του Σπύρου Ραυτόπουλου
Το Ουρλιαχτό, θεωρείται ως ένα από τα σημαντικότερα έργα της
αμερικανικής ποίησης. Είναι δημιούργημα του Άλεν Γκίνζπεργκ, του μεγάλου ποιητή
της λεγόμενης γενιάς των μπητ που συχνά αναφέρεται επίσης με τον όρο μπήτνικ.
Στους σημαντικότερους εκπροσώπους του ομώνυμου κινήματος περιλαμβανόταν επίσης
η ηγετική μορφή του Τζακ Κέρουακ (βλ. αντιπροσωπευτικό αφήγημα «Στον δρόμο»)
και ο Ουίλιαμ Μπάροουζ (βλ.
αντιπροσωπευτικό μυθιστόρημα «Γυμνό Γεύμα»).
Οι μπητ που εμφανίστηκαν στις αρχές του 1950 αντιπροσώπευαν
την αμφισβήτηση του κοινωνικοπολιτικού κατεστημένου και την οξεία κριτική της
συμβατικότητας της αμερικανικής ζωής, όντας όχι μόνο με τα κείμενά τους αλλά ως
ένα βαθμό και με τον τρόπο της ιδιωτικής τους ζωής εκπρόσωποι μιας ολόκληρης
γενιάς που αποζητούσε πραγματική ελευθερία. Δήλωναν τολμηρά την αντίθεσή τους
στον στενό κορσέ της κοινωνικής ομαλότητας, ειρωνεύονταν και καυτηρίαζαν την
ηθικολογούσα υποκρισία της αστικής ευταξίας και των κυρίαρχων συντηρητικών
ηθών, ήταν αντίθετοι προς τον στρατιωτικο-βιομηχανικό πολιτισμό, τον πολιτισμό
της καταπίεσης των μειονοτήτων, της καταστροφής και της καταστολής.
Αναζητούσαν
τις πνευματικές τους περιπέτειες αλλά και την καλλιτεχνική τους έμπνευση στις
ψυχότροπες ουσίες, στην τρέλα, στη σεξουαλική απελευθέρωση, στις ανατολικές
φιλοσοφίες, στην τζαζ, την ποίηση, τη λογοτεχνία και στο κοινωνικό περιθώριο με
τους ανθρώπους του. Η μποέμικη ζωή και οι δημιουργίες τους αποτελούν κραυγές
και χειρονομίες μιας απογοητευμένης από το σύστημα γενιάς, που διατηρεί ατόφιο
το κριτικό της πνεύμα, το πνεύμα της διαρκούς ψυχοπνευματικής αναζήτησης, την
περιφρόνησή της για τον μικροαστικό καθωσπρεπισμό και τον ακαδημαϊσμό, την
ανάγκη της για φυσική και πνευματική ελευθερία, περιπλάνηση και περιπέτεια, τη
διάθεσή της για βίωση ακραίων εμπειριών. Τα έργα των μεγάλων του μπητ είναι
συχνά βλάσφημα, προκλητικά και ταυτόχρονα γεμάτα ευαισθησίες και ανθρωπιά.
Τόσο το Ουρλιαχτό όσο και το Γυμνό Γεύμα κατηγορήθηκαν ως
άσεμνα κείμενα -οι δημιουργοί τους άλλωστε ποτέ δεν ισχυρίστηκαν το αντίθετο-
και αρχικά απαγορεύτηκαν. Η κυκλοφορία τους επετράπη λίγο αργότερα μετά από
δικαστική απόφαση που βρήκε ότι τα έργα διέθεταν κάποια κοινωνική αξία. Αρχικά
όμως ο εκδότης τους, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
και ο βιβλιοπώλης Shigeyoshi Murao,
αντιμετώπισαν κατηγορίες και συνελήφθησαν. Και τα τρία έργα θεωρούνται σήμερα
σημαντικοί σταθμοί της παγκόσμιας λογοτεχνίας.
Ο Γκίνζπεργκ αφιερώνει το Ουρλιαχτό του στον συγγραφέα Κάρλ Σόλομον, με τον οποίον γνωρίστηκαν σε ψυχιατρικό νοσοκομείο, το οποίο στο
ποίημα αναφέρεται ως Rockland.
Ο Γκίνζπεργκ στο ποίημα αναφέρεται και απευθύνεται στον Σόλομον συμπάσχων, συνταυτιζόμενος,
αλληλέγγυος. Άλλωστε ολόκληρο το τρίτο
μέρος του ποιήματος αναφέρεται στην παραφροσύνη του Σόλομον, που συχνά τραβάει
μαζί της και τον ίδιο τον Γκίνζπεργκ, αναφέρεται στον τρόμο για την απάνθρωπη
αντιμετώπισή της τρέλας εντός και εκτός ιδρύματος, για το αδυσώπητο κράτος που
βομβαρδίζει την ψυχοπνευματική και κοινωνική διαφορετικότητα, για τον κόσμο που
βομβαρδίζεται από την ίδια την πολιτικοκοινωνική παραφροσύνη του.
Μεταφράσεις του ποιήματος στα ελληνικά:
http://iliaskourakos.blogspot.gr/2012/02/blog-post_15.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/53679284/Wohl-%CE%9F%CF%85%CF%81%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%B1%CF%87%CF%84%CF%8C
Howl
By Allen Ginsberg
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the
tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw
Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning
their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree
cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of
teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations
in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride
from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children
brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all
drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s
floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s,
listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad
to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists
jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out
of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and
memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and
wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven
days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the
pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings
and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished
room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars
racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross
telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their
feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking
visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed
in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma
on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse
about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry
scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI
in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out
incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down,
and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and
trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with
delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking
pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the
sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in
rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen
freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked
angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of
fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that
winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her
ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and
continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls
trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to
sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in
the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen
night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt
waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially
secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements
hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams &
stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full
of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blur floodlight of the moon &
their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with
flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their
ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads
every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively
unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they
thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of
the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies
of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were
run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually
happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of
Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all
over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records
of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up
groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal
steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz
incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if
I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came
back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded
& loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now
Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated
its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts
who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black
locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of
hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung
jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of
insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy
pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the
madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the
midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic
book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and
the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful
little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a
variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2
visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose
and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet
putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind
for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the
cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their
skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and
unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in
armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings
are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose
breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch
whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose
factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae
crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of
genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is
the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am
a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural
ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the
sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations!
invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!
Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is
everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the
whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and
suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to
solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland
where you’ve murdered your twelve
secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same
dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious
and is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no
longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of
the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your
nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that
you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the
soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return
your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity
and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long
Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad
comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States
under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us
sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the
coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop
angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls
collapse O skinny legions run outside O
starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O
victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a
sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in
the Western night
San
Francisco, 1955—1956
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” from Collected Poems, 1947-1980. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Used with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: Selected Poems 1947-1995 (HarperPerennial, 2001)
Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου