Alan Hollinghurst, Maxwell Bodenheim
Der britische Schriftsteller Alan Hollinghurst wurde am 26. Mai 1954 in Stroud, Grafschaft Gloucestershire, als einziges Kind eines Bankmanagers geboren. Nach dem Englisch-Studium in Oxford zog er nach London und schrieb von 1982 bis 1995 (ab 1985 als stellvertretender Chefredakteur) Kritiken für das "Times Literary Supplement". Alan Hollinghurst gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Gegenwartsautoren Großbritanniens. 1989 erhielt er den Gay and Lesbian Book Award für sein Werk The Swimming Pool Library und 2004 den Booker Prize für seinen Roman The Line of Beauty.
Aus: The Spell
“He wondered if the boy had lost the way. They had started out on a driven track half-covered with small noisy stones; but it faded, was found again for half a mile, where it followed the rim of a dry wash, and then died away among the windswept contours and little dusty bushes of the desert. The pick-up roared on across long inclines of grey dirt. The boy kept his foot down and stared straight ahead, as if unable to consider the possibilities that lay to left and right. He was almost smiling -- Robin couldn't decide if from nerves or from the pleasure a local person has in scaring and disorienting a stranger. An empty bottle rolled and clinked against the metal supports of the bench-seat. Robin sat with his forearm braced in the open window, and grunted involuntarily at each bump and drop: academic research had never been so wayward or so physical. He found that he was smiling too, and that he was not only shaken but happy.
They reached a low crest and there beneath them spread thirty or forty miles of silvery waste, crossed by the quick eclipses of windy sunlight; the wide plain was rifted with gulleys and dry riverbeds, and climbed distantly to mountains which were radiant towers in the west and unguessable obscurities in the blackly shadowed south. This was what he wanted to see: it was what had brought a rich man and his architect here half a century ago. It wasn't a terrain that could be ploughed or grazed or humbled by use: nothing could have altered unless by the gradual violence of winds and storm rains. The pick-up slowed, and Robin imagined that even his guide, who had surely seen nothing but this country all his life, was responding to its magic or its admonishment.
`What are those mountains called?' he shouted over the churning of the engine and the racket of stones and grit against the bottom of the vehicle. The boy looked stoopingly across, and out beyond Robin at the morning-bright bluffs to the west. He nodded several times, perhaps he had only understood the word mountains, or was hesitating before so many mountains, with so many names.“
Alan Hollinghurst (Stoud, 26. Mai 1954)
Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Maxwell Bodenheim wurde am 26. Mai 1892 in Hermanville, Mississippi, als Maxwell Bodenheimer geboren. Um 1912 lernte Bodenheim Ben Hecht in Chicago kennen. Sie wurden Freunde und gründeten zusammen eine Zeitschrift. Weitere Mitglieder ihrer Gruppe waren u.a. Sherwood Anderson und Charles MacArthur. Seine ersten Verse veröffentlichte Bodenheim 1914 im Poetry Magazine. In den folgenden zehn Jahren etablierte er sich als einer der führenden Autoren der USA. Er veröffentlichte zehn Gedichtbände, die viele Merkmale des Imagismus enthalten, sowie 13 Romane. Nachdem er viele Jahre lang eine führende Figur der Künstlerszene von Greenwich Village gewesen war, verschlechterten sich Bodenheims Lebensumstände in den 1920er und 30er Jahren rapide. Vor der Hochzeit mit seiner zweiten Frau Grace war er zum Bettler geworden. Nach ihrem Krebstod wurde er zum Trinker und verlor an Ansehen. Er wurde mehrmals wegen Landstreicherei und Trunkenheit verhaftet und in ein Krankenhaus eingeliefert. Bodenheims dritte Frau Ruth war 28 Jahre jünger als er. Sie teilte seine heruntergekommene Lebensweise. Sie waren obdachlos und schliefen auf Parkbänken. Er bettelte mit einem Schild mit der Aufschrift „Ich bin blind“, sie schrieb kurze Gedichte gegen Geld oder Drinks nieder. Ruth schlief auch mit anderen Männern, was Bodenheim nicht zu stören schien. Bodenheim und Ruth wurden 1954 von dem 25jährigen psychisch gestörten Tellerwäscher Harold „Charlie“ Weinberg ermordet, den sie auf der Straße kennen gelernt hatten.
EAST SIDE MOVING PICTURE THEATRE--SUNDAY
An old woman rubs her eyes
As though she were stroking children back to life.
A slender Jewish boy whose forehead
Is tall, and like a wind-marked wall,
Restlessly waits while leaping prayers
Clash their light-cymbals within his eyes.
And a little hunchbacked girl
Straightens her back with a slow-pulling smile.
(I am afraid to look at her again.)
Then the blurred, tawdry pictures rush across the scene,
And I hear a swishing intake of breath,
As though some band of shy rigid spirits
Were standing before their last heaven.
Factory-girl
Why are your eyes like dry brown flower-pods,
Still, gripped by the memory of lost petals?
I feel that, if I touched them,
They would crumble to falling brown dust,
And you would stand with blindness revealed.
