23-04-2018: Aula 16
23 Abril 2018, 10:00 • Susana Valdez
Correção da tradução de um excerto da obra contemporânea Bird by Bird. Some instructions on Writing and Life da autora Anne Lamott (ver documento na Plataforma de Elearning). Principais problemas micro identificados:
- I
grew up around a father and a mother who read every chance they got, who took
us to the library every Thursday night to load up on books for the coming week.
- Most
nights after dinner my father stretched out on the couch to read, while my
mother sat with her book in the easy chair and the three of us kids each
retired to our own private reading stations.
- Our
house was very quiet after dinner—unless, that is, some of my father’s writer
friends were over.
My father was a writer, as were most of the men with whom he hung out.
They were not the quietest people on earth, but they were mostly very masculine and kind.
Usually in the afternoons, when that day’s work was done, they hung out at the no name bar in Sausalito, but sometimes they came to our house for drinks and ended up staying for supper.
I loved them, but every so often one of them would pass out at the dinner table. I was an anxious child to begin with, and I found this unnerving.
Many years passed before I realized that he did this by choice, for a living, and that he was not unemployed or mentally ill.
But the idea of spending entire days in someone else’s office doing someone else’s work did not suit my father’s soul. I think it would have killed him. He did end up dying rather early, in his mid-fifties, but at least he had lived on his own terms.
He could go anyplace he wanted with a sense of purpose.
Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
He taught the prisoners and me to put a little bit down on paper every day, and to read all the great books and plays we could get our hands on.
He taught us to be bold and original and to let ourselves make mistakes, and that Thurber was right when he said, "You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards."
But while he helped the prisoners and me to discover that we had a lot of feelings and observations and memories and dreams and (God knows) opinions we wanted to share, we all ended up just the tiniest bit resentful when we found the one fly in the ointment: that at some point we had to actually sit down and write.