Joao Cabral de Melo

Education by Stone

About the Selection and Translation

João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poetry was at its strongest between 1950 and 1980, and the selection presented here is weighted accordingly. His last book, Sevilha Andando, was published in 1989. João Cabral said he imagined writing poems that could only be read silently, and he claimed to be incapable of writing poetry without seeing the words on the page. In fact he quit writing it after he went blind, in the 1990s, and he described himself to reporters as an “ex-writer.”

Rather than offering excerpts from the author’s various long narrative poems, two such poems are presented in their entirety. Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of sections from Morte e Vida Severina [The Death and Life of a Severino] are included in her The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969) and in João Cabral’s Selected Poetry, 1937–1990 (Wesleyan, 1994).

The Afterword examines João Cabral’s poetics and discusses a number of the poems translated here. Lest readers imagine that some words were accidentally left out, let it be noted that a few poems —“The Dog without Feathers,” “Weaving the Morning” and “Banks and Cathedrals” are examples — employ syntactical ellipses, a device that I have usually tried to replicate in the translation.

Ten of the translations in this volume were first published, with some significant differences, in the Wesleyan Selected. Others were published in Paris Review, Grand Street, The Atlantic, Partisan, The New England Review, Chicago Review, and World Literature Today. Much of the Afterword was adapted from an article on João Cabral de Melo Neto published in Latin American Writers, Supplement I, Scribner’s, 2002. Readers may refer to that article for a fuller treatment of the poet and his work, as well as a bibliography.

Acknowledgments

I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting this project with a translation grant in 1985. I also thank the Endowment for its patience. The John Anson Kittredge Educational Fund kindly provided a supplementary grant. It was David Haberly who encouraged me to do an entire book and to apply for funding.

Dora Feiguin, Elizabeth Marques, Manuela Rocha and Marcia Rodrigues graciously clarified difficult passages. Several people who provided practical help or moral support are no longer with us: Frank MacShane, Haroldo de Campos, and the poet himself, João Cabral de Melo Neto, who said he hated to see translations of his poetry into languages he knew. He tolerated me anyway.

R.Z.

Education by Stone

Selected Poems

from Pedra do sono / Stone of Sleep 1942

Janelas

Há um homem sonhando

numa praia; um outro

que nunca sabe as datas;

há um homem fugindo

de uma árvore; outro que perdeu

seu barco ou seu chapéu;

há um homem que é soldado;

outro que faz de avião;

outro que vai esquecendo

sua hora seu mistério

seu medo da palavra véu;

e em forma de navio

há ainda um que adormeceu.

Windows

There’s a man dreaming

on a beach, another

who never remembers dates.

There’s a man running away

from a tree, another missing

his boat or his hat.

There’s a man who’s a soldier,

another who acts like an airplane,

another who keeps forgetting

his time his mystery

his fear of the word veil.

And there’s yet another who,

stretched out like a ship, fell asleep.

Poesia

Ó jardins enfurecidos,

pensamentos palavras sortilégio

sob uma lua contemplada;

jardins de minha ausência

imensa e vegetal;

ó jardins de um céu

viciosamente freqüentado:

onde o mistério maior

do sol da luz da saúde?

Poetry

O raging gardens,

thoughts words sorcery

under a contemplated moon,

O gardens of my vast

vegetable absence,

gardens of an enchanting,

addictive sky:

where is the larger mystery

of light the sun health?

O poema e a água

As vozes líquidas do poema

convidam ao crime

ao revólver.

Falam para mim de ilhas

que mesmo os sonhos

não alcançam.

O livro aberto nos joelhos

o vento nos cabelos

olho o mar.

Os acontecimentos de água

põem-se a se repetir

na memória.

Water and the Poem

The poem’s liquid voices

lure me to crime

to a revolver.

They tell me of islands

not even dreams

can reach.

With open book on my knees

and wind in my hair

I look at the sea.

What happens in water

starts repeating

in memory.

from O engenheiro / The Engineer 1945

A bailarina

A bailarina feita

de borracha e pássaro

dança no pavimento

anterior do sonho.

A três horas de sono,

mais além dos sonhos,

nas secretas câmaras

que a morte revela.

Entre monstros feitos

a tinta de escrever,

a bailarina feita

de borracha e pássaro.

Da diária e lenta

borracha que mastigo.

Do inseto ou pássaro

que não sei caçar.

The Dancer

The dancer made

of rubber and bird

dances on the floor

before the dream.

Three hours into sleep,

beyond all dreams,

in the secret chambers

which death reveals.

Among monsters made

with writing ink,

the dancer made

of rubber and bird.

Of the slow and daily

eraser I chew.

Of the insect or bird

I cannot catch.

O engenheiro

A luz, o sol, o ar livre

envolvem o sonho do engenheiro.

O engenheiro sonha coisas claras:

superfícies, tênis, um copo de água.

O lápis, o esquadro, o papel;

o desenho, o projeto, o número:

o engenheiro pensa o mundo justo,

mundo que nenhum véu encobre.

(Em certas tardes nós subíamos

ao edifício. A cidade diária,

como um jornal que todos liam,

ganhava um pulmão de cimento e vidro.)

A água, o vento, a claridade,

de um lado o rio, no alto as nuvens,

situavam na natureza o edifício

crescendo de suas forças simples.

The Engineer

Light, sun and the open air

surround the dream of the engineer.

The engineer dreams clear things:

surfaces, tennis, a glass of water.

A pencil, a T-square, paper;

designs, projects, numbers.

The engineer sees the world just

as it is, without any veils.

(On certain days we went up

the building. The daily city,

like a daily paper read by all,

was gaining a lung of cement and glass.)

The water, the wind, the brightness,

the river on one side and the clouds on high

made a place in nature for the building,

growing by its own simple strength.

A mesa

O jornal dobrado

sobre a mesa simples;

a toalha limpa,

a louça branca

e fresca como o pão.

A laranja verde:

tua paisagem sempre,

teu ar livre, sol

de tuas praias; clara

e fresca como o pão.

A faca que aparou

teu lápis gasto;

teu primeiro livro

cuja capa é branca

e fresca como o pão.

E o verso nascido

de tua manhã viva,

de teu sonho extinto,

ainda leve, quente

e fresco como o pão.

The Table

The folded newspaper

on the simple table;

the tablecloth clean,

the dishes white

and fresh like bread.

The green-skinned orange:

your unfailing landscape,

your open air, the sun

of your beaches: bright

and fresh like bread.

The knife that sharpened

your spent pencil;

your first book

whose cover is white

and fresh like bread.

And the verse born

of your living morning,

of your finished dream:

still warm, light

and fresh like bread.

O funcionário

No papel de serviço

escrevo teu nome

(estranho à sala

como qualquer flor)

mas a borracha

vem e apaga.

Apaga as letras,

o carvão do lápis,

não o nome,

vivo animal,

planta viva

a arfar no cimento.

O macio monstro

impõe enfim o vazio

à página branca;

calma à mesa,

sono ao lápis,

aos arquivos, poeira;

fome à boca negra

das gavetas, sede

ao mata-borrão;

a mim, a prosa

procurada, o conforto

da poesia ida.

The Office Clerk

I write your name

(alien to this office

like any flower)

on the paper for official

business, but the eraser

comes and deletes it.

It deletes the letters,

the pencil lead,

but not your name,

the live animal,

the live plant

panting in the cement.

The soft monster

finally imposes

emptiness on the page,

stillness on the table,

sleep on the pencil,

and dust on the files;

hunger on the black

mouths of drawers, thirst

on the blotting paper,

and on me the prose

of effort, my consolation

for the poetry that fled.

A lição da poesia

1

Toda a manhã consumida

como um sol imóvel

diante da folha em branco:

princípio do mundo, lua nova.

Já não podias desenhar

sequer uma linha;

um nome, sequer uma flor

desabrochava no verão da mesa:

nem no meio-dia iluminado,

cada dia comprado,

do papel, que pode aceitar,

contudo, qualquer mundo.

2

A noite inteira o poeta

em sua mesa, tentando

salvar da morte os monstros

germinados em seu tinteiro.

Monstros, bichos, fantasmas

de palavras, circulando,

urinando sobre o papel,

sujando-o com seu carvão.

Carvão de lápis, carvão

da idéia fixa, carvão

da emoção extinta, carvão

consumido nos sonhos.

3

A luta branca sobre o papel

que o poeta evita,

luta branca onde corre o sangue

de suas veias de água salgada.

A física do susto percebida

entre os gestos diários;

susto das coisas jamais pousadas

porém imóveis — naturezas vivas.

E as vinte palavras recolhidas

nas águas salgadas do poeta

e de que se servirá o poeta

em sua máquina útil.

Vinte palavras sempre as mesmas

de que conhece o funcionamento,

a evaporação, a densidade

menor que a do ar.

The Lesson of Poetry

1

The whole morning spent

like a motionless sun

before the blank page:

beginning of the world, new moon.

You could no longer trace

so much as a line;

not one name, not one flower

bloomed in the table’s summer,

not even in the bright midday

purchased daily in the form

of paper, which can accept

any kind of world.

2

All night long the poet

at his desk, trying to save

from death the monsters

germinated in his inkwell.

Monsters, animals, phantoms

of words — meandering,

urinating over the paper,

smearing it with their lead.

Pencil lead, the lead

of obsessions, lead

of dead emotions, lead

consumed in dreams.

3

White struggle on the paper

which the poet avoids,

white struggle of blood

flowing from his saltwater veins.

The physics of fear discerned

in daily gestures; fear

of things that never rest and yet

are immobile — unstill still lifes.

And the twenty words collected

in the saltwater of the poet,

to be used by the poet

in his efficient machine.

Always the same twenty words

he knows so well: how they work,

their evaporation, their density

less than the air’s.

from Psicologia da composição / Psychology of Composition 1947

Psicologia da Composição

II

Esta folha branca

me proscreve o sonho,

me incita ao verso

nítido e preciso.

Eu me refugio

nesta praia pura

onde nada existe

em que a noite pouse.

Como não há noite

cessa toda fonte;

como não há fonte

cessa toda fuga;

como não há fuga

nada lembra o fluir

de meu tempo, ao vento

que nele sopra o tempo.

VI

Não a forma encontrada

como uma concha, perdida

nos frouxos areais

como cabelos;

não a forma obtida

em lance santo ou raro,

tiro nas lebres de vidro

do invisível;

mas a forma atingida

como a ponta do novelo

que a atenção, lenta,

desenrola,

aranha; como o mais extremo

desse fio frágil, que se rompe

ao peso, sempre, das mãos

enormes.

VII

É mineral o papel

onde escrever

o verso; o verso

que é possível não fazer.

São minerais

as flores e as plantas,

as frutas, os bichos

quando em estado de palavra.

É mineral

a linha do horizonte,

nossos nomes, essas coisas

feitas de palavras.

É mineral, por fim,

qualquer livro:

que é mineral a palavra

escrita, a fria natureza

da palavra escrita.

Psychology of Composition

II

The blank page

won’t let me dream;

it incites me to clear

and exact poetry.

I take refuge

on this pristine shore

where nothing exists

for night to fall on.

Without any night,

all fountains cease;

without any fountain,

there is no flight;

without any flight,

nothing recalls the flowing

of my time, in the wind

wherein time blows.

VI

Not the form found

like a seashell, lost

among sands as limp

as hair;

not the form obtained

by a lucky or divine throw,

by shooting at glass rabbits

of the invisible;

but the form attained

like the end of a skein

which the spider

of careful attention

unrolls; like the furthest

point of that fragile thread,

inevitably snapped

by the weight of huge hands.

VII

Mineral

the paper used

for poetry, the poetry

it is possible not to write.

Mineral

the flowers and plants,

fruits and animals,

when in the state of words.

Mineral

the distant horizon,

our names, all things

made of words.

Mineral

the book, any book, because

the written word is mineral,

mineral the cold nature

of the written word.

Antiode

(

contra a poesia dita profunda

)

A

Poesia, te escrevia:

flor! conhecendo

que és fezes. Fezes

como qualquer,

gerando cogumelos

(raros, frágeis cogu —

melos) no úmido

calor de nossa boca.

Delicado, escrevia:

flor! (Cogumelos

serão flor? Espécie

estranha, espécie

extinta de flor, flor

não de todo flor,

mas flor, bolha

aberta no maduro.)

Delicado, evitava

o estrume do poema,

seu caule, seu ovário,

suas intestinações.

Esperava as puras,

transparentes florações,

nascidas do ar, no ar,

como as brisas.

B

Depois, eu descobriria

que era lícito

te chamar: flor!

(Pelas vossas iguais

circunstâncias? Vossas

gentis substâncias? Vossas

doces carnações? Pelos

virtuosos vergéis

de vossas evocações?

