[Элеанора]

Спасибо за информацию, Dariushka.

Сегодня попался мне на глаза фрагмент, который очень-очень зацепил. Тут же захотелось перевести. Выложу-ка я его и собственный перевод (не судите строго, писалось на вдохновении и почти не правилось), а если это уже публиковалось, то можно будет и убрать.

Viggo wrote the introduction to the book The Best American Nonrequired Reading – 2004.
I recently had the unfortunate experience of losing practically everything I'd written during the last three years. As I was in the process of moving from one house to another, my car was loaded with boxes of books, clothes, kitchen utensils, and all the usual household appliances and sacks of hurriedly packed scraps of letters, papers, drawings, photos, soaps, music, hood ornaments, lucky sticks and stones, spurs, superfluous combs, and outdated to-do lists.
While I was carrying some of this debris into the new house, someone broke the passenger-side window of my car and grabbed the backpack containing several notebooks I'd filled, since early 2001, with handwritten stories and poems.
The backpack also contained a couple of journals, two screenplays, my passport, and two half-read books. The hardest losses were the stories and poems in the notebooks. I had been looking forward, in particular, to reviewing and fine-tuning hundreds of pages of, for me, uncharacteristically long an unguarded poetry that had been written during a series of very quiet nights spent in the Sahara desert in late 2002. During that time, for various reasons, I had begun writing extended pieces using a lot of abstract imagery and fragmented recollections from my childhood, combined with the rush of sensory impressions I was receiving while living and working in Morocco.
The thick white pages of the notebooks from that time were grimy, stained red from the dust near Ouarzazate, yellow from Erfoud and Merzouga, brown and gray from my hands and the ashes of campfires and cigarettes, dog-eared, black with grease. They held sandstorms, camels, gargles, vulture, Arabic songs, calls to prayer, prayer rugs, tea, coffee, tent flaps. The reeked of diesel, were alive with flies, fossils, heat waves, goats, soldiers, scorpions, unseen women, donkeys, date palms, doves, hawks, vipers, new or decaying gardens, graveyards, city walls, mosques, stables, wells, fortresses and schools.
This was the start of a long-overdue cataloguing of buried memories of plants and their names, horses, car accidents, lightning, pet lizards, parts of arguments between my parents, illnesses, sheep; of fish caught, lost, released, cleaned, cooked, spied in rivers, ponds, lakes, eaten, rotting, struggling, dying, or dead. In those notebooks could be found faces of teachers I've had, of policemen, children, and old people suffering, giggling, sleeping, or otherwise lingering in emergency rooms, bus stations, on street corners, walking or standing on traces of roads or tracks through harsh deserts, prairies, icescapes, or urban wastelands. Here were all the toy soldiers, ineffective windshield wipers, first tastes of chocolate, wine, asparagus, venison, trout, chalk, ants, a Big Mac, dirt, dandelion stem, unsweetened yerba mate, duck, beer, snow, blood...
As the world was girding itself for the obviously imminent invasion of Iraq by the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing," a growing sense of urgency could be felt even out there in the idyllic stillness of the North African dunes under ridiculously starry skies. That, as well as the effects of working all day in the sun on horseback with Moroccan, Spanish, French, English and Americans colleagues, probably put me in an unusual state of mind each night as I sat eagerly scribbling in relative silence and welcome isolation. I'm not trying to go into travel diary mode, just trying to briefly describe a place and time that I was lucky to be in and that provided me with a lot of energy and inspiration.
Words were everywhere I looked, filling dreams, giving me names for everything. It was all I could do to keep up with them, catch a few as they drifted through me, fell now and then from clouds, from my eyes to the table, onto my lap or became tangled in horses' manes. Most of the words got away, as they usually will, but at night I regularly managed to gather them in bunches. The many handwritten poems that came out of that experience were what I most was looking forward to tackling in my new home in California. That is why the backpack containing those notebooks was on the top of the carload of belonging, leaning against the passenger-side window, in plain view for any potential passing thief. Out of my sight for perhaps five minutes, and then gone forever.
I spent a lot of time and effort in the following weeks scouring my part of town, looking through trash cans and alleyways, offering no-questions-asked rewards, doing anything I could think of to find what was irreplaceable for me and probably completely useless to whoever had stolen it. Finally, I let most of it go, knowing I would never be able to recreate what had been written far from home in that exhausted but uniquely productive state of mind. It does not matter where any of it was written, or whether any of it was as valuable as I remember it being. What had taken its place was the painful sense of losing ideas, forgetting unlikely swervings, unexpected matings and applications of words. Just as I've recently had the scary but hopefully temporary experience of not being able to see very clearly -- because of the conjunctivitis -- I now was faced with the alarming reality that newly captured and arranged impressions were gone.
Patches of recorded feelings vanished, irretrievable. There is no point in trying to remember and rebuild the word houses, word hills, word dams, or word skeletons like some sort of archeology project. There may be pieces I recall or inadvertently retell, but every word will be new, will go somewhere, will die no matter what I might do to tame or hold it.
You have, for whatever reason, continued to read up to this point in spite of the clearly presented options to do something else with your time many words ago. This nonrequired introduction has no doubt become so predictable, so obviously overstated in its meandering, that it might as well be required. Before I get any more entangled in this trap, I'll leave you with the following from the writer Paul la Cour:
"Being a poet is not writing a poem, but finding a new way to live."
Viggo Mortensen.