Sea Grapes
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About this ebook
Derek Walcott was aptly described by Laurence Liberman in The Yale Review as "one of the handful of brilliant historic mythologists of our day." Sea Grapes deepens with this major poet's search for true images of the post-Adamic "new world"--especially those of his native Caribbean culture. Walcott's rich and vital naming of the forms of island life is complemented by poems set in America and England, by inward-turning meditations, and by invocations of other poets--Osip Mandelstam, Walt Whitman, Frank O'Hara, James Wright, and Pablo Neruda.
On the publication of Selected Poems in 1963, Robert Graves wrote, "Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries." This collection of new poems in every way confirms Walcott's mastery. He is also the author of The Gulf, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, and Another Life.
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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Sea Grapes - Derek Walcott
Sea Grapes
THAT SAIL WHICH LEANS ON LIGHT,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean
for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband’s
longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is
like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name
in every gull’s outcry.
This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility
will never finish and has been the same
for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore
now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,
since Troy sighed its last flame,
and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough
from whose ground-swell the great hexameters come
to the conclusions of exhausted surf.
The classics can console. But not enough.
The Virgins
Down the dead streets of sun-stoned Frederiksted,
the first free port to die for tourism,
strolling at funeral pace, I am reminded
of life not lost to the American dream;
but my small-islander’s simplicities
can’t better our new empire’s civilized
exchange of cameras, watches, perfumes, brandies
for the good life, so cheaply underpriced
that only the crime rate is on the rise
in streets blighted with sun, stone arches
and plazas blown dry by the hysteria
of rumour. A condominium drowns
in vacancy; its bargains are dusted,
but only a jewelled housefly drones
over the bargains. The roulettes spin
rustily to the wind—the vigorous trade
that every morning would begin afresh
by revving up green water round the pierhead
heading for where the banks of silver thresh.
Frederiksted Nights
The goombay band or whatever
combination of Chicano charge
and black funk ignites the fish-fries
by the sizzling pierhead
with the sharks of submarines cruising
like the Puerto Riquenan putas
or lemon Dominican whores,
the electric guitars