The Passion — & San Servolo

Hace más de 20 años me citaba Susana Onega en este artículo sobre la novela de Jeanette Winterson The Passion:

Onega, Susana. "The Passion: Jeanette Winterson's Uncanny Mirror of Ink." Miscelánea 14 (1993): 113-30.
    http://www.miscelaneajournal.net/images/stories/articulos/vol14/onega14.pdf
    2014

—curiosamente, en esa novela acaba uno de los protagonistas recluido en lo que en la novela se llama el manicomio veneciano de "St. Servelo"—para enfatizar el tema de la reclusión en el propio cerebro, supongo. The Passion me la leí hacia el año 91, creo. No sabía yo que también acabaría yo pasando una estancia en "the madhouse on the island". An enchanted island for the mad, the rich, the bored, the perverted.

—oOo—

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
of young dog blood gave but a month's desires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death.  From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

(Empson, "Missing dates")

—oOo—