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    Another Life
    Another Life
    Another Life
    Ebook161 pages1 hour

    Another Life

    By Derek Walcott

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    In his longest and most ambitious poem, Derek Walcott reaches beyond an evocative portrayl of his native West Indies to create a moving elegy on himself and on man.

    The fascinating and complex matrix of the author's life is illuminated with our candor, verve, and strength. Over four thousand lines of verse are grouped into four parts. He evokes scenes of his divided childhood, in which children live in shacks while fine khaki-clothed Englishmen drink tea. He depicts the influence of three intimate friends, including his first love, Anna, on his emergence as a man and artist. He chronicles the mixed remorse and resolution of maturity. He recalls of his youth: "We were blessed with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam's task of giving things their names..." Yet in retrospect he acknowledges the irony of his artistic reliance on metaphor to transform reality--his search for "another life"

    When the author's most recent collection of poetry, The Gulf, was published, Selden Rodman wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "Now, with the publication of his fourth book of verse, Walcott's stature in the front rank of all contemporary poets using English should be apparent." Chad Walsh in Book World said: "I am convinced one of the half-dozen most imporant poets now writing in English. He may prove to be the best."

    Another Life helps to fulfill this prophecy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781466880306
    Another Life
    Author

    Derek Walcott

    Derek Walcott nació en 1930 en Claistres, capital de la antigua colonia británica de Santa Lucía, una isla en las Pequeñas Antillas. Hijo de un pintor británico que murió cuando él contaba un año de edad y nieto de esclavos, a esta mezcla de culturas hay que añadir que su familia fuera protestante en una comunidad donde predominaba el catolicisimo. Estudió en el University College of the West Indies. Es fundador de Trinidad Theater Workshop, y autor de numerosas obras de teatro y libros de poesía. Entre sus obras traducidas al castellano figuran: Islas, El testamento de Arkansas, La voz del crepúsculo, La abundancia. En cuanto a Omeros, está considerada como su obra maestra y fue galardonada con el premio W. H. Smith. En 1992 le fue concedido el Premio Nobel. Foto © Lisbeth Salas

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      Book preview

      Another Life - Derek Walcott

      The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

      Contents

      Title Page

      Copyright Notice

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      One: The Divided Child

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Two: Homage to Gregorias

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Three: A Simple Flame

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Four: The Estranging Sea

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      By Derek Walcott

      Copyright

      for Margaret

      On the day when I finally fasten my hands upon its wrinkled stem and pull with irresistible power, when my memories are quiet and strong, and I can finally translate them into words, then I shall perceive the unique and essential quality of this place. The innumerable petty miseries, the manifold beauties eclipsed by the painful necessity of combat and birth, these will be no more than the network of down-growing branches of a banyan tree, winding about the sea.

      Edouard Glissant

      Le Lézarde (The Ripening)

      one

      The Divided Child

      An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But, according to the true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting: but, rather, his first sight of the paintings of such a man as Cimabue. What makes the artist is the circumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray.

      Malraux

      Psychology of Art

      chapter 1

      Verandahs, where the pages of the sea

      are a book left open by an absent master

      in the middle of another life—

      I begin here again,

      begin until this ocean’s

      a shut book, and, like a bulb

      the white moon’s filaments wane.

      Begin with twilight, when a glare

      which held a cry of bugles lowered

      the coconut lances of the inlet,

      as a sun, tired of empire, declined.

      It mesmerised like fire without wind,

      and as its amber climbed

      the beer-stein ovals of the British fort

      above the promontory, the sky

      grew drunk with light.

                                              There

      was your heaven! The clear

      glaze of another life,

      a landscape locked in amber, the rare

      gleam. The dream

      of reason had produced its monster:

      a prodigy of the wrong age and colour.