Pelo pudor do verso

— pudor de flor —

por seu tão delicado

pudor de flor

que só se abre

quando a esquece o

sono do jardineiro?)

Depois eu descobriria

que era lícito

te chamar: flor!

(flor, imagem de

duas pontas, como

uma corda). Depois

eu descobriria

as duas pontas

da flor; as duas

bocas da imagem

da flor: a boca

que come o defunto

e a boca que orna

o defunto com outro

defunto, com flores,

— cristais de vômito.

C

Como não invocar o

vício da poesia: o

corpo que entorpece

ao ar de versos?

(Ao ar de águas

mortas, injetando

na carne do dia

a infecção da noite.)

Fome de vida? Fome

de morte, freqüentação

da morte, como de

algum cinema.

O dia? Árido.

Venha, então, a noite,

o sono. Venha,

por isso, a flor.

Venha, mais fácil e

portátil na memória,

o poema, flor no

colete da lembrança.

Como não invocar,

sobretudo, o exercício

do poema, sua prática,

sua lânguida horti —

cultura? Pois estações

há, do poema, como

da flor, ou como

no amor dos cães;

e mil mornos

enxertos, mil maneiras

de excitar negros

êxtases; e a morna

espera de que se

apodreça em poema,

prévia exalação

da alma defunta.

D

Poesia, não será esse

o sentido em que

ainda te escrevo:

flor! (Te escrevo:

flor! Não uma

flor, nem aquela

flor-virtude — em

disfarçados urinóis.)

Flor é a palavra

flor, verso inscrito

no verso, como as

manhãs no tempo.

Flor é o salto

da ave para o vôo;

o salto fora do sono

quando seu tecido

se rompe; é uma explosão

posta a funcionar,

como uma máquina,

uma jarra de flores.

E

Poesia, te escrevo

agora: fezes, as

fezes vivas que és.

Sei que outras

palavras és, palavras

impossíveis de poema.

Te escrevo, por isso,

fezes, palavra leve,

contando com sua

breve. Te escrevo

cuspe, cuspe, não

mais; tão cuspe

como a terceira

(como usá-la num

poema?) a terceira

das virtudes teologais.

Antiode

(

against so-called profound poetry

)

A

Poetry, I wrote you

flower! knowing

you are feces

like any other feces,

generating mushrooms

(rare, delicate mush —

rooms) in the damp

heat of our mouths.

Squeamish, I wrote

flower! (Are mushrooms

flowers? Curious

species, extinct

species of flower,

not entirely flower

but still flower, a blister

opening on ripeness.)

Squeamish, I avoided

the poem’s dung,

its stem, its ovary,

its intestinations.

I waited for pure

transparent flowerings

born, like a breeze,

in the air, of the air.

B

Later I discovered

that it was all right

to call you flower!

(Because of your similar

circumstances? Your

soft substances? Your

gentle hues? Because

of the virtuous gardens

of images you evoke?

Because a verse, like

a flower, is modest,

so delicately modest

with its flowerish

modesty that it only

opens when forgotten

by the gardener’s sleep?)

Later I discovered

that it was all right

to call you flower!

(flower, image of

two points, like

a chord). Later

I discovered

the flower’s two points,

the two mouths

of the image

of the flower: the mouth

that eats the deceased

and the mouth that adorns

the deceased with another

deceased, with flowers

— crystals of vomit.

C

How not invoke

the vice of poetry —

the body that numbs

in the air of verses?

(In the air of dead

waters, injecting

into the day’s flesh

the night’s infection.)

Thirst for life? Thirst

for death, attending

death as one

attends a movie.

The day? Arid.

So let the night come

with sleep. So let

the flower come.

Let the poem come, easier

and more portable

in memory, flower

in the vest of remembrance.

How not invoke,

above all, the practice

of the poem, its method,

its languid horti —

culture? There are

seasons for the poem

as for the flower, as

for love between dogs;

and a thousand tedious

grafts, a thousand ways

to arouse black

ecstasies; and the tepid

waiting for these

to rot into a poem,

precocious emanation

of the deceased soul.

D

Poetry, this is not

the sense in which

I still write you

flower! (I write

flower! Not a

flower, nor that

flower of virtue — in

dissembled urinals.)

Flower is the word

flower, verse

inscribed in verse,

like mornings in time.

Flower is the leap

of a bird into flight,

the leap out of slumber

when its tissue

is broken — an explosion

made to work

like a machine,

a vase of flowers.

E

Poetry, now I write

you feces, the living

feces you are.

I know you are

other words, words

impossible in poems.

That’s why I write

feces, a light word,

counting on its

brevity. I write you

spit, plain spit,

just as much spit

as the third

(how use it in

a poem?) the third

theological virtue.

O cão sem plumas /

The Dog without Feathers

1950

O cão sem plumas

1

(

Paisagem do Capibaribe

)

§A cidade é passada pelo rio

como uma rua

é passada por um cachorro;

uma fruta

por uma espada.

§O rio ora lembrava

a língua mansa de um cão,

ora o ventre triste de um cão,

ora o outro rio

de aquoso pano sujo

dos olhos de um cão.

§Aquele rio

era como um cão sem plumas.

Nada sabia da chuva azul,

da fonte cor-de-rosa,

da água do copo de água,

da água de cântaro,

dos peixes de água,

da brisa na água.

§Sabia dos caranguejos

de lodo e ferrugem.

Sabia da lama

como de uma mucosa.

Devia saber dos polvos.

Sabia seguramente

da mulher febril que habita as ostras.

§Aquele rio

jamais se abre aos peixes,

ao brilho,

à inquietação de faca

que há nos peixes.

Jamais se abre em peixes.

§Abre-se em flores

pobres e negras

como negros.

Abre-se numa flora

suja e mais mendiga

como são os mendigos negros.

Abre-se em mangues

de folhas duras e crespos

como um negro.

§Liso como o ventre

de uma cadela fecunda,

o rio cresce

sem nunca explodir.

Tem, o rio,

um parto fluente e invertebrado

como o de uma cadela.

§E jamais o vi ferver

(como ferve

o pão que fermenta).

Em silêncio,

o rio carrega sua fecundidade pobre,

grávido de terra negra.

§Em silêncio se dá:

em capas de terra negra,

em botinas ou luvas de terra negra

para o pé ou a mão

que mergulha.

§Como às vezes

passa com os cães,

parecia o rio estagnar-se.

Suas águas fluíam então

mais densas e mornas;

fluíam com as ondas

densas e mornas

de uma cobra.

§Ele tinha algo, então,

da estagnação de um louco.

Algo da estagnação

do hospital, da penitenciária, dos asilos,

da vida suja e abafada

(de roupa suja e abafada)

por onde se veio arrastando.

§Algo da estagnação

dos palácios cariados,

comidos

de mofo e erva-de-passarinho.

Algo da estagnação

das árvores obesas

pingando os mil açúcares

das salas de jantar pernambucanas,

por onde se veio arrastando.

§(É nelas,

mas de costas para o rio,

que “as grandes famílias espirituais” da cidade

chocam os ovos gordos

de sua prosa.

Na paz redonda das cozinhas,

ei-las a revolver viciosamente

seus caldeirões

de preguiça viscosa.)

§Seria a água daquele rio

fruta de alguma árvore?

Por que parecia aquela

uma água madura?

Por que sobre ela, sempre,

como que iam pousar moscas?

§Aquele rio

saltou alegre em alguma parte?

Foi canção ou fonte

em alguma parte?

Por que então seus olhos

vinham pintados de azul

nos mapas?

II

(

Paisagem do Capibaribe

)

§Entre a paisagem

o rio fluía

como uma espada de líquido espesso.

Como um cão

humilde e espesso.

§Entre a paisagem

(fluía)

de homens plantados na lama;

de casas de lama plantadas em ilhas

coaguladas na lama;

paisagem de anfíbios

de lama e lama.

§Como o rio

aqueles homens

são como cães sem plumas

(um cão sem plumas

é mais

que um cão saqueado;

é mais

que um cão assassinado.

§Um cão sem plumas

é quando uma árvore sem voz.

É quando de um pássaro

suas raízes no ar.

É quando a alguma coisa

roem tão fundo

até o que não tem).

§O rio sabia

daqueles homens sem plumas.

Sabia de suas barbas expostas,

de seu doloroso cabelo

de camarão e estopa.

§Ele sabia também

dos grandes galpões da beira dos cais

(onde tudo

é uma imensa porta

sem portas)

escancarados

aos horizontes que cheiram a gasolina.

§E sabia

da magra cidade de rolha,

onde homens ossudos,

onde pontes, sobrados ossudos

(vão todos

vestidos de brim)

secam

até sua mais funda caliça.

§Mas ele conhecia melhor

os homens sem pluma.

Estes

secam

ainda mais além

de sua caliça extrema;

ainda mais além

de sua palha;

mais além

da palha de seu chapéu;

mais além

até

da camisa que não tem;

muito mais além do nome

mesmo escrito na folha

do papel mais seco.

§Porque é na água do rio

que eles se perdem

(lentamente

e sem dente).

Ali se perdem

(como uma agulha não se perde).

Ali se perdem

(como um relógio não se quebra).

§Ali se perdem

como um espelho não se quebra.

Ali se perdem

como se perde a água derramada:

sem o dente seco

com que de repente

num homem se rompe

o fio de homem.

§Na água do rio,

lentamente,

se vão perdendo

em lama; numa lama

que pouco a pouco

também não pode falar:

que pouco a pouco

ganha os gestos defuntos

de lama;

o sangue de goma,

o olho paralítico

da lama.

§Na paisagem do rio

difícil é saber

onde começa o rio;

onde a lama

começa do rio;

onde a terra

começa da lama;

onde o homem,

onde a pele

começa da lama;

onde começa o homem

naquele homem.

§Difícil é saber

se aquele homem

já não está

mais aquém do homem;

mais aquém do homem

ao menos capaz de roer

os ossos do ofício;

capaz de sangrar

na praça;

capaz de gritar

se a moenda lhe mastiga o braço;

capaz

de ter a vida mastigada

e não apenas

dissolvida

(naquela água macia

que amolece seus ossos

como amoleceu as pedras).

III

(

Fábula do Capibaribe

)

§A cidade é fecundada

por aquela espada

que se derrama,

por aquela

úmida gengiva de espada.

§No extremo do rio

o mar se estendia,

como camisa ou lençol,

sobre seus esqueletos

de areia lavada.

§(Como o rio era uma cachorro,

o mar podia ser uma bandeira

azul e branca

desdobrada

no extremo do curso

— ou do mastro — do rio.

§Uma bandeira

que tivesse dentes:

que o mar está sempre

com seus dentes e seu sabão

roendo suas praias.

§Uma bandeira

que tivesse dentes:

como um poeta puro

polindo esqueletos,

como um roedor puro,

um polícia puro

elaborando esqueletos,

o mar,

com afã,

está sempre outra vez lavando

seu puro esqueleto de areia.

§O mar e seu incenso,

o mar e seus ácidos,

o mar e a boca de seus ácidos,

o mar e seu estômago

que come e se come,

o mar e sua carne

vidrada, de estátua,

seu silêncio, alcançado

à custa de sempre dizer

a mesma coisa,

o mar e seu tão puro

professor de geometria.)

§O rio teme aquele mar

como um cachorro

teme uma porta entretanto aberta,

como um mendigo,

a igreja aparentemente aberta.

§Primeiro,

o mar devolve o rio.

Fecha o mar ao rio

seus brancos lençóis.

O mar se fecha

a tudo o que no rio

são flores de terra,

imagem de cão ou mendigo.

§Depois,

o mar invade o rio.

Quer

o mar

destruir no rio

suas flores de terra inchada,

tudo o que nessa terra

pode crescer e explodir,

como uma ilha,

uma fruta.

§Mas antes de ir ao mar

o rio se detém

em mangues de água parada.

Junta-se o rio

a outros rios

numa laguna, em pântanos

onde, fria, a vida ferve.

§Junta-se o rio

a outros rios.

Juntos,

todos os rios

preparam sua luta

de água parada,

sua luta

de fruta parada.

§(Como o rio era um cachorro,

como o mar era uma bandeira,

aqueles mangues

são uma enorme fruta:

§A mesma máquina

paciente e útil

de uma fruta;

a mesma força

invencível e anônima

de uma fruta

— trabalhando ainda seu açúcar

depois de cortada —.

§Como gota a gota

até o açúcar,

gota a gota

até as coroas de terra;

como gota a gota

até uma nova planta,

gota a gota

até as ilhas súbitas

aflorando alegres.)

IV

(

Discurso do Capibaribe

)

§Aquele rio

está na memória

como um cão vivo

dentro de uma sala.

Como um cão vivo

dentro de um bolso.

