, prayers, speeches, holy water and the whole range of famousLa main couronnée-brand knives,as well as a horrible Tour de France bumper sticker.

Your hand can brandish a rosary or a flick-knife.I saw many priests in soutanes, young priests, handsome ones, African priests, now very numerous: this black priest,with his thick-framed glasses, full of hope, his lips set hard as Christ’s own martyrological gaze;black priests in the service of the white invader’s religious frenzy. Black priests have always restored my faith in Rome.

Tal vez haya hoy un milagro, someone said, in the Spanish of Latin America, that miracle-saturated, ragged land.And at seven on the dot the procession of wheelchairs: Canadians, English, Italians, French, Poles, Russians;a whole rich, thoughtful and crippled world, searching here for the last fount of hope and fantasy.Baseless hope is the true structure of our lives.

 I ate in a McDonald’s, because there is a McDonald’s in Lourdes: a goodly burger and chips, and a glassof Coke with ice, thirty-fivefrancs the lot; I ate alongside nuns, postulants, novices and believers. I, a man alone, one hand on my hamburger,the other holding a large yellow chip, thin-cut and rather overcooked; an absurd tourist, a guy who travelsto the moral limits of this great white world: your hand can brandish a rosary or a flick-knife, or perhaps both at the same time.