By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

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Todo está condensado en esas diez fotografías sacadas del álbum de Elizabeth y George: los nervios del primer encuentro; la exaltación de la felicidad, de la belleza y la juventud que no pueden desperdiciarse sin amor; la feminidad desbordada; el orgullo de sentirse amada; el dolor y la desesperación en los momentos de separación; la espera interminable; el rechazo de los demás. For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action. okay, so i have been really sad for a couple of days now. and i have reread great swathes of this book under the influence of my own ragged emotions.and i am ashamed to admit that i like it more now. i have to keep the two-stars for that is how i felt when i really read it, but might i suggest reading this when you are in the throes of some sort of emotional tidal wave?? it was not meant for happy eyes. although there still isn't any shame copulating with any houseflies here at my place. I will mention the references to the Songs of Solomon, how the depth of their nuance add to the lyrical movement of this classic piece; how I was pleasantly surprised to see these familiar words presented in this book :

This is about love, desperation, and mental disparity (contemplated suicide also plays a role here). It is beautiful and disjointed; somber, yet hopeful; trenchant, yet gracious, and articulate, but at times, also reticent. a b c Barton, Laura (March 6, 2013). "The poems and punch-ups of By Grand Central Station". The Guardian. London . Retrieved September 8, 2019. Cada una de las diez partes en que se divide En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré es como una imagen aislada; diez instantáneas tomadas en distintos momentos de la relación de Elizabeth Smart con el poeta George Barker. Y aunque estas imágenes, casi abstractas en ocasiones, transmiten con viveza los sentimientos de su autora, el relato de su relación con Barker apenas se puede seguir en el texto.Under the redwood tree my grave was laid, and I beguiled my true love to lie down. The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship. My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy. The winds boomed triumph, our spines seemed overburdened, and our bones groaned like old trees, but a smile like a cobweb was fastened across the mouth of the cave of fate. The first novella is so perfect that the second one feels unnecessary. It's sort of the sequel, the and then this stuff happened, but it feels unwanted in the book. The first novella had everything and I thought this will be awesome, it will be more of the greatness. But it's not as good. It's not that "The Assumption of Rogues & Rascals" is bad, it's quite good actually, but it's not of the same caliber as the first piece. But with or without us, the Day itself must return, we insist, when the Joke at least sits basking in the sun, decorating her idle body with nameless red, once blood.

The first piece in this book is an autobiographical-ish story of the authors love for the poet George Barker. She totally falls in love with him before even meeting him and sets him up to move from England to America and they fall in love and they have a bunch of kids together. There only hitch in this storybook romance is that George Barker is married to another woman, whom he stays married too. I don't know what his wife knew, what the arrangements were, but this wasn't a Henry & June kind of arrangement. This was a woman totally in love with this poet and basically giving her life to him and only getting to be the second most important woman in his life. The first piece is about the feelings of being in love with someone attainable but not fully attainable. The second piece is about living without the person, in a foreign country, during a war with a few kids by the person. The second piece takes a while to get going, it's not until after the scene is set of life during and immediately after wartime that Smart finds her stride and really gets going. The voice of the first half of the book was varied. Now it is tired. It is bitter. It doesn't see the world through the eyes of a romantic poem, even a tragic one but sees the ugliness now. In the first part she wouldn't have seen a rose and say: Philosophy, like lichens, takes centuries to grow and is always ignored in the Book of Instructions. If you can’t Take It, Get Out. For some of the people / some of the times, I mean (being old enough to know those who have made it into something sustainable).What I really liked about this piece, is the serene melancholy written with precious meticulousness: Anarchist Surrealism & Canadian Apocalyptic Modernism: Allusive Political Praxis in Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept" by James Gifford Aun sin tener la cultura necesaria para exprimir todo el sentido a las múltiples referencias, relaciones y citas que incluye, la obra puede disfrutarse como lo que es, una dramática y lírica plegaria por un amor complicado. Un libro carente de línea argumental, a veces caótico, siempre exigente y extraordinario, y sí, por momentos, oscuro e inescrutable (¡Ay esa parte siete!). Pero no es necesario entender cada frase, cada párrafo para captar y aprehender y saborear la fuerza del sentimiento que trasmite, la tragedia que retrata. El libro es el alma de su autora. De lo exterior, de los hechos, solo podemos hacernos una nebulosa idea: suficiente. Allí mismo comenzó un apasionado y tormentoso romance plagado de encuentros y separaciones; la primera de ellas cuando Elizabeth se quedó embarazada en 1941 y tuvo que volver a su casa en Canadá. Sus padres no comprendieron sus sentimientos y emplearon sus influencias para impedir que Barker pudiera entrar en el país, acusándole de “conducta inmoral”. Pero Elizabeth no estaba dispuesta a darse por vencida y, en plena guerra, siguió a su amado hasta Inglaterra, donde continuaron su particular relación durante años, sin que Barker terminara nunca de decidirse entre su mujer y Elizabeth, una indecisión que no le impidió tener otros tres hijos con ella. De hecho, el pobre George tuvo hasta quince hijos con diferentes mujeres.

What hand of fate placed this book in my path after I'd finished a long series of Muriel Spark books I do not know. All I know is that I found myself taking this book home and loving it all evening, and all through the next day, and when I reached the end, I started loving it all over again from the beginning, this time reveling in the difference between it and Spark's books. Where Spark is all concision, Smart is all excess, where Spark is firm and trim, Smart is soft and yielding. I didn't know I needed this excess of words, this soft pulpy innerness, but I did. I see now that I was thirsty for writing that had feelings and heart instead of control and cleverness. I just didn't know it. The novel has been referenced many times by the British singer Morrissey. The title was adapted by the band The Kitchens of Distinction in the song "On Tooting Broadway Station". oh, yeah?? is that what shame does?? it copulates with houseflies, does it?? gosh, i hope the maggot gets shame's eyes...i have no patience for this sort of thing.One day, while browsing in a London bookshop, Elizabeth Smart chanced upon a slim volume of poetry by George Barker – and fell passionately in love with him through the printed word. Eventually they communicated directly and, as a result of Barker’s impecunious circumstances, Elizabeth Smart flew both him and his wife from Japan, where he was teaching, to join her in the United States. Thus began one of the most extraordinary, intense and ultimately tragic love affairs of our time. They never married but Elizabeth bore George Barker four children and their relationship provided the impassioned inspiration for one of the most moving and immediate chronicles of a love affair ever written – ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’. Y en cada una de esas etapas, esta tormenta de emociones queda enmarcada dentro de un triángulo amoroso omnipresente, en el que la relación entre ambas mujeres –la rivalidad, la admiración, la culpa– es tan importante como las otras dos. A pesar de los esfuerzos de la familia de la autora para que el libro no viese la luz, en los círculos literarios de Nueva York y Londres terminó por convertirse en una obra de culto. Se volvió a publicar en 1966 y, en esta ocasión, su inmediato éxito permitió a Elizabeth Smart dedicarse por fin una carrera literaria que había comenzado a los diez años y que sus pasiones habían truncado.