Como um cão vivo

debaixo dos lençóis,

debaixo da camisa,

da pele.

§Um cão, porque vive,

é agudo.

O que vive

não entorpece.

O que vive fere.

O homem,

porque vive,

choca com o que vive.

Viver

é ir entre o que vive.

§O que vive

incomoda de vida

o silêncio, o sono, o corpo

que sonhou cortar-se

roupas de nuvens.

O que vive choca,

tem dentes, arestas, é espesso.

O que vive é espesso

como um cão, um homem,

como aquele rio.

§Como todo o real

é espesso.

Aquele rio

é espesso e real.

Como uma maçã

é espessa.

Como um cachorro

é mais espesso do que uma maçã.

Como é mais espesso

o sangue do cachorro

do que o próprio cachorro.

Como é mais espesso

um homem

do que o sangue de um cachorro.

Como é muito mais espesso

o sangue de um homem

do que o sonho de um homem.

§Espesso

como uma maçã é espessa.

Como uma maçã

é muito mais espessa

se um homem a come

do que se um homem a vê.

Como é ainda mais espessa

se a fome a come.

Como é ainda muito mais espessa

se não a pode comer

a fome que a vê.

§Aquele rio

é espesso

como o real mais espesso.

Espesso

por sua paisagem espessa,

onde a fome

estende seus batalhões de secretas

e íntimas formigas.

§ E espesso

por sua fábula espessa;

pelo fluir

de suas geléias de terra;

ao parir

suas ilhas negras de terra.

§Porque é muito mais espessa

a vida que se desdobra

em mais vida,

como uma fruta

é mais espessa

que sua flor;

como a árvore

é mais espessa

que sua semente;

como a flor

é mais espessa

que sua árvore,

etc. etc.

§Espesso,

porque é mais espessa

a vida que se luta

cada dia,

o dia que se adquire

cada dia

(como uma ave

que vai cada segundo

conquistando seu vôo).

The Dog Without Feathers

1

(

Landscape of the Capibaribe River

)

§The city is crossed by the river

as a street

is crossed by a dog,

a fruit

by a sword.

§The river called to mind

a dog’s gentle tongue,

or a dog’s sad belly,

or that other river

which is the dirty wet cloth

of a dog’s two eyes.

§The river

was like a dog without feathers.

It knew nothing of the blue rain,

of the pink fountain,

of the water in a water glass,

of the water in pitchers,

of the fish in the water,

of the breeze on the water.

§It knew the crabs

of mud and rust.

It knew sludge

like a mucous membrane.

It must have known the octopus,

and surely knew

the feverish woman living in oysters.

§The river

never opens up to fish,

to the shimmer,

to the knifelike nervousness

existing in fish.

It never opens up in fish.

§It opens up in flowers,

poor and black

like black men and women.

It opens up into a flora

as squalid and beggarly

as the blacks who must beg.

It opens up in hard-leafed

mangroves, kinky

as a black man’s hair.

§Smooth like the belly

of a pregnant dog,

the river swells

without ever bursting.

The river’s childbirth

is like a dog’s,

fluid and invertebrate.

§And I never saw it seethe

(as bread when rising

seethes).

In silence

the river carries its fertile poverty,

pregnant with black earth.

§In silence it gives itself:

in capes of black earth,

in boots or gloves of black earth

for the foot or hand

that plunges in.

§As happens with dogs,

sometimes the river

seemed to stagnate.

Then its waters flowed

thicker and warmer;

they flowed with the thick

warm waves

of a snake.

§Then it had something

of a madman’s stagnation.

Something of the stagnation

of hospitals, prisons, asylums,

of the dirty and smothered life

(dirty, smothering laundry)

past which it slowly flowed.

§Something of the stagnation

of decayed palaces,

eaten

by mold and mistletoe.

Something of the stagnation

of obese trees

dripping a thousand sugars

from the Pernambuco dining rooms

past which it slowly flowed.

§(It is there,

with their backs to the river,

that the city’s “cultured families”

brood over the fat eggs

of their prose.

In the round peace of their kitchens

they viciously stir

their pots

of viscid indolence.)

§Could the river’s water

be the fruit of some tree?

Why did it seem

like ripened water?

Why the flies always

above it, as if about to land?

§Did any part of the river

ever jump for joy?

Was it ever, anywhere,

a song or fountain?

Why then

were its eyes painted blue

on maps?

II

(

Landscape of the Capibaribe

)

§Through the landscape

the river flowed

like a sword of thick liquid.

Like a humble

thickset dog.

§Through the landscape

(it flowed)

of men planted in mud;

of houses of mud

planted on islands

congealed in mud;

a landscape of mud

and mud amphibians.

§Like the river

those men

are like dogs without feathers.

(A dog without feathers

is more

than a dog that’s been stripped,

is more

than a dog that’s been killed.

§A dog without feathers

is when a tree without voice.

It is when like a bird

its roots in the air.

It is when something is so deeply

gnawed it is gnawed

to what it doesn’t have.)

§The river knew

about those men without feathers.

It knew

about their stark beards

and their painful hair

of shrimp and cotton shreds.

§It also knew

about the warehouses on the wharf

(where everything is

a huge door

without doors)

opened wide

to horizons reeking of gas.

§And it knew

about the lean, corklike city,

where bony men,

bridges and bony buildings

(everyone

dressed in duck cloth)

wither

to their intimate rubble.

§But it knew much better

the men without feathers

who wither

even beyond

their deepest rubble,

even beyond

their straw,

beyond

the straw in their hats,

beyond

even

the shirts they don’t have,

and far beyond their names,

even when written

on the driest sheet of paper.

§For it’s in the water of the river

that those men are lost

(slowly

and with no teeth).

There they are lost

(as a needle is not lost).

There they are lost

(as a clock does not break).

§There they are lost

as a mirror does not break.

There they are lost

as spilled water is lost:

without the sharp tooth

which in an instant snaps

the thread of man

in a man.

§In the water of the river

slowly

they are lost

in mud, a mud

which little by little

also cannot speak,

which little by little

acquires the cadaverous features

of mud;

the gummy blood,

the paralytic eye

of mud.

§In the river landscape

it is hard to know

where the river begins,

where the mud

begins from the river,

where the land

begins from the mud,

where man,

where his skin

begins from the mud,

where man begins

in that man.

§It is hard to know

whether that man

isn’t already

less than man

— less than the man

who can at least gnaw

at the bones of his work,

who can bleed

in the public square,

who can scream

if the millstone chews his arm,

who can have a life

that is chewed

and not just

dissolved

(in that smooth water

that softens his bones

as it softened the stones).

III

(

Fable of the Capibaribe

)

§The city is fertilized

by that flowing

sword,

by the moist gums

of that sword.

§At the end of the river

the sea extended

like a shirt or sheet

over its skeletons

of washed sand.

§(As the river was a dog,

the sea could be a flag,

blue and white

and unfurled

at the end of the journey

— or mast — of the river.

§A flag

that would have teeth

— for with its teeth and its soap

the sea is always

gnawing its beaches.

§A flag

that would have teeth

— for like a pure poet

polishing skeletons,

like a pure rodent,

a pure policeman

arranging skeletons,

the diligent sea

never stops

washing and rewashing

its pure skeleton of sand.

§The sea and its incense,

the sea and its acids,

the sea and the mouth of its acids,

the sea and its stomach

that eats, and eats itself,

the sea and its flesh

glazed like a statue’s,

its silence, achieved

at the price of always

saying the same thing,

the sea and its pure

teacher of geometry.

§The river fears the sea

as a dog fears

a door that’s cracked open,

as a beggar fears

an apparently open church.

§First

the sea pushes back the river.

The sea shuts the river out

of its white sheets.

The sea shuts its doors to all

the river’s flowers

of earth, to all its images

of dogs or beggars.

§Then

the sea invades the river.

The sea

wants

to destroy in that river

its flowers of swollen earth,

whatever in that earth

can grow and burst,

like an island,

a fruit.

§But before going to the sea

the river lingers

in stagnant mangrove swamps.

The river unites

with other rivers

in a lagoon, in swamps

where life coldly seethes.

§The river unites

with other rivers.

United,

all the rivers

prepare their fight

of stagnant water,

their fight

of stagnant fruit.

§(As the river was a dog,

as the sea was a flag,

those mangrove swamps

are an enormous fruit:

§The same patient

and useful machine

of a fruit,

the same anonymous,

invincible force

of a fruit

— still forging its sugar

when already cut.

§As drop by drop

until sugar,

so drop by drop

until the crowns of earth;

as drop by drop

until a new plant,

so drop by drop

until the sudden islands

joyously emerging.)

IV

(

Discourse of the Capibaribe

)

§The river

exists in memory

like a living dog

inside a room.

Like a living dog

inside one’s pocket.

Like a living dog

under the sheets,

under one’s shirt,

one’s skin.

§A dog, because it lives,

is sharp.

Whatever lives

doesn’t numb.

Whatever lives wounds.

Man,

because he lives,

clashes with the living.

To live

is to wend among the living.

§Whatever lives

inflicts life

on silence, on sleep, on the body

that dreamed of cutting itself

clothes out of clouds.

Whatever lives clashes,

has teeth, edges, is heavy.

Whatever lives is heavy

like a dog, a man,

like the river.

§Heavy

like everything real.

The river

is heavy and real.

As an apple

is heavy.

As a dog

is heavier than an apple.

As the blood of a dog

is heavier

than the dog itself.

As a man

is heavier

than the blood of a dog.

As the blood of a man

is much heavier

than the dream of a man.

§Heavy

as an apple is heavy.

As an apple

is much heavier

if a man eats it

than if a man sees it.

As it is even heavier

if hunger eats it.

As it is yet heavier still

if hunger sees

but cannot eat it.

§The river

is heavy

like the heaviest reality.

Heavy

because of its heavy landscape,

where hunger

deploys its secret battalions

of visceral ants.

§And heavy

because of its fable’s heavy plot,

because of the flowing

of its earthen jellies,

heavy when it gives birth

to its islands of black earth.

§Because life that multiplies

itself in more life

is much heavier,

as a fruit

is heavier

than its flower,

as the tree

is heavier

than its seed,

as the flower

is heavier

than its tree,

etc. etc.

§Heavy,

because life is heavier

when it is fought for

each day,

because the day is heavier

when it is won

each day

(like a bird

conquering each second

its flight).

from Paisagens com figuras / Landscapes with Figures 1956

Pregão turístico do Recife

Aqui o mar é uma montanha

regular redonda e azul,

mais alta que os arrecifes

e os mangues rasos ao sul.

Do mar podeis extrair,

do mar deste litoral,

um fio de luz precisa,

matemática ou metal.

Na cidade propriamente

velhos sobrados esguios

apertam ombros calcários

de cada lado de um rio.

Com os sobrados podeis

aprender lição madura:

um certo equilíbrio leve,

na escrita, da arquitetura.

E neste rio indigente,

sangue-lama que circula

entre cimento e esclerose

com sua marcha quase nula,

e na gente que se estagna

nas mucosas deste rio,

morrendo de apodrecer

vidas inteiras a fio,

podeis aprender que o homem

é sempre a melhor medida.

Mais: que a medida do homem

não é a morte mas a vida.

Tourist Pitch for Recife

Here the sea is a mountain

smooth and blue and round,

taller than the coral reefs

and shallow swamps to the south.

From the sea you can extract

(from the sea that laps our coast)

a thread of precise light,

mathematical or metallic.

In the city itself

old lanky row houses

rub their limestone shoulders

on both sides of a river.

From these houses you can learn

a lesson of long experience:

a delicate equilibrium

in writing, as in architecture.

And from this indigent river,

this blood-mud that meanders

with its almost static march

through sclerosis and cement,

and from the people who stagnate

in the river’s mucous membranes,

entire lives rotting

one by one to death,

you can learn that man

is always the best measure,

and that the measure of man

is not death but life.

O vento no canavial

Não se vê no canavial

nenhuma planta com nome,

nenhuma planta maria,

planta com nome de homem.

É anônimo o canavial,

sem feições, como a campina;

é como um mar sem navios,

papel em branco de escrita.

É como um grande lençol

sem dobras e sem bainha;

penugem de moça ao sol,

roupa lavada estendida.

Contudo há no canavial

oculta fisionomia:

como em pulso de relógio

há possível melodia,

ou como de um avião

a paisagem se organiza,

ou há finos desenhos nas

pedras da praça vazia.

Se venta no canavial

estendido sob o sol

seu tecido inanimado

faz-se sensível lençol,

se muda em bandeira viva,

de cor verde sobre verde,

com estrelas verdes que

no verde nascem, se perdem.

Não lembra o canavial

então, as praças vazias:

não tem, como têm as pedras,

disciplina de milícias.

