Innanzitutto chi è Goran Simic. E' un poeta/scrittore bosniaco-canadese e basta XD se volete saperne di più andate sul suo sito ufficiale, QUI
Detto ciò, passiamo ad Alan. Il 12 dicembre 2001 all'Apollo Theatre a Londra, nell'ambito dell'International Writers' Season of The Orange Word, un festival letterario sponsorizzato dalla Orange, Alan Rickman recita alcune poesie del suddetto Goran Simic, che sono:
- Dogs and Bones - Beginning After Everything - Christmas - Sarajevo Spring.
As part of The Word Festival held in London recently, Alan Rickman was asked to read a selection of Goran Simic's poems during an evening dedicated to war poetry. Goran Simic is a Bosnian writer currently living in Canada who has written harrowing and bitter poetry about his experiences in Sarajevo. Not having copies, I can't now remember all the poems' horrors (though the title of one, Sprinting from the Graveyard, makes me shiver), but they were stories of burying friends, dogs running wild and canny in the streets, the terror of opening your eyes in case you saw anything, and the utterly numbing yet howlingly painful sense of despair caused by war and the direct experience of war.
Mr Rickman was the first actor to read and, after being introduced by the Festival's Director Peter Florence, he strode across the stage to the microphone and our applause, all dressed in black, a solemn, almost sultry expression on his face. Well, he was about to give us some pretty serious stuff. He announced the title of the first poem and then started to read. And totally disappeared.
It's the only way I can describe it. As soon as he began to read, I was no longer aware of Alan Rickman standing on stage, reading, acting, performing. All I was aware of was the power of words that seemed not to have been crafted to perfection years previously, but that were being spoken freshly here for the first time. There was nothing else to be aware of. If I had been seated alone in a tiny room with the person who had experienced these terrible things, listening to him as he felt his way into an expression of his raw-meat memories, the impact could not have been greater. The voice was so full of passion, yet so empty and flat, so angry and violent and yet so despairing and hopeless, that after just some 7 minutes, we were emotionally limp and drained and wrung out.
And then, after three poems, Mr Rickman smiled (very briefly), said "thank you" very quietly, and came back to us just in time to leave the stage to absolute and stunned applause. It was a most bizarre experience, yet a very profound one, and its power resulted not only from the actual force of the words themselves, but from this actor's ability to be so entirely 'there' when performing that he is not 'there' at all. He became, as it were, a transparency for what the poet wanted to say, rather than a performer of it. He let his mouth be shaped by the words, rather than shaping them himself.
Only the very finest actors could dare to do such a thing: to surrender themselves completely and still retain command of the situation (which, of course, he did at all times). He allowed us to lose our sense of him, but at no time did he lose his sense of himself. I've heard a lot of poetry read over the years, but never like that. If you ever get the chance to hear Alan Rickman read, grab it without hesitation, whether he's reading Dante's Inferno or yesterday's shopping list. You won't regret it.
Questo un video con la sua meravigliosa voce
Questi i testi delle poesie.
Dogs and Bones
After a few days of war the Sarajevo streets were a catwalk for dogs: perfumed dogs, well-groomed dogs, dogs with cut-glass collars and not a flea between them. Their owners had left them as they left the burning city. The trash-heaps became a battlefield where the lapdogs lost to an army of strays, lean-limbed and mangy with hate. Cowering and cleansed, the back-alley refugees retreated to the doorways of locked apartments, barking in answer to each unearthly whistle as the morning shells came in.
...one of those locked apartments where we kicked down the door, searching for a bastard sniper and found the skeleton of an old woman fused to a kitchen chair, yes, merged with the wood. She had starved to death sitting next to a pantry crammed with cans of food. We spent a long time debating the crucial issue of her religion. Yackety-yack. We could get no clue from the photos that littered the place, or the needlepoint of a knight and castle, or the hundred bottles of perfume placed around her bed. Her piously folded hands remained a secret. It was dawn before the argument died out and we carred her into the street where dogs were fighting amid the garbage-- nothing they wouldn't risk, nothing they wouldn't eat. Who cares, anyway? Who knows whether she even believed in God? 'By God, God will find his hands full after this war," someone said, and we fell silent, pretending not to see her silly grin, and the sudden silver glint of the can-opener on its chain around her neck.
Beginning After Everything
After I buried my mother (under fire, I sprinted from the graveyard)
after the soldiers came with my brother wrapped in tarp (I gave them back his gun)
after the fire in the eyes of my children as they ran to the cellar (the rats ran ahead of them)
after I wiped the old woman’s face with a dishtowel (terrified to reveal a face I knew)
after the ravenous dog feasting on blood (just another corpse in snipers’ alley)
after everything
I wanted to write poems like newspaper reports, so heartless, so cold, that I could forget them, forget them in the same moment that someone might ask me, ‘Why do you write poems like newspaper reports?’
Christmas
'I'm blind,' I say. I don't speak again for a very long time. Of course, I'm lying about being blind: if I look out of the window, to where the children are singing carols, I see how the snow seems to fetch a rainbow; I see frozen songbirds fall from the branches; I see a butcher haul a slaughtered lamb down the street. It is night. An icon burns in the stove. There's a seamless drone from the airport that makes me want to weep. 'I am blind,' I say, 'I am blind.' She doesn't say a word. She beats the Devil's tattoo on the tabletop. 'I've forgotten,' I whisper. I don't speak again for a very long time. Of course, I'm lying about having forgotten: I think back to hoofprints in the snow and dogs on a leash. It was a manhunt. I remember my father laughed when I barked at the birds. 'Have you ever noticed how a vacuum-cleaner sounds like a plane in take-off, or how a TV left on too long will fix a room with a hot and heavy smell? Have you noticed the depth of frost?' I ask her. 'Have you noticed this incredible frost at all?' She's got nothing to say for herself. She might not have heard. I won't speak again. I'll sit here and watch the traffic lights adapting endlessly to whatever's best. That's me, I'm just like that. A whole universe buzzed above the control tower: isn't that strange? Fish in the depths are strange--the way they live. The smell of hay in an orchard is too strange for words. Now and then, someone winks from the bottle: the genie, the Puck of plum brandy. 'Can you see me?' I ask. 'Can you see me any jot of me, any tittle?' She nods, but of course she's lying. As if I cared, as if she could understand the half of what I say.
Sarajevo Spring
It is spring again. The spring is coming. It is coming in on crutches. Swallows nest in the ruins. Someone has strung a clothes-line in the graveyard and a hundred diapers semaphore the wind. Peace surprised us: we needed more time to pretend we deserved it, more time to be 'the survivors', as if we had plans, as if we knew what next, as if our dreams were not all of seagulls and the sea. Peace is like a virus, a light fever. Peace makes our Sunday suits restless; it makes our shoes shuffle. Soldiers wander the streets legless on slivovitz asking, 'What next? What next?' They won't go home to collect their demob papers, they won't hand in their uniforms; well, what did you expect? They needed more time, more time like the boy we carred feet first from the movie-house, wiped out by a happy ending. like our neighbors, who've clean forgotten how to keep a good row going; like our local hero, a four-hundred-metre man, who sits all day by the running track in his wheelchair as if it might suddenly come to him: what next. Soon it will be medals and flags, a coat of whitewash for the orphanage walls. The children carry family albums with them wherever they go. My friend carries a child's winter glove. I think he needs more time for this, more time, I think peace has made us less than ourselves, and spring is coming hobble- clop, hobble-clop, hobble-clop