      All afternoon the student

      with the dry fever of some draughtsman’s clerk

      had magnified the harbour, now twilight

      eager to complete itself,

      drew a girl’s figure to the open door

      of a stone boathouse with a single stroke, then fell

      to a reflecting silence. This silence waited

      for the verification of detail:

      the gables of the Saint Antoine Hotel

      aspiring from jungle, the flag

      at Government House melting its pole,

      and for the tidal amber glare to glaze

      the last shacks of the Morne till they became

      transfigured sheerly by the student’s will,

      a cinquecento fragment in gilt frame.

      The vision died,

      the black hills simplified

      to hunks of coal,

      but if the light was dying through the stone

      of that converted boathouse on the pier,

      a girl, blowing its embers in her kitchen,

      could feel its epoch entering her hair.

      Darkness, soft as amnesia, furred the slope.

      He rose and climbed towards the studio.

      The last hill burned,

      the sea crinkled like foil,

      a moon ballooned up from the Wireless Station. O

      mirror, where a generation yearned

      for whiteness, for candour, unreturned.

      The moon maintained her station,

      her fingers stroked a chiton-fluted sea,

      her disc whitewashed the shells

      of gutted offices barnacling the wharves

      of the burnt town, her lamp

      baring the ovals of toothless façades,

      along the Roman arches, as he passed

      her alternating ivories lay untuned,

      her age was dead, her sheet

      shrouded the antique furniture, the mantel

      with its plaster-of-Paris Venus, which

      his yearning had made marble, half-cracked

      unsilvering mirror of black servants,

      like the painter’s kerchiefed, ear-ringed portrait: Albertina.

      Within the door, a bulb

      haloed the tonsure of a reader crouched

      in its pale tissue like an embryo,

      the leisured gaze

      turned towards him, the short arms

      yawned briefly, welcome. Let us see.

      Brown, balding, a lacertilian

      jut to its underlip,

      with spectacles thick as a glass paperweight

      over eyes the hue of sea-smoothed bottle glass,

      the man wafted the drawing to his face

      as if dusk were myopic, not his gaze.

      Then, with slow strokes the master changed the sketch.

                 ii

      In its dimension the drawing could not trace

      the sociological contours of the promontory;

      once, it had been an avenue of palms

      strict as Hobbema’s aisle of lowland poplars,

      now, levelled, bulldozed and metalled for an airstrip,

      its terraces like tree-rings told its age.

      There, patriarchal banyans,

      bearded with vines from which black schoolboys gibboned,

      brooded on a lagoon seasoned with dead leaves,

      mangroves knee-deep in water

      crouched like whelk-pickers on brown, spindly legs

      scattering red soldier crabs

      scrabbling for redcoats’ meat.

      The groves were sawn

      symmetry and contour crumbled,

      down the arched barrack balconies

      where colonels in the whisky-coloured light

      had watched the green flash, like a lizard’s tongue,

      catch the last sail, tonight

      row after row of orange stamps repeated

      the villas of promoted Civil Servants.

      The moon came to the window and stayed there.

      He was her subject, changing when she changed,

      from childhood he’d considered palms

      ignobler than imagined elms,

      the breadfruit’s splayed

      leaf coarser than the oak’s,

      he had prayed

      nightly for his flesh to change,

      his dun flesh peeled white by her lightning strokes!

      Above the cemetery where

      the airstrip’s tarmac ended

      her slow disc magnified

      the life beneath her like a reading-glass.

      Below the bulb

      a green book, laid

      face downward. Moon,

      and sea. He read

      the spine. FIRST POEMS:

      CAMPBELL. The painter

      almost absently

      reversed it, and began to read:

                       "Holy be

                       the white head of a Negro,

                       sacred be

                       the black flax of a black child…"

      And from a new book,

      bound in sea-green linen, whose lines

      matched the exhilaration which their reader,

      rowing the air around him now, conveyed,

      another life it seemed would start again

      while past the droning, tonsured head

      the white face

      of a dead child stared from its window-frame.

                 iii

      They sang, against the rasp and cough of shovels,

      against the fists of mud pounding the coffin,

      the diggers’ wrists rounding off every phrase,

      their iron hymn, "The Pilgrims of the

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