É solta sua simetria:

como a das ondas na areia

ou as ondas da multidão

lutando na praça cheia.

Então, é da praça cheia

que o canavial é a imagem:

vêem-se as mesmas correntes

que se fazem e desfazem,

voragens que se desatam,

redemoinhos iguais,

estrelas iguais àquelas

que o povo na praça faz.

The Wind in the Canefield

There is in the canefield

no plant with a name,

no plant called Maria,

no plant with a man’s name.

The canefield is anonymous,

plain-faced like the prairie,

like an ocean without ships,

a blank sheet of paper.

It is like a large bedsheet

without folds or hems,

a girl’s downy skin in the sun,

clothes spread out to dry.

Yet hidden in the canefield

there is a physiognomy,

as in a watch’s ticking

there is a potential melody,

as from a plane the landscape

reveals an organization,

as the stones of an empty square

delineate graceful patterns.

When wind blows in the canefield

spread out under the sun,

its inanimate fabric

becomes a sensitive bedsheet:

it changes into a living

flag of green on green,

with green stars born

and lost in the greenness.

Then the canefield no longer

resembles an empty square:

it does not have, like the stones,

the discipline of armies.

Its symmetry is jagged,

like that of waves on sand

or of the waves of people

vying in the crowded square.

Yes, the crowded square

is what the canefield mirrors,

with the same kinds of currents

arising and subsiding,

the same eddies and whirlpools

that can break out anywhere,

the same stars as those formed

by the people in the square.

Cemitério pernambucano

(

Toritama

)

Para que todo este muro?

Por que isolar estas tumbas

do outro ossário mais geral

que é a paisagem defunta?

A morte nesta região

gera dos mesmos cadáveres?

Já não os gera de caliça?

Terão alguma umidade?

Para que a alta defesa,

alta quase para os pássaros,

e as grades de tanto ferro,

tanto ferro nos cadeados?

— Deve ser a sementeira

o defendido hectare,

onde se guardam as cinzas

para o tempo de semear.

Cemetery in Pernambuco

(

Toritama

)

Why this great wall?

Why shut off these graves

from the other, larger

charnel, the dead landscape?

In this region do the corpses

themselves breed death? Does death

no longer breed them, dry as rubble?

Do they contain some moisture?

Why this high defense,

almost too high for the birds,

and the gates with so much iron,

so much iron in the locks?

This must be the seedbed,

the well-defended acre,

where the ashes are preserved

until the time for sowing.

Encontro com um poeta

Em certo lugar da Mancha,

onde mais dura é Castela,

sob as espécies de um vento

soprando armado de areia,

vim surpreender a presença,

mais do que pensei, severa,

de certo Miguel Hernández,

hortelão de Orihuela.

A voz desse tal Miguel,

entre palavras e terra

indecisa, como em Fraga

as casas o estão da terra,

foi um dia arquitetura,

foi voz métrica de pedra,

tal como, cristalizada,

surge Madrid a quem chega.

Mas a voz que percebi

no vento da parameira

era de terra sofrida

e batida, terra de eira.

Não era a voz expurgada

de suas obras seletas:

era uma edição do vento,

que não vai às bibliotecas,

era uma edição incômoda,

a que se fecha a janela,

incômoda porque o vento

não censura mas libera.

A voz que então percebi

no vento da parameira

era aquela voz final

de Miguel, rouca de guerra

(talvez ainda mais aguda

no sotaque da poeira;

talvez mais dilacerada

quando o vento a interpreta).

Vi então que a terra batida

do fim da vida do poeta,

terra que de tão sofrida

acabou virando pedra,

se havia multiplicado

naquelas facas de areia

e que, se multiplicando,

multiplicara as arestas.

Naquela edição do vento

senti a voz mais direta:

igual que árvore amputada,

ganhara gumes de pedra.

Encounter with a Poet

In a certain place in La Mancha

where the Castilian plain is hardest,

in the midst of a stiff blowing

wind armed with sand,

I happened upon the presence,

severer than I had imagined,

of one Miguel Hernández,

a farmer of Orihuela.

The voice of this Miguel,

hanging between word and earth,

the same uncertain earth

houses in Fraga are made of,

was once an architecture,

a metric voice of stone,

crystallized the way Madrid

appears when you first arrive.

But the voice I discerned

in the highland wind

was of tortured, beaten earth,

the earth of a threshing floor —

not the expurgated voice

of the poet’s selected works

but an edition of the wind

not found in libraries.

It was a disturbing edition,

to which many shut the window

(disturbing because the wind

frees rather than censures).

The voice which I heard

in the wind of the highland

was Miguel’s final voice

gone hoarse from war

(perhaps even harsher

in the dialect of dust;

perhaps more mutilated

in the wind’s interpretation).

I saw that the beaten land

of the end of the poet’s life,

land turned to stone

from so much suffering,

had multiplied itself

in those knives of sand

and in that multiplication

had multiplied its edges.

In that edition of the wind

the voice directly touched me —

it had gained blades of stone,

like an amputated tree.

Cemitério pernambucano

(

São Lourenço da Mata

)

É cemitério marinho

mas marinho de outro mar.

Foi aberto para os mortos

que afoga o canavial.

As covas no chão parecem

as ondas de qualquer mar,

mesmo as de cana, lá fora,

lambendo os muros de cal.

Pois que os carneiros de terra

parecem ondas de mar,

não levam nomes: uma onda

onde se viu batizar?

Também marinho: porque

as caídas cruzes que há

são menos cruzes que mastros

quando a meio naufragar.

Cemetery in Pernambuco

(

São Lourenço da Mata

)

This is a marine cemetery,

but marine of a different sea.

It was opened for the dead

who drown in the canefield.

The mounds of dirt resemble

the waves of any sea,

even the waves of cane, outside,

lapping these whitewashed walls.

Since these graves of earth

look like waves of sea,

they have no names; where

was a wave ever christened?

A marine cemetery because

its fallen crosses serve

not as crosses but masts

— masts of ships that are sinking.

Alguns toureiros

Eu vi Manolo González

e Pepe Luís, de Sevilha:

precisão doce de flor,

graciosa, porém precisa.

Vi também Julio Aparicio,

de Madrid, como Parrita:

ciência fácil de flor,

espontânea, porém estrita.

Vi Miguel Báez, Litri,

dos confins da Andaluzia,

que cultiva uma outra flor,

angustiosa de explosiva.

E também Antonio Ordóñez,

que cultiva flor antiga:

perfume de renda velha,

de flor em livro dormida.

Mas eu vi Manuel Rodríguez,

Manolete, o mais deserto,

o toureiro mais agudo,

mais mineral e desperto,

o de nervos de madeira,

de punhos secos de fibra,

o de figura de lenha,

lenha seca de caatinga,

o que melhor calculava

o fluido aceiro da vida,

o que com mais precisão

roçava a morte em sua fímbria,

o que à tragédia deu número,

à vertigem, geometria,

decimais à emoção

e ao susto, peso e medida,

sim, eu vi Manuel Rodríguez,

Manolete, o mais asceta,

não só cultivar sua flor

mas demonstrar aos poetas:

como domar a explosão

com mão serena e contida,

sem deixar que se derrame

a flor que traz escondida,

e como, então, trabalhá-la

com mão certa, pouca e extrema:

sem perfumar sua flor,

sem poetizar seu poema.

A Few Matadors

I saw Manolo González

and Pepe Luis of Seville:

sweet precision of flowers,

gracefully meticulous.

I also saw Julio Aparicio,

from Madrid, like “Parrita”:

simple science of flowers,

spontaneous yet strict.

I saw Miguel Báez, “Litri,”

from down in Andalusia,

who grows a different flower:

anguished and explosive.

And also Antonio Ordóñez,

whose ancient flower exudes

the fragrance of old lace,

of flowers that sleep in books.

But then I saw Manuel Rodríguez,

“Manolete,” the arid one,

the most mineral of all matadors,

the sharpest and most awake,

the one with wooden nerves,

with dry and fibrous fists,

and a figure like a stick,

a stick of dried-out brush,

the one who could best calculate

the steely fluid of life,

who with the greatest precision

brushed with death on the fringe,

who gave a number to tragedy,

decimals to feelings,

to vertigo a geometry,

and height and weight to fear.

Yes I saw Manuel Rodríguez,

“Manolete,” the most ascetic,

not only nurture his flower

but demonstrate to poets:

how to tame the explosion

with a quiet, restrained hand,

being careful not to spill

his flower, hidden from view,

and how, then, to use that force

with sure hand, swift and fierce,

without perfuming his flower,

without poetizing his poem.

Cemitério pernambucano

(

Nossa Senhora da Luz

)

Nesta terra ninguém jaz,

pois também não jaz um rio

noutro rio, nem o mar

é cemitério de rios.

Nenhum dos mortos daqui

vem vestido de caixão.

Portanto, eles não se enterram,

são derramados no chão.

Vêm em redes de varandas

abertas ao sol e à chuva.

Trazem suas próprias moscas.

O chão lhes vai como luva.

Mortos ao ar-livre, que eram,

hoje à terra-livre estão.

São tão da terra que a terra

nem sente sua intrusão.

Cemetery in Pernambuco

(

Nossa Senhora da Luz

)

Here no one lies at rest,

even as a river does not rest

in another river, nor is

the sea a cemetery of rivers.

None of these dead

comes dressed in a coffin,

which is why they aren’t buried

but spilled into the ground.

They come in hammocks that swung

on porches open to rain and sun.

They bring their own flies.

The ground fits them like a glove.

Dead when they walked in the open air,

now they inhabit the open earth,

and so earthly are they that the earth

does not even feel their intrusion.

from Quaderna / Four-spot 1960

Cemitério alagoano

(

Trapiche da Barra

)

Sobre uma duna da praia

o curral de um cemitério,

que o mar todo o dia, todos,

sopra com vento antissético.

Que o mar depois desinfeta

com água de mar, sanativa,

e depois, com areia seca,

ele enxuga e cauteriza.

O mar, que só preza a pedra,

que faz de coral suas árvores,

luta por curar os ossos

da doença de possuir carne,

e para curá-los da pouca

que de viver ainda lhes resta,

lavadeira de hospital,

o mar esfrega e reesfrega.

Cemetery in Alagoas

(

Trapiche da Barra

)

On a dune next to the beach

lies this corral of a cemetery,

which the sea each day, all day long,

sweeps with an antiseptic wind,

and which then it disinfects

with its salubrious saltwater,

and then, with arid sand,

dries and cauterizes.

The ocean, prizing only stones

and taking coral for its trees,

fights to cure the bones

of the disease of having flesh,

and to cure them of the shreds

left over from their life,

an untiring hospital maid,

it scrubs and scrubs and scrubs.

A mulher e a casa

Tua sedução é menos

de mulher do que de casa:

pois vem de como é por dentro

ou por detrás da fachada.

Mesmo quando ela possui

tua plácida elegância,

esse teu reboco claro,

riso franco de varandas,

uma casa não é nunca

só para ser contemplada;

melhor: somente por dentro

é possível contemplá-la.

Seduz pelo que é dentro,

ou será, quando se abra;

pelo que pode ser dentro

de suas paredes fechadas;

pelo que dentro fizeram

com seus vazios, com o nada;

pelos espaços de dentro,

não pelo que dentro guarda;

pelos espaços de dentro:

seus recintos, suas áreas,

organizando-se dentro

em corredores e salas,

os quais sugerindo ao homem

estâncias aconchegadas,

paredes bem revestidas

ou recessos bons de cavas,

exercem sobre esse homem

efeito igual ao que causas:

a vontade de corrê-la

por dentro, de visitá-la.

The Woman and the House

Your seductive charm is more

like that of a house than of a woman,

coming as it does from within,

from what is behind the façade.

Even when it exhibits

your quiet elegance,

your sheer plaster glow

and frank laughter of verandas,

a house never exists

merely to be contemplated;

or rather, only from within

can one really contemplate it.

It seduces by what is within

or will be, when it is opened;

by what it might turn out to be

inside its closed walls;

by what has been done inside

with its emptiness, the nothingness;

by its interior spaces,

not by what it contains;

by the interior spaces

— its divisions, its areas,

how they are organized

into rooms and hallways —

which, suggesting to man

comfortable quarters,

smoothly finished walls

or hiding places in cellars,

arouse in that man

the same feeling you do:

the desire to go inside

and explore all through.

Cemitério paraibano

(

entre Flores e Princesa

)

Uma casa é o cemitério

dos mortos deste lugar.

A casa só, sem puxada,

e casa de um só andar.

E da casa só o recinto

entre a taipa lateral.

Nunca se usou o jardim;

muito menos, o quintal.

