The Selected Short Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

Lançamentos

Se existe autora cuja obra eu gostaria de possuir por inteiro, é sem sombra de dúvida, a obra completa de Ursula K. Le Guin, a minha escritora preferida. Cada vez que sai uma colecção nova dela, desejava poder comprá-la. Infelizmente, a minha situação financeira não o permite, mas aqui está mais uma colecção que gostaria de ver nas minhas estantes um dia. Para quem gosta de edições especiais com caixas, este The Selected Short Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin reúne alguns dos seus melhores contos e novellas em dois volumes: The Unreal and the Real e The Found and the Lost. A publicação é da Saga Press em Hardcover e a caixa com os dois volumes sai a 15 de Novembro de 2016.

Part I: Where On Earth

Introduction

“Brothers and Sisters”

“A Week in the Country”

“Unlocking the Air”

“Imaginary Countries”

“The Diary of the Rose”

“Direction of the Road”

“The White Donkey”

“Gwilan’s HarpMay’s Lion”

“Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight”

“Horse Camp”

“The Water Is Wide”

“The Lost Children”

“Texts”

“Sleepwalkers”

“Hand, Cup, Shell”

“Ether, Or”

“Half Past Four”

Part II: Outer Space, Inner Lands

Introduction

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“Semley’s Necklace”

“Nine Lives”

‘Mazes”

“The First Contact With the Gorgonids”

“The Shobies’ Story”

“Betrayals”

“The Matter of Seggri”

“Solitude”

“The Wild Girls”

“The Fliers of Gy”

“The Silence of the Asonu”

“The Ascent of the North Face”

“The Author of the Acacia Seeds”

“The Wife’s Story”

“The Rule of Names”

“Small Change”

“The Poacher”

“Sur”

“She Unnames Them”

“The Jar of Water”

Vaster than Empires and More Slow

Buffalo Gals, WonÕt You Come Out Tonight

Hernes

The Matter of Seggri

Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea

Forgiveness Day

A Man of the People

A Woman’s Liberation

Old Music and the Slave Women

The Finder

On the High Marsh

Dragonfly

Paradises Lost

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (84)

I don’t know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven’t seen that. But I know they don’t spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.

The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (83)

For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.

The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (82)

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.

The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (81)

The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune, and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.

The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (80)

I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups - clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It's a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you're not with it. That's a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? With them. With the others. All together. Safety in numbers. I'm not me. I'm a basketball letter. I'm a popular kid. I'm my friend's friend. I'm a black leather growth on a Honda. I'm a member. I'm a teenager. You can't see me, all you can see is us. We're safe. And if We see You standing alone by yourself, if you're lucky we'll ignore you. If you're not lucky, we might throw rocks. Because we don't like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their jeans reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe.

Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (79)

The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasn’t exactly a modest ambition. But what I had learned from Natalie was that you could have a very immodest ambition if you went after it methodically.

Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (78)

She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be.

Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (77)

And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.

Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (76)

Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.

Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin recebe "Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters" nos National Book Awards

São poucos os autores que me conseguiram cativar em tão pouco tempo, mas Ursula K. Le Guin está no topo da minha lista. Em apenas três anos, tornou-se na autora que mais leio e, definitivameente, na minha preferida. Neil Gaiman (que fica no segundo lugar nas categorias que acabei de mencionar), apresentou a autora nos National Book Awards, que recebeu a "Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters". Na sua apresentação, Neil Gaiman fala de The Wizard of Earthsea, que leu na infância e de The Left Hand of Darkness que leu apenas com 12 anos, do estilo tão limpo da autora, das suas palavras tão precisas e bem escolhidas, dos seus ensaios, da forma como ela o ajudou a ser um escritor e uma pessoa melhor. Da ficção à não-ficção, da fantasia à ficção científica, da escrita infantil à escrita para adultos, ou à ficção de mainstream, Ursula K. Le Guin, é uma escitora com grandes ideias e ideais, é uma gigante na literatura. 

No seu discurso de aceitação, Ursula K. Le Guin, fez questão de relembrar os seus colegas da fantasia e da ficção científica que, muitas vezes esquecidos, viram os prémios literários a ser entregues aos chamados "realistas":

I rejoice in accepting it for and sharing it with all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long: my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction. Writers of the imagination who, for the last fifty years, watched the beautiful awards go to the so-called "realists".

A autora salientou os tempos difíceis que se avizinham para os escritores em termos do mercado e da arte da escrita, lançando um aviso sobre o poder do capitalismo e apelando à resistência nem que seja através das palavras, acabando o discurso relembrando que o prémio dos escritores e das editoras não deve ser o lucro, mas sim a liberdade:

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries - the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art...

The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings... Resistance and change often begins in art, and very often, in our art - the art of words.
 

I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want - and should demand - our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Abaixo, fica o vídeo completo com a apresentação de Neil Gaiman e o discurso de Ursula K. Le Guin, que merece inteiramente esta distinção por uma carreira diversificada e absolutamente cheia de talento em todas as áreas a que se dedicou ao longo da vida:

Neil Gaiman presents lifetime achievement award to Ursula K. Le Guin at 2014 National Book Awards from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (45)

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (44)

On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly. "There has never been a war." In her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief. So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.

Four Ways to Forgiveness, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (42)

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.

The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (41)

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin 

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (38)

All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing—the one true thing!

 

The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (33)

A solidão é a morte da alma: o homem é a humanidade, como costumamos dizer. Mas também dizemos, nunca confies em ninguém a não ser no teu irmão ou numa pessoa que conheças desde o berço. É essa a nossa lei e é a única que é segura.

A Cidade das Ilusões, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (32)

We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.” 

 

The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (29)

To die was merely to go on in another direction.

...

If you wanted to come home you had to keep going on, that was what she meant when she wrote "true journey is return", but it had never been more than an intuition.

"The Day Before the Revolution", Ursula K. Le Guin

Deliciosa Leitura Fantástica (28)

As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin