/lit/ - Literature

I feel uncomfortable criticizing English texts because I have a bad knowledge and instinct aesthetic response to the language. I can translate my own texts, but ussualy only literary, with no attention to sound and other effects. My criticism of the works here would be far from commendable.

>This is from the tragedy I am writing. The original is in Portuguese. It is a war speech (a piece of propaganda by the tyrant that is the main character of the work). Apologies for the bad English.

Make every drop of blood in your veins roar,
And that every single gland in your bodies boil in tigers:
War now grunts to you all the avail
- The assent that society and peace deny -
To unlock the deep wells of your instincts
And allow the darkness to climb them.
From the cavers of the mind unless the wolves,
Might the steel armor-plate your hearts and your brains
So that the prays of pity and the cold cheep
Of fear do not penetrate in your spirits:
That both this knots, of veins and of thoughts,
Disentangle their skeins of contradictions
And only the furious famine for victory sing on them.
Oh gods of war, that sculpt with blood
The labyrinths of human destiny,
Honor the sap with which our
Cuts do honor you, and that your records
Embroider tales of glory with the scarlet
Lines of our scars.
Our sacred texts speak of angels,
Well, to me angels are our own young lads
When in the wars they dew blood from their muscles
And drip sweat that smells of cholera.
Yes, this are my angels, the genies in front of whom
My faith knells and my deeply moved
Heart sing hymns, yes, this are my angels,
And not the storks of heaven, greasy
With butter of light and oil of stars,
Effeminate harp players
That dilute the golden eternity
Of their flaccid afternoons drinking champagne
Of ambrosia and eating bonbons of nectar,
Pinky and obese cherubs,
Raspberries that have swollen by eating to much manna bread.
We man have naked, wingless backs,
And only ambition, the fierce hunger
Allow us to fly to the heavens of the eternal.

>>6877421

This is the delirium of a mad man.

"The cold rain is crying and the polar winds whip my flesh, whip my flesh. The cold rain rains, and the clouds are yelling with the earth. The electrical fire of the thunder, the tadpoles of the tempest are debating in the skies: their voice has the smell of sulfur; is there a philosopher, a scholar of the thunder, who can translate what their politics are? What lice are eating the brain of god so that he allows the creation to suffers with so violent diarrhea? The eyes of the stars are rotten and dripping pus, their drool gonorrhea. The sun died, sloughed off in a perpetual eclipse: the eye rolling in the skies is a raisin. The cold rain tweaks, the icy wind stabs. The voice of the breeze in the hawthorn is the howling and lamentation of phantoms, the crying of old entities, and it is so cold, so cold."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RFz9ItaWHo

This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes "Otto Otto" and "Mesmer Mesmer" and "Lambert Lambert," but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.

When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I may still use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred.

For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.