E casa pequena: própria

menos a hotel que a pensão:

pois os inquilinos cabem

no cemitério saguão,

os poucos que, por aqui

recusaram o privilégio

de cemitérios cidades

em cidades cemitérios.

Cemetery in Paraíba

(

between Flores and Princesa

)

This cemetery is a house

for those who herein lie.

A house without attachments,

a house of just one story.

And only the part of a house

enclosed by the stucco walls.

No one ever used the garden,

much less the surrounding yard.

Too small to be a hotel,

it’s more like a boardinghouse,

with a cemetery lobby

just big enough to hold

those few residents who,

coming here, refused

the privilege of city cemeteries

in cemetery cities.

A palavra seda

A atmosfera que te envolve

atinge tais atmosferas

que transforma muitas coisas

que te concernem, ou cercam.

E como as coisas, palavras

impossíveis de poema:

exemplo, a palavra ouro,

e até este poema, seda.

É certo que tua pessoa

não faz dormir, mas desperta;

nem é sedante, palavra

derivada da de seda.

E é certo que a superfície

de tua pessoa externa,

de tua pele e de tudo

isso que em ti se tateia,

nada tem da superfície

luxuosa, falsa, acadêmica,

de uma superfície quando

se diz que ela é “como seda”.

Mas em ti, em algum ponto,

talvez fora de ti mesma,

talvez mesmo no ambiente

que retesas quando chegas

há algo de muscular,

de animal, carnal, pantera,

de felino, da substância

felina, ou sua maneira,

de animal, de animalmente,

de cru, de cruel, de crueza,

que sob a palavra gasta

persiste na coisa seda.

The Word Silk

The atmosphere surrounding you

reaches heights in which

it changes many things

concerning you or near you.

And as well as things, words

impossible in poems:

for instance, the word gold

and, until this poem, silk.

True, your person arouses

rather than inducing sleep;

nor is it a sedative, a word

derived from the word for silk.

And it’s true that the surface

of your outward person,

of your skin and of all

that gropes inside you,

has nothing of the luxurious,

false, academic surface

— that surface designated

by the phrase “like silk.”

But in you, somewhere,

or perhaps outside you,

perhaps in the ambience

made tense by your presence,

there’s something muscular,

animal, carnal, pantherish,

catlike — catlike in substance

or in a cat’s way of being —

something animal, animalistic,

crude, cruel — a cruelty — which

beneath the worn-out word

persists in the thing silk.

Cemitério pernambucano

(

Floresta do Navio

)

Antes de se ver Floresta

se vê uma Constantinopla

complicada com barroco,

gótico e cenário de ópera.

É o cemitério. E esse estuque

tão retórico e florido

é o estilo doutor, do gosto

do orador e do político,

de um político orador

que em vez de frases, com tumbas

quis compor esta oração

toda em palavras esdrúxulas,

esdrúxula, na folha plana

do Sertão, onde, desnuda,

a vida não ora, fala,

e com palavras agudas.

Cemetery in Pernambuco

(

Floresta do Navio

)

Before seeing Floresta

one sees a Constantinople

with touches of baroque,

gothic, and opera scenery.

It’s the cemetery, with its

florid and rhetorical plaster

cast in the orotund style

of the speaker or politician,

of a political speaker

who instead of sentences

used tombs to make this speech,

all in grandiloquent language —

grandiloquence, on the flat sheet

of the backlands, where naked

life does not make speeches

but talks with short sharp words.

Cemitério pernambucano

(

Custódia

)

É mais prático enterrar-se

em covas feitas no chão:

ao sol daqui, mais que covas,

são fornos de cremação.

Ao sol daqui, as covas logo

se transformam nas caieiras

onde enterrar certas coisas

para, queimando-as, fazê-las:

assim, o tijolo ainda cru,

as pedras que dão a cal

ou a capoeira raquítica

que dá o carvão vegetal.

Só que nas covas caieiras

nenhuma coisa é apurada:

tudo se perde na terra,

em forma de alma, ou de nada.

Cemetery in Pernambuco

(

Custódia

)

It’s more practical to be buried

in graves dug in the ground:

under this sun, more than graves

they are crematory ovens.

Under this sun soon the graves

are transformed into kilns

where certain things are buried

to burn into finished form:

so it is with still raw bricks,

the stones that become lime,

and the slashed and burnt brush

that changes into charcoal.

But in these graves-turned-kilns

the contents are not refined:

all is lost in the earth,

in the form of a soul, or nothing.

from Dois parlamentos / Two Parliaments 1961

Festa na casa-grande

(

ritmo deputado; sotaque nordestino

)

I

— O cassaco de engenho,

o cassaco de usina:

— O cassaco é um só

com diferente rima.

— O cassaco de engenho

bangüê ou fornecedor:

— A condição cassaco

é o denominador.

— O cassaco de engenho

de qualquer Pernambuco:

— Dizendo-se cassaco

se terá dito tudo.

— Seja qual for seu nome,

seu trabalho, seu soldo:

— Dizendo-se cassaco

se terá dito todos.

6

— O cassaco de engenho

quando é criança:

— Parece cruzamento

de caniço com cana.

— O cassaco de engenho

criança é mais caniço:

— Puxa mais bem ao pai

porque não é maciço.

— O cassaco de engenho

quando é criança:

— Não só puxa ao caniço,

puxa também à cana.

— Mas à cana de soca,

repetida e sem força:

— A cana fim de raça,

de quarta ou quinta folha.

II

— O cassaco de engenho

quando é mulher:

— É um saco vazio

mas que se tem de pé.

— O cassaco de engenho

mulher é como um saco:

— De açúcar, mas sem ter

açúcar ensacado.

— O cassaco de engenho

quando é mulher:

— Não é um saco capaz

de conservar, conter.

— É um saco como feito

para se derramar:

— De outros que não se sabe

como se fazem lá.

16

— O cassaco de engenho

quando é um velho:

— Somente por acaso

ele alcança esse teto.

— O cassaco de engenho

velho nem é acaso:

— É que um cassaco novo

apressou-se no prazo.

— O cassaco de engenho

quando é um velho:

— Então, chegado aí,

se apressa em esqueleto.

— Se apressa a descarnar

como taipa em ruína:

— E como ele é de taipa

seu esqueleto é faxina.

2

— O cassaco de engenho

de longe é como gente:

— De perto é que se vê

o que há de diferente.

— O cassaco de engenho,

de perto, ao olho esperto:

— Em tudo é como homem,

só que de menos preço.

— Não há nada de homem

que não tenha, em detalhe,

e tudo por inteiro,

nada pela metade.

— É igual, mas apesar,

parece recortado

com a tesoura cega

de alfaiate barato.

7

— O cassaco de engenho

de longe é de osso e carne:

— De perto é que se vê

que de outra qualidade.

— O cassaco de engenho

se se chega a tocá-lo:

— É outra a consistência

de seu corpo, é mais ralo.

— Tem a textura bruta

e ao mesmo tempo frouxa,

menos que algodãozinho,

sim própria das estopas.

— E dos panos puídos

chegados ao estado

em que, no português,

pano passa a ser trapo.

12

— O cassaco de engenho

de longe é o mesmo barro:

— De perto é que se vê

que o dele foi mais baço.

— O cassaco de engenho

é opaco e mortiço:

— Nunca aprende com os aços

de uma usina, seu brilho.

— Nem com o brilho mais cego

do cobre que ele vê

nas tachas em que mexe

nos engenhos bangüê.

— Sequer aprende o brilho

do cabo das enxadas

que ele enverniza em seco

com a lixa da mão áspera.

17

— O cassaco de engenho

de longe é branco ou negro:

— De perto é que se vê

que é amarelo mesmo.

— O cassaco de engenho

é amarelo sempre:

— Mas do amarelo inchado

que é verde levemente.

— Desse verde amarelo

em que o azul não entra

e que não fosse nele

se diria doença.

— Um verde especial,

espécie de auriverde,

só dele, branco ou negro,

de receita só dele.

3

— O cassaco de engenho

quando está dormindo:

— Se vê que é incapaz

de sonhos privativos.

— Nele não há esse ar

distante ou distraído

de quem detrás das pálpebras

um filme está assistindo.

— Detrás de suas pálpebras

haverá apenas treva

e de certo nenhum

sonho ali se projeta.

— O cassaco de engenho

dorme em sala deserta:

— A nenhum sonho-filme

assiste, nem tem tela.

8

— O cassaco de engenho

quando não está dormindo:

— É como se seu sono

ainda o encharcasse, limo.

— Quando não está dormindo

não é que está acordado,

é apenas que caminha

onde o sono é mais raso.

— Não tem como evitar

que o marasmo o embeba

e o impeça de subir

à consciência seca.

— O cassaco de engenho

nunca acorda de todo:

— Anda sempre nos pântanos

do sono, por seu lodo.

13

— O cassaco de engenho

quando no trabalho:

— Tudo com que trabalha

lhe parece pesado.

— É como se seu sangue,

que entretanto é mais ralo,

lhe pesasse no corpo,

espesso como caldo.

— Como o caldo de cana

já muito cozinhado

e que vai-se espessando

no gesto do melaço.

— O cassaco de engenho

tem o ritmo pesado:

— O do gesto do mel

deixando o último tacho.

18

— O cassaco de engenho

quando não trabalha:

— As coisas continuam

sendo-lhe bem pesadas.

— Por sua pouca roupa

está sempre esmagado

e pesa-lhe no pé

inexistente sapato.

— Pesa-lhe a mão que leva

e se não leva nada,

e pesa-lhe igualmente

se se move ou parada.

— Ao cassaco de engenho

pesa o ar que respira:

— E até mesmo lhe pesa

o chão sobre que pisa.

4

— O cassaco de engenho

faz amarelamente

toda coisa que toca

tocando-a, simplesmente.

— É o contrário do barro

das casas-de-purgar

que se bota no açúcar

a fim de o branquear.

— O cassaco de engenho

purga tudo ao contrário:

— Como o barro, se infiltra,

mas deixa tudo barro.

— Limpa tudo do limpo

e deixa em tudo nódoa:

— A que há em sua camisa,

em sua vida, no que toca.

9

— O cassaco de engenho

vai amarelamente

entre todo esse azul

que é Pernambuco sempre.

— Mesmo contra o amarelo

da palha canavial,

ainda é mais amarelo

o seu, porque moral.

— O cassaco de engenho

é o amarelo tipo:

— É amarelo de corpo

e de estado de espírito.

— De onde a calma que às vezes

parece sabedoria:

— Mas não é calma, nada,

é o nada, é calmaria.

14

— O cassaco de engenho

é amarelamente

mesmo no mundo em cor

que bebe na aguardente.

— Primeiro, a aguardente

lhe dá um certo azul

e esquecido o amarelo,

ele quer ir-se ao Sul.

— Ao cassaco de engenho

depois o azul é roxo:

— Já em vez de ir-se ao Sul

deseja é ir-se morto.

— Por fim, inevitável,

volta a vida amarela:

— No amargor amarelo

da ressaca que o espera.

19

— O cassaco de engenho

vê amarelamente

todo o rosa-Brasil

que ele habita e não sente.

— Para ele, a água do rio

não é azul mas barro,

e as nuvens, aniagem,

pardas, de pano saco.

— Ao cassaco de engenho

nunca a terra é de vargem:

— E o dia mostra sempre

desbotada folhagem.

— E outra é a morte que vem

retratar seu trespasse:

— Não usa pano preto,

cobre-se, sim, de cáqui.

5

— O cassaco de engenho

quando doente-com-febre:

— Não de febre amarela

mas da de sezões, verde.

— Por fora, se se toca

no seu corpo de gente:

— Se pensa que a caldeira

dele afinal se acende.

— Contudo se se toca

esse corpo por dentro:

— Se vê que, se é caldeira,

nem tem assentamento.

— Que se é engenho, é

de fogo frio ou morto:

— Engenho que não mói,

que só fornece aos outros.

10

— O cassaco de engenho

quando vai morrendo:

— Então seu amarelo

se ilumina por dentro.

— Adquire a transparência

própria ao cristal anêmico:

— Aquela de que a cera

dá o melhor exemplo.

— Adquire a transparência

própria de qualquer vela:

— Da mesma em cuja ponta

plantam a chama que o vela.

— A dele, então, é igual

à carne dessa vela:

— E a chama se pergunta

por que não a acendem nela.

15

— O cassaco de engenho

quando o carregam, morto:

— É um caixão vazio

metido dentro de outro.

— É morte de vazio

a que carrega dentro:

— E como é de vazio,

ei-lo que não tem dentros.

— Do caixão alugado

nem chega a ser miolo:

— Pois como ele é vazio,

se muito, será forro.

— O enterro do cassaco

é o enterro de um coco:

— Uns poucos envoltórios

em volta do centro oco.

