Tres historias y Diez poemas de Hemingway

El 13 de Agosto de 1923 conmemoramos la primera publicación de Ernest Hemingway: Three Stories and Ten Poems. Fue una edición de 300 copias que sdacó a la luz un amigo y compañero expatriado, el editor y escritor Robert McAlmon. Ambos llegaron a París en 1921, Hemingway era un periodista de 22 años, bisoño en temas de publicación, tenía novia y un imperativo: todo lo que tengo que hacer es escribir una frase verdadera. Este primer esfuerzo tuvo lugar en la habitación de su hotel y en los Cafés.

It was a pleasant café, warm clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story….
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

“Up in Michigan” era una de las tres historias de su primer libro. Algunos de los poemas hacían referencia a su infancia en Michigan boyhood too. Ofrecemos “Along with Youth”:

A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow-eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biased twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boys’ letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday’s Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.

En un comentario crítico sobre el libro que apareció en el Tribune de París (27 de Noviembre, 1923), Gertrude Stein concedió a la escritura de Hemingway su aprobación.

I may say of Ernest Hemingway that as he sticks to poetry and intelligence it is both poetry and intelligent…. I should say that Hemingway should stick to poetry and intelligence and eschew the hotter emotions and the more turgid vision. Intelligence and a great deal of it is a good thing to use when you have it, it’s all for the best.