Rudyard Kipling

IF ...
Se podes mostrar calma enquanto junto a ti
Todos lançam, perdendo-a, as culpas sobre ti;
Se confias em ti, muito embora de ti
Duvidem os demais, como o fazem de si;
Se podes esperar sem sentir desalento
E não retribuir mentiras declaradas
Nem de outrem o rancor e o seu torpe intento
Sem ostentar bondade em frases afectadas.
Se podes abstrair dos sonhos que sonhaste
E pensar, sem que vivas para isso somente;
Se podes defrontar o triunfo ou desastre
Tratando de impostor um ou outro igualmente;
Se podes ver verdades por ti proclamadas
Deturpadas por maus para lograr o povo
E coisas a que deste a vida, destroçadas
E curvar-te, cansado e fazê-las de novo.
Se podes agarrar os ganhos de uma vida
E num lance, arriscá-los, à sorte dos dados
E perdendo, voltar ao ponto de partida
Sem que, mesmo em segredo, digas teus cuidados;
Se podes obrigar, exaustos pela idade,
Teus orgãos a servir-te, após o que lá vai ...
Quando de ti nada exista além da tua vontade
Que lhes diz: continuai, continuai, continuai ...
Se podes ser honesto, ouvindo toda a gente
E privar com os reis sem perder o à-vontade;
Se, p’ra amigos ou não, podes ser indulgente
Prestável para todos, mas com dignidade;
Se podes empregar o minuto apressado
Em sessenta segundos de fecundo trilho;
O mundo inteiro é teu com tudo nele nado
E mais, mas muito mais: és um HOMEM, meu filho!
Rudyard Kipling
(traduzido por ADÉRITO DE SOUSA)
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,
o
r 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 these two impostors 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 worn-out 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 lovings 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!
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling's Biography
(1865-1936)
Born in Bombay in an artistic and intellectual family, Kipling was educated in England and lived there from six to seventeen. He went back to India in 1882 to take up journalism. He worked for the Civil and Military Gazette at Lahore where his father was the curator of the local museum.
Kipling produced Departmental Ditties in 1886, Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888 and Soldiers Three in 1888. On his return to England, in 1889, he made a rapid progress in the affections of the general reader. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) making wide use of the vigorous and unliterary language of soldiers and common people were universally admired.
After much travelling and prolonged stays in South Africa where he was active in supporting British imperialism and popularising the war against the Boers, Kipling settled in England. His political influence was no less important than his literary reputation. His poetry is best represented in the Seven Seas (1896) and The Five Nations (1903) while his prose, inferior in the novel Many Inventions (1893), the two Jungle Books (1894, 1895), Just So Stories (for children, 1902), Actions and Reactions (1909), Debits and Credits (1926) and many others. For the children he also wrote Captains Courageous (1897), Stalky and Co. (1899), Kim (1901) etc. He was the first writer to get the Nobel prize for short stories.
Kipling's reputation, very high in the nineties, began to decline after the turn of the century and particularly after World War I. Bitterly disappointed in his dreams of Britain's grandeur, he shut himself up in gloomy solitude and though he never left off writing, his books fell stillborn from the press. When he died, he was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, but no man of letters of any distinction took part in the ceremony.
After World War II, however, Kipling began to come into his own. He is more and more widely recognised as a sort of “popular classic”.❐