20

— O cassaco de engenho

defunto e já no chão:

— Para rápido acabá-lo

tudo faz mutirão.

— O massapê, piçarra,

e a Mata faz Sertão.

— E o sol, para ajudar,

se é inverno faz verão.

— Para roer os ossos

os vermes viram cão:

— E outra vez vermes, vendo

o giz que os ossos são.

— E o vento canavial

dá também sua demão:

— Varre-lhe os gases da alma,

levando-a (lavando), são.

Party at the Manor House

(

Congressional rhythm; Northeast accent

)

1

— The sugar mill worker

in a large or small mill

— Is the same mill worker

with a different rhyme.

— The sugar mill worker

in a raw mill or refinery:

— “Sugar mill worker”

is the crucial denominator.

— Any sugar mill worker

from any Pernambuco:

— When he says “sugar mill worker”

will have said everything.

— Whatever his name,

position or salary:

— By saying “sugar mill worker,”

he will have said it all.

6

— The sugar mill worker

in child form

— Looks like a cross

between reed and cane.

— The child mill worker

has more of the reed:

— Is more like his father,

because he is lean.

— The sugar mill worker

in child form

— Is not only reed,

he is also cane.

— But cane that is weak

from overharvesting:

— A degenerate breed

of the fourth or fifth cutting.

II

— The sugar mill worker

in female form

— Is an empty sack

that stands on two feet.

— The female mill worker

is essentially a sack

— Of sugar without

any sugar inside.

— The sugar mill worker

in female form

— Is a sack that cannot

conserve or contain.

— She’s a sack made

just to be emptied

— Of other sacks made in her

nobody knows how.

16

— The sugar mill worker

in the form of an old man:

— Only by chance

does he get that far.

— The old mill worker

isn’t old by chance:

— He’s a young mill worker

who hurried up his age.

— The sugar mill worker

in the form of an old man:

— Having gotten that far,

he hurries to become a skeleton.

— He hurriedly grows lean

like a mud wall in ruins:

— His flesh is the mud,

his skeleton the frame.

2

— The sugar mill worker

looks like us from a distance:

— Looking closer one sees

what sets him apart.

— The sugar mill worker

up close, to a sharp eye:

— Is in all respects human

but at half the price.

— He is missing nothing

that you and I have,

down to every detail,

like any normal man.

— He’s the same, yet seems

to have been cut out

by the dull scissors

of a third-rate tailor.

7

— The sugar mill worker

looks like flesh and blood:

— Looking closer one sees

just what substance he is.

— The mill worker’s body

when actually touched

— Proves to be different,

of a thinner consistence.

— Its texture is rough

and at the same time slack,

like cheap cotton cloth

or like cotton scraps.

— Like well-worn cloths

torn and tattered

to where, in our language,

cloths become rags.

12

— The sugar mill worker

seems to be of our clay:

— Looking closer one sees

that his clay was grayer.

— The sugar mill worker

is shadowy and dim:

— He never learns to shine

like the sugar mill’s steels.

— He can’t even shine

like the duller copper

of the vats he stirs

in the smaller mills.

— He never even learns

to shine like the hoe handles

he dry polishes daily

with his sandpaper hand.

17

— The sugar mill worker

looks white or black:

— Looking closer one sees

he is actually yellow.

— The sugar mill worker

is always yellow:

— A swollen yellow,

slightly green.

— That yellowish green

without any blue,

which in anyone else

would be called disease.

— A special green,

a kind of greenish gold,

be he black or white,

a color all his own.

3

— The sugar mill worker

when he is sleeping

— Is obviously incapable

of private dreams.

— He’s missing that faraway

look of enchantment

of those who watch films

behind their eyelids.

— Behind his eyelids

there is only a darkness

where surely no dream

is being projected.

— The mill worker sleeps

in an empty cinema

— Where there is no film-dream,

nor even a screen.

8

— The sugar mill worker

when he’s not sleeping

— Looks like seaweed,

as if sleep still drenched him.

— When he’s not sleeping,

he isn’t really awake;

he merely walks

in a shallower sleep.

— He cannot escape

the marasmus that soaks him

and keeps him from rising

to a dry consciousness.

— The sugar mill worker

is never fully awake:

— He still walks in the swamps

of sleep, through their mire.

13

— The sugar mill worker

when he’s at work:

— Everything he works with

feels heavy to him.

— It’s as if his blood,

though thinner than ours,

weighed on his body

like juice when thick.

— Like sugarcane juice which,

after much cooking,

gets thicker and thicker

until it’s molasses.

— The sugar mill worker

has a heavy rhythm:

— Like the final molasses

leaving the final vat.

18

— The sugar mill worker

when not at work

— Continues to feel

that things are quite heavy.

— He is constantly crushed

by his scanty clothing,

and his nonexistent shoes

weigh heavy on his feet.

— His hand weighs heavy

lifting something or nothing,

and it weighs on him whether

it’s moving or still.

— To the sugar mill worker

his very breath is heavy:

— And he even feels the weight

of the ground he walks on.

4

— The sugar mill worker

yellowishly tinges

all that he touches

merely by touching it.

— He’s the converse of the clay

in the bleaching chambers

added to the sugar

to make it turn white.

— The sugar mill worker

bleaches in reverse:

— He penetrates, like the clay,

but turns everything dirty.

— He cleans off the cleanness

and leaves behind a smudge:

— The smudge on his shirt,

on his life, on what he touches.

9

— The sugar mill worker

yellowishly lives

among all that blue

which is always Pernambuco.

— Even against the yellow

of the canefield straw,

his yellow is still yellower,

for it reaches his morale.

— The sugar mill worker

is the quintessential yellow:

— Yellow in his body

and in his state of mind.

— This explains his calm,

which can appear as wisdom:

— But it’s not calmness at all,

it’s nothingness, inertia.

14

— The sugar mill worker

yellowishly exists

even in the colored world

he enters with cane liquor.

— In the beginning the liquor

makes him somewhat rosy

and, forgetting his yellow,

he thinks of heading south.

— In the sugar mill worker

the rose turns to purple:

— Instead of heading south,

he wants to pass away.

— Finally, inevitably,

his yellow life returns

— In the yellow bitterness

of the next day’s hangover.

19

— The sugar mill worker

yellowishly sees

the rose-colored Brazil

he lives in but doesn’t feel.

— For him the river water

is not blue but muddy,

and clouds are burlap-colored,

the grayish brown of sackcloth.

— To the sugar mill worker

the land is never a meadow:

— And each day shows him

the same faded foliage.

— And different is the death

that comes to paint his end:

— Instead of using black,

it dresses up in khaki.

5

— The sugar mill worker

when sick with fever:

— It isn’t yellow fever

but malaria, green.

— If you touch the outside

of his human-looking body:

— It feels as if his furnace

has finally fired up.

— If, however, you touch

this body on the inside:

— You see that, if a furnace,

it has no foundation.

— And if it is a sugar mill,

its fire is cold or dead:

— A mill that doesn’t refine,

that only supplies to others.

10

— The sugar mill worker

when he is dying:

— His yellow begins

to glow from inside.

— He gains a transparency

that suggests anemic crystal:

— Of which candle wax

is the best example.

— He gains the transparency

of a common candle:

— Of the candle they’ve lit

to watch over his last hour.

— The flesh of this candle

is just like his own:

— And the flame wonders why

they don’t light his too.

15

— The sugar mill worker

when carried away, dead:

— He’s one empty coffin

inside another.

— A death of emptiness

is what’s carried inside:

— And since the death is empty,

it has no insides.

— He can’t even be the contents

of the rented coffin:

— Since he is empty,

at most he’ll be the lining.

— The burial of a mill worker

is the burial of a coconut:

— A handful of wrappings

around a hollow core.

20

— The sugar mill worker

dead and in the ground:

— Everything pitches in

to finish him off quickly.

— Black earth becomes gravel,

the woods become dry plains:

— And the sun gives a hand

by making winter summer.

— To better gnaw the bones,

the worms turn into dogs:

— Then back again into worms,

when they see the bones are chalk.

— And the wind of the canefield

also helps to make him final:

— By sweeping away the gases

(his soul) to purify him.

from Serial / Serial 1961

O sim contra o sim

Marianne Moore, em vez de lápis,

emprega quando escreve

instrumento cortante:

bisturi, simples canivete.

Ela aprendeu que o lado claro

das coisas é o anverso

e por isso as disseca:

para ler textos mais corretos.

Com mão direta ela as penetra,

com lápis bisturi,

e com eles compõe,

de volta, o verso cicatriz.

E porque é limpa a cicatriz,

econômica, reta,

mais que o cirurgião

se admira a lâmina que opera.

Francis Ponge, outro cirurgião,

adota uma outra técnica:

gira-as nos dedos, gira

ao redor das coisas que opera.

Apalpa-as com todos os dez

mil dedos da linguagem:

não tem bisturi reto

mas um que se ramificasse.

Com ele envolve tanto a coisa

que quase a enovela

e quase a enovelando,

se perde, enovelado nela.

E no instante em que até parece

que já não a penetra,

ela entra sem cortar:

saltou por descuidada fresta.

Miró sentia a mão direita

demasiado sábia

e que de saber tanto

já não podia inventar nada.

Quis então que desaprendesse

o muito que aprendera,

a fim de reencontrar

a linha ainda fresca da esquerda.

Pois que ela não pôde, ele pôs-se

a desenhar com esta

até que, se operando,

no braço direito ele a enxerta.

A esquerda (se não se é canhoto)

é mão sem habilidade:

reaprende a cada linha,

cada instante, a recomeçar-se.

Mondrian, também da mão direita

andava desgostado;

não por ser ela sábia:

porque, sendo sábia, era fácil.

Assim, não a trocou de braço:

queria-a mais honesta

e por isso enxertou

outras mais sábias dentro dela.

Fez-se enxertar réguas, esquadros

e outros utensílios

para obrigar a mão

a abandonar todo improviso.

Assim foi que ele, à mão direita,

impôs tal disciplina:

fazer o que sabia

como se o aprendesse ainda.

Yes Against Yes

Marianne Moore, refusing a pen,

writes her stanzas

with a cutting edge,

a common jackknife or scalpel.

She discovered that the clear side

of things is the obverse,

and therefore dissects them

to read texts more accurately.

She enters with unswerving hand

and a scalpel pen

to produce, on leaving,

a neatly stitched poem.

And since the scar is clean,

sparse and straight,

more than the surgeon

one admires the surgical blade.

Francis Ponge, also a surgeon,

uses a different technique, turning

the things he operates on

in his fingers, and himself around them.

He handles them with all ten

thousand fingers of language;

his is not a straight scalpel

but one that’s always branching.

With it he so wraps and wraps

the thing that he almost winds it

into a ball and loses

himself, wound up inside it.

And just when it would seem

he can no longer penetrate,

he enters without cutting,

through a crack that went unseen.

Miró felt that his right hand

was too intelligent

and that knowing so much

it could no longer invent.

He wanted it to unlearn

all it had learned

to recover the fresh line

of his left hand, still pure.

This being impossible, he began

to draw with the left hand,

attaching it at last

to his right arm by a graft.

Unless one is left-handed,

the left hand lacks ability:

every line is a relearning,

every moment a new beginning.

Mondrian regarded his right hand

with just as much distrust,

not for being intelligent,

but because it was easy as such.

He did not give it a new arm;

he wanted it to be truer.

So he grafted other

more intelligent hands on to it.

He grafted rulers, T-squares

and other instruments

that forced his hand

to quit all improvisation.

He imposed on his right hand

this discipline:

to do what it already knew

as if it were still learning.

O ovo de galinha

1

Ao olho mostra a integridade

de uma coisa num bloco, um ovo.

Numa só matéria, unitária,

maciçamente ovo, num todo.

Sem posssuir um dentro e um fora,

tal como as pedras, sem miolo:

e só miolo: o dentro e o fora

integralmente no contorno.

No entanto, se ao olho se mostra

unânime em si mesmo, um ovo,

a mão que o sopesa descobre

que nele há algo suspeitoso:

que seu peso não é o das pedras,

inanimado, frio, goro;

que o seu é um peso morno, túmido,

um peso que é vivo e não morto.

II

O ovo revela o acabamento

a toda mão que o acaricia,

daquelas coisas torneadas

num trabalho de toda a vida.

E que se encontra também noutras

que entretanto mão não fabrica:

nos corais, nos seixos rolados

e em tantas coisas esculpidas

cujas formas simples são obra

de mil inacabáveis lixas

usadas por mãos escultoras

escondidas na água, na brisa.

No entretanto, o ovo, e apesar

da pura forma concluída,

não se situa no final:

está no ponto de partida.

III

A presença de qualquer ovo,

até se a mão não lhe faz nada,

possui o dom de provocar

certa reserva em qualquer sala.

