ALICIA OSTRIKER [9881]

Alicia Ostriker

Poeta, crítica y activista Alicia Ostriker nació en 1937 en la ciudad de Nueva York. Obtuvo grados de Brandeis en la Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison. Dos veces finalista del National Book Award, Ostriker ha publicado numerosos libros de poesía, entre ellos The Book of Seventy (2009), que recibió el Premio Nacional del Libro Judío. 

Poesía:

Songs, Holt (New York, NY), 1969.

Once More out of Darkness, and Other Poems, Smith/Horizon Press (New York, NY), 1971, enlarged edition, Berkeley Poets Cooperative (Berkeley, CA), 1974.

A Dream of Springtime, Smith/Horizon Press (New York, NY), 1979.

The Mother/Child Papers, Momentum (Santa Monica, CA), 1980.

A Woman under the Surface: Poems and Prose Poems, Princeton University Press, 1982.

The Imaginary Lover, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986.

Green Age, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.

The Crack in Everything, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

The Volcano Sequence, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.

No Heaven, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

The Book of Seventy, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

OTROS:

Vision and Verse in William Blake, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1965.

(Editor) William Blake: Complete Poems, Penguin (New York, NY), 1977.

Writing like a Woman, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1983.

Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women Poets in America, Beacon, 1986.

Feminist Revision and the Bible, Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1992.

The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1994.

(Author of preface) The Five Scrolls (Old Testament Bible), Vintage (New York, NY), 2000.

Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2000.

For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, Rutgers University Press (Piscataway, NJ), 2008.

Matisse, también

Matisse, también, cuando los dedos dejaron de trabajar

Trabajó más y más audazmente, sus colores primarios celebraron

Los matrimonios de la inocencia y la gloria, la inocencia y la gloria

Monet cuando las cataratas cubrieron sus ojos

Pintó volutas de furia, y cuando su vista se recuperó

Pintó nenúfares, Picasso afirmó

Yo no busco, encuentro, y se adhirió a esa historia

Sobre sí mismo e hizo que la historia se cumpliera.

Malditos los padres. Estamos hablando de rebeldía.

Publicado en Poetry Foundation

Traducido del inglés por Myriam Rozenberg

A Young Woman, A Tree

Passing that fiery tree—if only she could

Be making love,

Be making poetry, 

Be exploding, be speeding through the universe

Like a photon, like a shower

Of yellow blazes— 

She believes if she could only overtake

The riding rhythm of things,

Of her own electrons,

Then she would be at rest

If she could forget school,

Climb the tree,

Be the tree,

Burn like that.

She doesn’t know yet, how could she

That this same need

Is going to erupt every September

And that in 40 years the idea will strike her

From no apparent source,

In a Laundromat

Between a washer and a dryer,

Like one of those electric light bulbs

Lighting up near a character’s head in a comic strip—

There in that naked and soiled place

With its detergent machines,

Its speckled fluorescent lights,

Its lint piles broomed into corners as she fumbles for quarters

And dimes, she will start to chuckle and double over

Into the plastic baskets’

Mountain of wet 

Bedsheets and bulky overalls—

Old lady! She’ll grin,

beguiled at herself,

Old lady! The desire to burn is already a burning! How about that!