Kathleen Raine: Poesía y naturaleza. Adolfo Gómez Tomé (ed. y tr.) Murcia: Tres Fronteras, 2008.

Cuidadísima antología y traducción de la obra poética de Kathleen Raine a cargo de Adolfo Gómez Tomé. La introducción, además de unas notas biográficas, da las claves elementales para comprender los principios estéticos de la obra de Raine. Creo que pueden resumirse en esta idea, tan próxima a Walt Whitman, extraída de sus Autobiografías:

Estar con otra gente, incluso con mi mejor amiga, significaba ser reducida a la estatura de una niñita con trenzas color pardo y una diadema de terciopelo. Sola, yo era toda la tierra, hasta el horizonte y hasta las profundidades del suelo.

(p. 18)

Expresado de otro modo en el poema The poet and the accuser (The Pythoness,1949):

Water, wind and stone I am, (…)
A note struck by the stars I am,
A memory trace of sun and moon and moving waters,
A voice of the unnumbered dead… 

(pp. 80-83)

Los poemas seleccionados por Gómez Tomé abarcan toda su carrera literaria, desde su primer libro Stone and flower (1943) hasta Living with mistery (1992), añadiendo Uncollected and New Poems.

Me parece interesante comentar, en primer lugar, esta invocación a la inspiración poética al estilo del Ión platónico.

INVOCATION

There is a poem on the way
There is a poem all round me,
The poem is in the near future,
The poem is in the upper air
Above the foggy atmosphere
It hovers, a spirit
That I would make incarnate.
Let my body sweat
Let snakes torment my breast
My eyes be blind, ears deaf, hands distraught
Mouth parched, uterus cut out,
Belly slashed, back lashed,
Tongue slivered into thongs of leather
Rain stones inserted in my breasts
Head severed,
If only the lips may speak,
If only the god will come.

(p. 23)

Stone and flower (1943)

En segundo lugar, The Journey, que celebra el ciclo de la vida, identificando la muerte con un tránsito que siempre se consuma en un renacer de la Belleza. 

THE JOURNEY 

As I went over fossil hill
I gathered up small jointed stones,
And I remembered the archaic sea
Where once these pebbles were my bones.

As I walked on the Roman wall
The wind blew southward from the pole,
Oh I have been that violence hurled
Against the ramparts of the world.

At nightfall in an empty kirk
I felt the fear of all my deaths:
Shapes I had seen with animal eyes
Crowded the dark with mysteries.

I stood beside a tumbling beck
Where thistles grew upon a mound
That many a day had been my home,
Where now my heart rots in the ground.

I was the trout that haunts the pool,
The shadowy presence of the stream.
Of many lives I leave
The scattered bone and broken wing.

I was the dying animal
Whose cold eye closes on a jagged thorn,
Whose carcass soon is choked with moss,
Whose skull is hidden by the fern.

My footprints sink in shifting sand
And barley-fields have drunk my blood,
My wisdom traced the spiral of a shell,
My labour raised a cairn upon a fell.

Far I have come and far must go,
In many a grave my sorrow lies,
But always from dead fingers grow
Flowers that I bless with living eyes.

(pp. 45-47)

The Pythoness (1949)

En tercer lugar, un poema que indaga en los misterios de la teodicea desde una perspectiva muy próxima a la sabiduría del Job del Antiguo Testamento.

POPPY-FLOWER

Today a wondrous hundredfold poppy
With muddled mauve and crimson petals
Has opened at my garden door in once only
Miraculous ephiphany-
And who am I that the creator of numberless worlds
Should send this gift from the inexhaustible treasury?
Today in Persia a mountain shook
Human multitudes with no more concern
Than fallen petals, or stars in galaxies –
And who are we
In that Presence to whom large and small,
Many and one, are alike, are nothing, are all?

(p. 98)

Living with mistery (1992)

Por último, cito un fragmento del extenso poema final en el que Raine expresa un fuerte desencanto respecto a la desacralización del mundo que ha consumado el triunfo de la Técnica.

La única salvación: la purificación por el fuego.

MILLENIAL HYMN TO THE LORD SHIVA

(…)
No fix of science,
Nor amenable god
Can save from ourselves
The selves we have become,
We are all in it,
No one is blameless –
At the end of history
To whom can we pray
But the destroyer,
The liberator, the purifier?

(pp. 127-129)

Uncollected and New Poems

Un libro necesario que da a conocer una voz poética que combina, al modo romántico, ciencia, mito y filosofía.