O que é difícil de entender

se se pensa na forma clara

que tem um ovo, e na franqueza

de sua parede caiada.

A reserva que um ovo inspira

é de espécie bastante rara:

é a que se sente ante um revólver

e não se sente ante uma bala.

É a que se sente ante essas coisas

que conservando outras guardadas

ameaçam mais com disparar

do que com a coisa que disparam.

IV

Na manipulação de um ovo

um ritual sempre se observa:

há um jeito recolhido e meio

religioso em quem o leva.

Se pode pretender que o jeito

de quem qualquer ovo carrega

vem da atenção normal de quem

conduz uma coisa repleta.

O ovo porém está fechado

em sua arquitetura hermética

e quem o carrega, sabendo-o,

prossegue na atitude regra:

procede ainda da maneira

entre medrosa e circunspecta,

quase beata, de quem tem

nas mãos a chama de uma vela.

The Egg

1

To the eye an egg suggests

the integrity of a block.

A single, uniform substance,

wholly and compactly eggish.

Without an inside and outside,

pulpless as a stone, or pulp

all in all: inside and outside

one and the same throughout.

But if to the eye an egg

appears to be unanimous,

the hand which holds it

discovers something suspicious:

that its weight is not the cold,

inanimate, addled weight of stones

— not a dead weight — but the tumid,

warm weight of something living.

II

To any hand that caresses it

an egg reveals the smooth

finish of things whose shaping

required a lifetime of labor,

a finish found in other things

not made by human hands:

in corals, rounded pebbles,

and all sorts of sculpted objects

whose simple forms are the work

of inexhaustible sandpapers held

by a thousand sculpting hands

hidden in water and wind.

And yet the egg, despite

its pure, finished form,

hasn’t reached an end;

it is only now beginning.

III

The mere presence of an egg,

even if no hand comes near,

can provoke a certain reserve

in whoever is in the room,

which is hard to understand

in light of the clear, clean

shape of an egg and the candor

of its whitewashed wall.

The reserve an egg inspires

is of a peculiar kind,

like that which a revolver

but not a bullet causes.

It’s the reserve felt before objects

which, concealing another inside,

threaten with the act of discharging

more than with what they discharge.

IV

Whenever an egg is handled,

a ritual is observed:

it is treated in a diffident,

quasi-religious manner.

One might argue that the care

of the person carrying an egg

is the usual care one takes

with anything that’s full.

The egg, however, is closed

in its hermetic architecture,

and whoever carries it, knowing this,

persists in the usual way,

still proceeding with caution,

a bit fearful, wary, and almost

pious, as one whose hands

bear the flame of a candle.

from A educação pela pedra / Education by Stone 1966

O mar e o canavial

O que o mar sim aprende do canavial:

a elocução horizontal de seu verso;

a geórgica de cordel, ininterrupta,

narrada em voz e silêncio paralelos.

O que o mar não aprende do canavial:

a veemência passional da preamar;

a mão-de-pilão das ondas na areia,

moída e miúda, pilada do que pilar.

*

O que o canavial sim aprende do mar:

o avançar em linha rasteira da onda;

o espraiar-se minucioso, de líquido,

alagando cova a cova onde se alonga.

O que o canavial não aprende do mar:

o desmedido do derramar-se da cana;

o comedimento do latifúndio do mar,

que menos lastradamente se derrama.

The Sea and the Canefield

What the sea learns from the canefield:

the horizontal style of its verse;

the georgics of street poets, uninterrupted,

chanted out loud and in parallel silence.

What the sea doesn’t learn from the canefield:

the passion of a rising tide;

the pestle-pounding of waves on sand,

ground ever finer, repesteled, repounded.

*

What the canefield learns from the sea:

the quiet rhythm of advancing waves;

its meticulous liquid spreading

that fills every hollow where it passes.

What the canefield doesn’t learn from the sea:

the sugarcane’s unbridled flowing;

the moderation of the plantation-sea,

which flows less rampantly.

A educação pela pedra

Uma educação pela pedra: por lições;

para aprender da pedra, freqüentá-la;

captar sua voz inenfática, impessoal

(pela de dicção ela começa as aulas).

A lição de moral, sua resistência fria

ao que flui e a fluir, a ser maleada;

a de poética, sua carnadura concreta;

a de economia, seu adensar-se compacta:

lições da pedra (de fora para dentro,

cartilha muda), para quem soletrá-la.

*

Outra educação pela pedra: no Sertão

(de dentro para fora, e pré-didática).

No Sertão a pedra não sabe lecionar,

e se lecionasse não ensinaria nada;

lá não se aprende a pedra: lá a pedra,

uma pedra de nascença, entranha a alma.

Education by Stone

An education by stone: lesson by lesson;

learning from the stone by going to its school,

grasping its impersonal, unstressed voice

(it begins its classes with one in diction).

The lesson in morals — its cold resistance

to what flows and to flowing, to being molded;

a lesson in poetics — its concrete flesh;

another in economics — its compact weight:

lessons from the stone (from the outside in,

a speechless primer) to learn how to spell it.

*

Another education by stone: in the backlands

(from the inside out, and predidactic).

In the backlands the stone does not give lessons,

and if it gave them, nothing would be taught;

there the stone is not something you learn

but is a stone from birth, penetrating the soul.

Sobre o sentar- /estar-no-mundo

Ondequer que certos homens se sentem

sentam poltrona, qualquer o assento.

Sentam poltrona: ou tábua-de-latrina,

assento além de anatômico, ecumênico,

exemplo único de concepção universal,

onde cabe qualquer homem e a contento.

*

Ondequer que certos homens se sentem

sentam bancos ferrenhos, de colégio;

por afetuoso e diplomata o estofado,

os ferem nós debaixo, senão pregos,

e mesmo a tábua-de-latrina lhes nega

o abaulado amigo, as curvas de afeto.

A vida toda, se sentam mal sentados,

e mesmo de pé algum assento os fere:

eles levam em si os nós-senão-pregos,

nas nádegas da alma, em efes e erres.

On Sitting/Being-in-the-World

When certain men sit, no matter where

they sit, they sit in an easy chair.

An easy chair, or a toilet seat:

not only functional but ecumenical,

the only universally agreed-upon seat,

where all can fit and feel at home.

*

Wherever certain men sit, they sit

at hard desks, the kind used in schools;

however large and well-cushioned the seat,

they are hurt underneath by knots or nails,

and even the toilet seat denies them

the convex comfort of its friendly curves.

All their lives they sit uncomfortably,

and even when standing, some seat hurts them;

they carry in themselves the knots or nails,

in the buttocks of the soul, in p’s and q’s.

Tecendo a manhã

Um galo sozinho não tece uma manhã:

ele precisará sempre de outros galos.

De um que apanhe esse grito que ele

e o lance a outro; de um outro galo

que apanhe o grito que um galo antes

e o lance a outro; e de outros galos

que com muitos outros galos se cruzem

os fios de sol de seus gritos de galo,

para que a manhã, desde uma teia tênue,

se vá tecendo, entre todos os galos.

2

E se encorpando em tela, entre todos,

se erguendo tenda, onde entrem todos,

se entretendendo para todos, no toldo

(a manhã) que plana livre de armação.

A manhã, toldo de um tecido tão aéreo

que, tecido, se eleva por si: luz balão.

Weaving the Morning

One rooster cannot weave a morning.

He will always need other roosters:

one to catch the cry that he

and toss it to another, another rooster

to catch the cry that a rooster before him

and toss it to another, and other roosters

that with many other roosters crisscross

the sun threads of their rooster cries,

so that the morning, from a tenuous tissue,

will grow by the weaving of all the roosters.

2

And enlarging into a fabric involving all,

erecting itself into a tent where all may enter,

extending itself for all, in the canopy

(the morning) that floats without any frame:

the morning, a canopy made of a weave so airy

that, once woven, it rises by itself: balloon light.

Fábula de um arquiteto

A arquitetura como construir portas,

de abrir; ou como construir o aberto;

construir, não como ilhar e prender,

nem construir como fechar secretos;

construir portas abertas, em portas;

casa exclusivamente portas e teto.

O arquiteto: o que abre para o homem

(tudo se sanearia desde casas abertas)

portas por-onde, jamais portas-contra;

por onde, livres: ar luz razão certa.

2

Até que, tantos livres o amedrontando,

renegou dar a viver no claro e aberto.

Onde vãos de abrir, ele foi amurando

opacos de fechar; onde vidro, concreto;

até refechar o homem: na capela útero,

com confortos de matriz, outra vez feto.

Tale of an Architect

Architecture: the art of building doors

to open up — the building of openness;

building not to isolate and confine

nor to shut up secrets, but building

every door an open door — building

houses made only of doors and roofs.

Architect: the one who opens to man

(in open houses all would be cleansed)

doors-leading-to, never doors-against;

doors for freeing: air light sure reason.

2

Until, intimidated by so many free things,

he stopped letting life be transparent.

Where there were openings he put in

opacities; instead of glass, concrete —

resealing man in the chapel-uterus

with the old comforts, once more a fetus.

Rios sem discurso

Quando um rio corta, corta-se de vez

o discurso-rio de água que ele fazia;

cortado, a água se quebra em pedaços,

em poços de água, em água paralítica.

Em situação de poço a água equivale

a uma palavra em situação dicionária:

isolada, estanque no poço dela mesma,

e porque assim estanque, estancada;

e mais: porque assim estancada, muda,

e muda porque com nenhuma comunica,

porque cortou-se a sintaxe desse rio,

o fio de água por que ele discorria.

*

O curso de um rio, seu discurso-rio,

chega raramente a se reatar de vez;

um rio precisa de muito fio de água

para refazer o fio antigo que o fez.

Salvo a grandiloqüência de uma cheia

lhe impondo interina outra linguagem,

um rio precisa de muita água em fios

para que todos os poços se enfrasem:

se reatando, de um para outro poço,

em frases curtas, então frase e frase,

até a sentença-rio do discurso único

em que se tem voz a seca ele combate.

Speechless Rivers

When a river cuts, it cuts completely

the discourse its water was speaking;

cut, the water breaks into pieces,

into pools of water, paralyzed water.

Situated in a pool, water resembles

a word in its dictionary situation:

isolated, standing in the pool of itself

and, because it is standing, stagnant.

Because it is standing, it is mute,

and mute because it doesn’t communicate,

because this river’s syntax, the current

of water on which it ran, was cut.

*

The course of a river, its river-discourse,

can rarely be swiftly restored;

a river needs considerable water current

to recreate the current that created it.

Unless the grandiloquence of a flood

imposes a different, interim language,

a river needs many currents of water

for all of its pools to be phrased —

being restored from one pool to the next

in short phrases, then phrase to phrase,

until the river-sentence of the only discourse

in which it can speak will defy the drought.

O canavial e o mar

O que o mar sim ensina ao canavial:

o avançar em linha rasteira da onda;

o espraiar-se minucioso, de líquido,

alagando cova a cova onde se alonga.

O que o canavial sim ensina ao mar:

a elocução horizontal de seu verso;

a geórgica de cordel, ininterrupta,

narrada em voz e silêncio paralelos.

2

O que o mar não ensina ao canavial:

a veemência passional da preamar;

a mão-de-pilão das ondas na areia,

moída e miúda, pilada do que pilar.

O que o canavial não ensina ao mar:

o desmedido do derramar-se da cana;

o comedimento do latifúndio do mar,

que menos lastradamente se derrama.

The Canefield and the Sea

What the sea teaches the canefield:

the quiet rhythm of advancing waves;

its meticulous liquid spreading

that fills every hollow where it passes.

What the canefield teaches the sea:

the horizontal style of its verse;

the georgics of street poets, uninterrupted,

chanted out loud and in parallel silence.

2

What the sea doesn’t teach the canefield:

the passion of a rising tide;

the pestle-pounding of waves on sand,

ground ever finer, repesteled, repounded.

What the canefield doesn’t teach the sea:

the sugarcane’s unbridled flowing;

the moderation of the plantation-sea,

which flows less rampantly.

Os rios de um dia

Os rios, de tudo o que existe vivo,

vivem a vida mais definida e clara;

para os rios, viver vale se definir

e definir viver com a língua da água.

O rio corre; e assim viver para o rio

vale não só ser corrido pelo tempo:

o rio o corre; e pois que com sua água,

viver vale suicidar-se, todo o tempo.

2

Pois isso, que ele define com clareza,

o rio aceita e professa, friamente,

e se procuram lhe atar a hemorragia,

ou a vida suicídio, o rio se defende.

