Poemas inspiradores

Ayer, preparando la entrada, tuve que decidir entre enlazar If para ser leído o para ser escuchado. Encontré una versión que, a pesar de no recitar el poema completo, me gustaba mucho más que la que finalmente enlacé. Sin embargo, al ser un anuncio de un banco y mencionar la crisis me pareció de una ironía excesiva. Aunque quizás esa también fuese una buena razón para utilizar el vídeo.
Lo cierto es que el anuncio pertenece a una serie que lleva por título "Pensamientos que trascienden el tiempo" que forma parte de una campaña de UBS. Me rindo, son demasiado buenos como para no compartirlos. No son sólo los poemas, es la puesta en escena, la forma magnífica en que son recitados, el acompañamiento musical. A continuación, mis tres favoritos, por el momento.

IF
de Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And—which is more—you'll be a Man my son!


Un poema de cabecera. Estoicismo británico para toda una vida. (No está interpretado en su totalidad.)

THE BALLAD OF EAST AND WEST
de Rudyard Kiplin

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!


La sonoridad del poema al ser recitado me parece sublime. Cuatro versos con más fondo del que parece.

INVICTUS
de William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Al parecer Mandela conservó este poema mientras estuvo prisionero, pero más allá de esto, me ha impresionado el saber que Henley escribió el poema desde una cama de hospital. Alan Bates lo recita de forma magistral.

Hay bastantes más.