Penúltimos Días

…es el poema que ha escrito el premio Nobel Derek Walcott contra el también premio Nobel Sir Vidia S. Naipaul. Se llama “La mangosta” y los fragmentos que he podido leer (aquí y aquí y aquí) dejan muy poco a la imaginación. Una evidencia más de que los buenos escritores no están a salvo de las bajas pasiones.
Por si alguien se anima a traducirlo en exclusiva al español, aquí dejo el fragmento:

The Mongoose

I have been bitten. I must avoid infection,
Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.
Read his last novels. You’ll see just what I mean:
A lethargy approaching the obscene.
The model is Maugham, more ho-hum than Dickens.
The essays have more bite. They scatter chickens,
Like critics. But each studied phrase is poison,
Since he has made that sneering style a prison.
Their plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly.
The anti-hero is a prick named Willy,
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence
And whines with his creator’s self-abhorrence.
They are exhausted woods respectfully reading
incestuous the reputation and unreading. (?)
So the old mongoose, still making good money
Is a burnt out comic, predictable, unfunny
The joy of supplements, his minstrel act
Delighting editors endorsing facts
Over fiction, tearing colleagues and betters
To pieces in the name of English letters
The feathers fly, the snow comes drifting down
The mongoose keeps its class act as a clown
It can do cartwheels of exaggeration
Mostly it snivels, proud of being Asian
Of being attached to nothing, race or nation
It would be just as if a corpse took pride in its decay
After its gift had died and off the page its biles exude the stench
of envy, “la pourriture” in French
cursed its first breath for being Trinidadian
then wrote the same piece for the English Guardian
Once he liked humans, how long ago this was
The mongoose wrote “A House for Mr Biswas”

(…)

To show its kindness it clutches a kitten
That looks as if it’s scared of being bitten
Right at the neck; it’s the Mongoose’s nature,
It cannot help that it was born in Asia.

(…)

I thought once all the Mongoose needed
for greatness was compassion, if it had heeded
The gaping wound from all the blades he hated;
And so his name was one I nominated
For the laurel branch. For five years he waited.
India and England were in his citation
Of gratitude, but not the Negroid nation
That nursed his gift…

PD: Aquí pueden escuchar el poema completo, leído por Walcott: