[Scene: a closet. There are two characters, Roderigo and Sebastian. Roderigo is inconsequential, since he has nothing to do but listen to Sebastian and then explain – and again explain – what Sebastian has said or done, why he has said it or done it, and wherein so doing it – or saying it – he was wrong. On the other hand Sebastian is the hero of the piece. This may be indicated by hanging a large sign on his chest which says HERO. He should do nothing but talk. I will not have him waving his arms, pacing up and down before the footlights and embracing (or defying) Roderigo. In the first place he simply dislikes Roderigo. In the second place there should be no footlights.]
мой перевод пролога, на большее я не рискну[Сцена: кладовка. Два персонажа, Родриго и Себастиан. Родриго сам значения не имеет, он нужен только чтобы слушать Себастиана и затем толковать - и перетолковывать - что Себастиан сказал или сделал, почему он это сказал или сделал, и, говоря или делая все это - был неправ. С другой стороны Себастиан главный герой в этой пьесе. Это даже неплохо бы подчеркнуть, повесив ему на грудь большую табличку ГЕРОЙ. Все, что он должен делать, это говорить. Никаких взмахов руками, хождения взад-вперед перед рампой, никаких попыток принять (или проигнорировать) Родриго. Во-первых, Родриго ему просто неприятен. А во-вторых - рампы здесь не будет.]
Roderigo
Say that he has these thing: a war, a book,
Stickers all over his trunk;
Shoes on his feet, fish on his hook,
Paper, pen and ink.
Say that he has these things, and say his time
Has been fairly ridden with blessings for a professed
Purveyor of Life -- Life, Life, Life ready for Rhyme
Or Reason, real, raw, earnest, manifest.
For all this he`s not ready
For what he was readied for, but merely
A babe in his woods as the old phrase goes, and still
Wet behind the well-wrought juvenile
Say that these things take time. Not in a day
Was Rome, or Uncle Tom`s Cabin, or Babel built.
Milton`s eyes, Keats` lungs and Miss Millay
Were necessary loss, so much milk split
Before the rarest blossoms in their woods
Emerged that now his haste would nip in the bud.
But say he knows all this, having read the abuse
His questing forebears fumbling all their cues
Suffered from dragons and devils by the gross
Before their fleeces nestled in their mews;
And knows too that no covers in his wood
Will shelter him from Circes others heed.
Old know-it-all, he has already taken
The best advice the best advisers give,
And like the king of kings is cruelly shaken
By the absence of new troubles to conceive.
What does one say, then? Things work out?
It is so hard to deal with a clever man.
Let there be light and there is light --
He, one finds out later, switched it on.
And yet, for all this, all the facts disclose
A wanting of his wisdom when his woods are really his.
Sebastian
A cup each flour and milk, and yoke of egg.
Two parts gin to one part ice. Add mustard.
Three before breakfast, one after meals. Let leg
Soak in tub until custard.
Unroll rug and beat it.
Roll up towel and squeeze.
Gather garbage and heat it
In deep deep freeze.
[Continuing after a dramatic pause ]
[Continuing after a dramatic pause]
I don`t know that I ever had much respect
For even solidest phantom without a past
Or present or future that would project
Him out of his own dirty shirt and vest --
Unless he was mine. The fault has been mine.
What are the buttons and cards that significance wears,
Saying, "I am a member of… I am a sign
Meaning, 'I am a symbol of … my long ears
Say Mule,'" but buttons and cards?
Who is it who is "any of certain birds,
Flightless, aquatic and also known as auk"
But a fool with a white stomach and no neck?
So with this wood. It is all very well to say
"Trees" -- a "dense growth" perhaps -- but mainly "trees."
But for the rest, life`s quis, quo, quid, you may
Leave me out of it, please.
For the process is catching. Give me a Yard,
And I take Space in the gross, which in turn is hard
By Time -- and then what? I was pathetic,
A child in an oxygen tent
Staring at sheets and walls, when my first synthetic
Spasm struck me eloquent.
Rose from my bed, to the window bore, shouted, "yes,
I attribute it all to The Rise of The Middle Class."
From there in swift progression I reduced
The West to Rome and The Many to One,
Leaving open the alternate whereby Christ
Makes three and God`s undone.
Back to my bed; pull the sheets up; tell the nurse
The case in 7 A a writer's curse.
By this I mean…
I have done with me. My hospital and my wood,
Wherein I raged for the cure and the path from the tangle,
Are the myths of mind which never understood
A hospital or wood. Henceforth let such sores rankle
As are honest, and such beasts claw
As may be fixed in the blacked sight of gun.
With the rest, the rant and wrangle, hem and haw,
I have (I repeat for emphasis) done.
I propose a new life. I propose to learn,
If need be, how to walk, talk, read, write and swear,
What to do with a fire, and how to turn
A flank or a penny but never a hair.
I propose to live, do and do and do,
Or anything else at once reasonable and opposed,
In some inoffensive way,
To me before my fuse blew and I buzzed.
Roderigo
Who does not start afresh, turn over leaves
When the pressing grievance grievously him grieves?
Beside himself, who does not, on his uppers,
Wish he were six other duffers?
Here is merely another case of dream
Compensation, something replacing a girl who wasn`t home.
But note the bitterness in his voice, as if he knew
The future, though it must, will never do.
And note his "new life"; through the paint
One sees streaks of matter already spent.
All is not well.
Not even dream is believed; even cravings repel.
Sebastian
Not The Executive Type, nor trained
Bottle Plant Engineer,
I may emerge as Uniformed Guard --
Yang Man, Alert, Austere
And when my Youth, Red-blooded, Blind,
Leaves me, and my Lessons
In Salesmanship, Progressive, end --
Man, Elderly, Errands.
Whatever Duty calls, two Gifts
Will keep me housed and fed.
However Slow and Spiritless,
Aggressive and Well Bred.
The Wide World lies before me. Oaf
Seeks Opening in Life.
Roderigo
The columns of The Times have no regard
For those who scorn them. The Times is hard
On all but earnest Draftsmen, Hackmen, Salesmen,
Brokers, Jewelers, Plasterers and Mailmen
Who have seen their job and done it for the glory
Which is drafts and hacks, the honor which is money.
For Sebastian...
Sebastian
I`ll take a house by a sea
And a cave in the mountains;
Live by the sun and be
Seasoned by the seasons.
A jug of wine, a breadfruit tree
And other
Pastoral props will be
My provender.
Lucy in negligee
And faithful old griffin
My only ties will be
With this earth the life on.
Roderigo
The last time he played pastoral games he vowed
Never to leave the city. His respect
For shepherds and sheep – for that matter, horses and cows –
Remains unlimited but abstract, since he has yet
To find any where he`s plowed.
For him the rocks and stones where Lucy rolls
Make a blurred Connecticut backdrop for curious plays
Having nothing at all to do with rocks and stones
Unless it be granted (I grant it) that Nature reveals
Itself in most fastidious ways
Sebastian
Or – The Army. I`ll go back
To the specificity of orders,
Buckles and hospital corners,
And rise from the ranks of all officers` bar to shake
A battalion or two from bed for night maneuvers.
I`ll be free, free, free in my olive drab
On the shores of The Arsenal
From the rigors of personal
Doubts and disciplines, leaving my least rub
In the hands of a grand old general.
Later I`ll scribble my memoirs – a final report
On Service to Country,
Including a glossary
On sights to be seen in Cork,
And liquors which leveled our troop to a man at Albany.
This is the life.
Barracks and beaches, buttons and bluff.
Roderigo
He hasn`t mentioned the sea yet – Mother,
What in the way of a berth on a sinking schooner
Have you? Have you a vacancy plumbed?
Let him be somewhat pretentiously doomed –
He`ll like it –
To the leathery voices of sea urchins singing "make it
Six feet long and three feet wide,
Deep and durable inside."
For only the sea is his proper soil,
Only the sea his home.
Let a green globular farmer towed by a whale,
A city of bone,
And legions and legions of mackerel
Comprise his army, industry and pastoral.
Sebastian
Who is this carping character standing beside me?
Has he a license to be here? What is he doing
Twisting my words, distorting my meanings, wheezing
Tragedy, tragedy, tragedy?
I am the one to decide, am I not, upon matters
I must decide? I am the one, am I not, to reject
Such plans and resolves of my own as prove suspect?
Let me hear no more. Let American Letters
Puff on somehow on my own poor single track.
To proceed...
The inadequacy of a beetle on its back
Does not unbeetle the beetle. Nor is Zeus
Able to ape forever a swan or a goose.
However well Dr. Jekyll may be received
He should be told that nobody is deceived.
Nature, y`know.
Nature deplores an unnatural cow.
Very well.
And it is unnatural on my part to abuse
That which I am or have been – a beetle? A goose?
Like grafting a tail on a leg of a normal newt
My new life may transmute my skills – as newt? --
To something queer and helpless.
I grant this.
My respect for the named and the known,
The tried and the tested, the parsed and the charted, proscribes
Either three-legged newts or radical two-legged boobs.
I grant too that no graces I may graft
To myself with the contrivances of my craft
Will stick.
Yeats and Houdini are dead, whose trapdoors were not trick.
Indeed, if the truth be known, though the truth be scant,
There is nothing, nothing at all, I will grant.
But this is not (do you understand?) to say
That true newts are custodians of The Way;
That futures lie in the past; that roots
May not be scourges of their shoots.
No, there comes a time in the lives of men and beasts
To throw out last year`s horns and hides and busts.
And so...
And so I am here on this stage today
To say that none of you knows me --
You, Roderigo, sniffing my play,
And you in the loges who nose me.
None knows nuttin, as Lear said
To a grey cat as he queened it.
None knows nuttin, as Job said
To God, who meaned it.
I will surprise you in buckles and sashes,
Wigs and masks and pinks.
I will confound you with rushes and dashes
At breaches, dear friend, and brinks.
Nothing is safe, nothing secure
From powers and passions I store
In secret room behind a secret door.