Yet you would not shrink, for your life
Has been long since memorized,
And eyes would only melt out against its high walls.
Besides, in the making of boxes
Sprinkled with crude forget-me-nots,
One is curiously blessed if one's eyes are dead.
Maxwell Bodenheim (26. Mai 1892 – 6. Februar 1954)
Aus: The Spell
“He wondered if the boy had lost the way. They had started out on a driven track half-covered with small noisy stones; but it faded, was found again for half a mile, where it followed the rim of a dry wash, and then died away among the windswept contours and little dusty bushes of the desert. The pick-up roared on across long inclines of grey dirt. The boy kept his foot down and stared straight ahead, as if unable to consider the possibilities that lay to left and right. He was almost smiling -- Robin couldn't decide if from nerves or from the pleasure a local person has in scaring and disorienting a stranger. An empty bottle rolled and clinked against the metal supports of the bench-seat. Robin sat with his forearm braced in the open window, and grunted involuntarily at each bump and drop: academic research had never been so wayward or so physical. He found that he was smiling too, and that he was not only shaken but happy.
They reached a low crest and there beneath them spread thirty or forty miles of silvery waste, crossed by the quick eclipses of windy sunlight; the wide plain was rifted with gulleys and dry riverbeds, and climbed distantly to mountains which were radiant towers in the west and unguessable obscurities in the blackly shadowed south. This was what he wanted to see: it was what had brought a rich man and his architect here half a century ago. It wasn't a terrain that could be ploughed or grazed or humbled by use: nothing could have altered unless by the gradual violence of winds and storm rains. The pick-up slowed, and Robin imagined that even his guide, who had surely seen nothing but this country all his life, was responding to its magic or its admonishment.
`What are those mountains called?' he shouted over the churning of the engine and the racket of stones and grit against the bottom of the vehicle. The boy looked stoopingly across, and out beyond Robin at the morning-bright bluffs to the west. He nodded several times, perhaps he had only understood the word mountains, or was hesitating before so many mountains, with so many names.“
Alan Hollinghurst (Stoud, 26. Mai 1954)
Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Maxwell Bodenheim wurde am 26. Mai 1892 in Hermanville, Mississippi, als Maxwell Bodenheimer geboren. Um 1912 lernte Bodenheim Ben Hecht in Chicago kennen. Sie wurden Freunde und gründeten zusammen eine Zeitschrift. Weitere Mitglieder ihrer Gruppe waren u.a. Sherwood Anderson und Charles MacArthur. Seine ersten Verse veröffentlichte Bodenheim 1914 im Poetry Magazine. In den folgenden zehn Jahren etablierte er sich als einer der führenden Autoren der USA. Er veröffentlichte zehn Gedichtbände, die viele Merkmale des Imagismus enthalten, sowie 13 Romane. Nachdem er viele Jahre lang eine führende Figur der Künstlerszene von Greenwich Village gewesen war, verschlechterten sich Bodenheims Lebensumstände in den 1920er und 30er Jahren rapide. Vor der Hochzeit mit seiner zweiten Frau Grace war er zum Bettler geworden. Nach ihrem Krebstod wurde er zum Trinker und verlor an Ansehen. Er wurde mehrmals wegen Landstreicherei und Trunkenheit verhaftet und in ein Krankenhaus eingeliefert. Bodenheims dritte Frau Ruth war 28 Jahre jünger als er. Sie teilte seine heruntergekommene Lebensweise. Sie waren obdachlos und schliefen auf Parkbänken. Er bettelte mit einem Schild mit der Aufschrift „Ich bin blind“, sie schrieb kurze Gedichte gegen Geld oder Drinks nieder. Ruth schlief auch mit anderen Männern, was Bodenheim nicht zu stören schien. Bodenheim und Ruth wurden 1954 von dem 25jährigen psychisch gestörten Tellerwäscher Harold „Charlie“ Weinberg ermordet, den sie auf der Straße kennen gelernt hatten.
EAST SIDE MOVING PICTURE THEATRE--SUNDAY
An old woman rubs her eyes
As though she were stroking children back to life.
A slender Jewish boy whose forehead
Is tall, and like a wind-marked wall,
Restlessly waits while leaping prayers
Clash their light-cymbals within his eyes.
And a little hunchbacked girl
Straightens her back with a slow-pulling smile.
(I am afraid to look at her again.)
Then the blurred, tawdry pictures rush across the scene,
And I hear a swishing intake of breath,
As though some band of shy rigid spirits
Were standing before their last heaven.
Factory-girl
Why are your eyes like dry brown flower-pods,
Still, gripped by the memory of lost petals?
I feel that, if I touched them,
They would crumble to falling brown dust,
And you would stand with blindness revealed.
Yet you would not shrink, for your life
Has been long since memorized,
And eyes would only melt out against its high walls.
Besides, in the making of boxes
Sprinkled with crude forget-me-nots,
One is curiously blessed if one's eyes are dead.
Maxwell Bodenheim (26. Mai 1892 – 6. Februar 1954)
froumen - 26. Mai, 18:31