O que um rio do Sertão, rio interino,

prova com sua água, curta nas medidas:

ao se correr torrencial, de uma vez,

sobre leitos de hotel, de um só dia;

ao se correr torrencial, de uma vez,

sem alongar seu morrer, pouco a pouco,

sem alongá-lo, em suicídio permanente

ou no que todos, os rios duradouros;

esses rios do Sertão falam tão claro

que induz ao suicídio a pressa deles:

para fugir na morte da vida em poças

que pega quem devagar por tanta sede.

Rivers for a Day

Of all the living things there are, rivers

lead the clearest, most well-defined life;

to live, for a river, means to define itself,

and define means to live with its watery tongue.

The river flows; and so to live, for the river,

doesn’t just mean to endure time’s flowing;

it flows through time, and so to live also means

to commit suicide with its water, all the time.

2

What the river clearly defines

it coldly accepts and professes,

defending itself against all attempts

to stop its suicide life, its hemorrhaging.

Rivers in the Sertão, transient rivers,

prove this with their intermittent water:

by flowing torrentially, all at once,

over hotel beds used just for a day;

by flowing torrentially, all at once,

without slowly dragging out their dying,

without dragging it out in endless

suicide, like the rivers that endure.

Those Sertão rivers speak so clearly

that their rushing induces suicide: flight

into death from the life of shallow pools

that holds those who slowly, from thirst, slowly.

Psicanálise do açúcar

O açúcar cristal, ou açúcar de usina,

mostra a mais instável das brancuras:

quem do Recife sabe direito o quanto,

e o pouco desse quanto, que ela dura.

Sabe o mínimo do pouco que o cristal

se estabiliza cristal sobre o açúcar,

por cima do fundo antigo, de mascavo,

do mascavo barrento que se incuba;

e sabe que tudo pode romper o mínimo

em que o cristal é capaz de censura:

pois o tal fundo mascavo logo aflora

quer inverno ou verão mele o açúcar.

*

Só os bangüês que-ainda purgam ainda

o açúcar bruto com barro, de mistura;

a usina já não o purga: da infância,

não de depois de adulto, ela o educa;

em enfermarias, com vácuos e turbinas,

em mãos de metal de gente indústria,

a usina o leva a sublimar em cristal

o pardo do xarope: não o purga, cura.

Mas como a cana se cria ainda hoje,

em mãos de barro de gente agricultura,

o barrento da pré-infância logo aflora

quer inverno ou verão mele o açúcar.

Psychoanalysis of Sugar

Sugar crystals (the sugar from refineries)

exhibit the most unstable whiteness:

people from Recife know just how much,

and how very little, it will endure.

They know the slightness of how little

the crystals can keep the sugar crystallized

over its ancient past as raw sugar,

the clayish raw sugar that latently seethes;

and they know that anything can break

the slight power of crystals to inhibit,

for that raw-sugar past soon surfaces

when winter or summer melts sugar back to syrup.

*

Only the older sugar mills still in use

still purify raw sugar by mixing in clay;

refineries educate it from an early age

rather than purify it when already adult.

In infirmaries, with vacuums and turbines

run by metal hands of industry people,

refineries make it sublimate its turbid syrup

into crystals: they don’t purify, they cure it.

But since sugarcane is still raised today

by the clay hands of agriculture people,

its clayish, preschool past soon surfaces

when winter or summer melts sugar back to syrup.

Os reinos do amarelo

A terra lauta da Mata produz e exibe

um amarelo rico (se não o dos metais):

o amarelo do maracujá e os da manga,

o do oiti-da-praia, do caju e do cajá;

amarelo vegetal, alegre de sol livre,

beirando o estridente, de tão alegre,

e que o sol eleva de vegetal a mineral,

polindo-o, até um aceso metal de pele.

Só que fere a vista um amarelo outro,

e a fere embora baço (sol não o acende):

amarelo aquém do vegetal, e se animal,

de um animal cobre: pobre, podremente.

2

Só que fere a vista um amarelo outro:

se animal, de homem: de corpo humano;

de corpo e vida; de tudo o que segrega

(sarro ou suor, bile íntima ou ranho),

ou sofre (o amarelo de sentir triste,

de ser analfabeto, de existir aguado):

amarelo que no homem dali se adiciona

o que há em ser pântano, ser-se fardo.

Embora comum ali, esse amarelo humano

ainda dá na vista (mais pelo prodígio):

pelo que tardam a secar, e ao sol dali,

tais poças de amarelo, de escarro vivo.

The Kingdoms of Yellow

The lush earth of the Mata yields and displays

an opulent yellow (though not that of metals):

the yellows of mango and of passion fruit,

of oiti-da-praia and cajá and cashew;

a vegetable yellow so joyous in the sunlight

it almost shouts for joy, the bright sun

raising it from vegetable into mineral,

polishing it until its skin gleams metallic.

But there’s another yellow that hurts the eyes,

even though it’s dull (doesn’t gleam in the sun):

a less-than-vegetable yellow which, if it’s animal,

the animal’s of copper: the shoddy kind, corroded.

2

But there’s another yellow that hurts the eyes:

if it’s animal, it’s of man: of human bodies;

of bodies and of life; of all that they secrete

(sweat or pus, bile or snot)

or suffer (the yellow of feeling sad,

of being illiterate, of hardly existing):

a yellow which in those men includes

being swampy, being their own burden.

Though common there, this human yellow

still stands out (for being such a wonder):

for the sun, though bright, takes forever to dry up

those shallow, yellow pools of living spit.

Num monumento à aspirina

Claramente: o mais prático dos sóis,

o sol de um comprimido de aspirina:

de emprego fácil, portátil e barato,

compacto de sol na lápide sucinta.

Principalmente porque, sol artificial,

que nada limita a funcionar de dia,

que a noite não expulsa, cada noite,

sol imune às leis de meteorologia,

a toda hora em que se necessita dele

levanta e vem (sempre num claro dia):

acende, para secar a aniagem da alma,

quará-la, em linhos de um meio-dia.

*

Convergem: a aparência e os efeitos

da lente do comprimido de aspirina:

o acabamento esmerado desse cristal,

polido a esmeril e repolido a lima,

prefigura o clima onde ele faz viver

e o cartesiano de tudo nesse clima.

De outro lado, porque lente interna,

de uso interno, por detrás da retina,

não serve exclusivamente para o olho

a lente, ou o comprimido de aspirina:

ela reenfoca, para o corpo inteiro,

o borroso de ao redor, e o reafina.

On a Monument to Aspirin

Clearly the most practical of suns:

the sun in the form of an aspirin.

Easy to use, cheap and portable,

this succinct stone is always full

of sun since, being artificial,

its efficacy is not limited

to daytime — night does not nightly

banish it. Immune to meteorological

laws, this sun rises when needed

(always bringing a clear day with it):

shining brightly, it dries and bleaches

the soul’s sackcloth into midday linens.

*

The shape and the effect of an aspirin

lens converge; the clean finish

of this crystal, polished with emery

and repolished with files, prefigures

the climate it generates, and the Cartesian

nature of everything in that climate.

And since it is an internal lens,

for internal use, behind the retina,

the aspirin does not serve only

the eye but refocuses for the whole

body the surrounding obscurity,

bringing it back into clear view.

Habitar o tempo

Para não matar seu tempo, imaginou:

vivê-lo enquanto ele ocorre, ao vivo;

no instante finíssimo em que ocorre,

em ponta de agulha e porém acessível;

viver seu tempo: para o que ir viver

num deserto literal ou de alpendres;

em ermos, que não distraiam de viver

a agulha de um só instante, plenamente.

Plenamente: vivendo-o de dentro dele;

habitá-lo na agulha de cada instante,

em cada agulha instante: e habitar nele

tudo o que habitar cede ao habitante.

2

E de volta de ir habitar seu tempo:

ele corre vazio, o tal tempo ao vivo;

e como além de vazio, transparente,

o instante a habitar passa invisível.

Portanto: para não matá-lo, matá-lo;

matar o tempo, enchendo-o de coisas;

em vez do deserto, ir viver nas ruas

onde o enchem e o matam as pessoas;

pois como o tempo ocorre transparente

e só ganha corpo e cor com seu miolo

(o que não passou do que lhe passou),

para habitá-lo: só no passado, morto.

Inhabiting Time

To avoid killing his time, he imagined:

living it while it’s in progress, live,

in the precision-instant when it passes,

like a needlepoint and yet accessible.

Living his time: by going to live

in a literal desert or a desert of porches —

deserted places that wouldn’t distract him

from living the needle of a single instant

to the full. Fully living it on the inside,

inhabiting it in the needle of each instant,

in each needle-instant, and inhabiting it

with all that inhabiting offers the inhabitant.

2

Back from inhabiting his time, he thought:

time in progress, live time, is empty,

and not only empty but also transparent,

so that the instant to be inhabited passes unseen.

Therefore: to avoid killing it, we have to kill it,

to kill time by filling it with things,

to live not in the desert but in the streets,

where people fill it up and kill it.

Since time goes by transparently

and only gains body and color by what’s in it

(whatever passed it and hasn’t all passed),

we can only inhabit it in the past, where it’s dead.

Para a feira do livro

Folheada, a folha de um livro retoma

o lânguido e vegetal da folha folha,

e um livro se folheia ou se desfolha

como sob o vento a árvore que o doa;

folheada, a folha de um livro repete

fricativas e labiais de ventos antigos,

e nada finge vento em folha de árvore

melhor do que vento em folha de livro.

Todavia a folha, na árvore do livro,

mais do que imita o vento, profere-o:

a palavra nela urge a voz que é vento,

ou ventania varrendo o podre a zero.

*

Silencioso: quer fechado ou aberto,

inclusive o que grita dentro; anônimo:

só expõe o lombo, posto na estante,

que apaga em pardo todos os lombos;

modesto: só se abre se alguém o abre,

e tanto oposto do quadro na parede,

aberto a vida toda, quanto da música,

viva apenas enquanto voam suas redes.

Mas apesar disso e apesar de paciente

(deixa-se ler onde queiram), severo:

exige que lhe extraiam, o interroguem;

e jamais exala: fechado, mesmo aberto.

For the Book Fair

When leafed, the leaf of a book regains

the vegetable lassitude of green leaves,

and a book is leafed or loses its leaves

like the tree it came from, blown by the wind;

when leafed, the leaf of a book repeats

fricatives and labials of ancient winds,

and nothing feigns wind in the leaves of a tree

as well as wind in the leaves of a book.

And yet the leaf in the tree of the book,

more than mimicking, utters the wind;

its words move the voice, which is wind:

a gale that blows what is rotten away.

*

Silent whether closed or open,

including what shouts inside it; anonymous,

it shows only its spine when on the shelf,

which annuls all the spines in gray; modest,

it opens only when someone opens it,

unlike a hanging picture, which is open

all its life, and unlike music,

alive only while its lines are flying.

But despite this and despite its patience

(lets anyone, anywhere, read it), severe,

requiring that you dig in, interrogate it;

and even when open, closed: it never gives vent.

from Museu de tudo / Catchall Museum 1975

A insónia de Monsieur Teste

Uma lucidez que tudo via,

como se à luz ou se de dia;

e que, quando de noite, acende

detrás das pálpebras o dente

de uma luz ardida, sem pele,

extrema, e que de nada serve:

porém luz de uma tal lucidez

que mente que tudo podeis.

The Insomnia of Monsieur Teste

A lucidity which sees everything,

as if by lamp- or daylight,

and which, at nightfall, turns on

behind the eyelids the tooth

of a sharp and skinless light,

extreme and serving for nothing:

a light so lucid it fools you

into thinking you can do everything.

W. H. Auden

(

1905–1973

)

Se morre da morte que ela quer.

É ela que escolhe seu estilo,

sem cogitar se a coisa que mata

rima com sua morte ou faz sentido.

Mas ela certo te respeitava,

de muito ler reler teus livros,

pois matou-te com a guilhotina,

fuzil limpo, do ataque cardíaco.

W. H. Auden

(

1905–1973

)

We die the death death decides.

Death itself selects its method,

without caring whether the weapon

fits or rhymes with the victim.

But death apparently respected you

after reading and rereading your stanzas,

for it killed you with the guillotine,

the clean gun of a heart attack.

O artista inconfessável

Fazer o que seja é inútil.

Não fazer nada é inútil.

Mas entre fazer e não fazer

mais vale o inútil do fazer.

Mas não, fazer para esquecer

que é inútil: nunca o esquecer.

Mas fazer o inútil sabendo

que ele é inútil, e bem sabendo

que é inútil e que seu sentido

não será sequer pressentido,

fazer: porque ele é mais difícil

do que não fazer, e dificil —

mente se poderá dizer

com mais desdém, ou então dizer

mais direto ao leitor Ninguém

que o feito o foi para ninguém.

The Unconfessing Artist

Doing this or that is useless.

Not doing anything is useless.

But between doing and not doing,

better the uselessness of doing.

But no, doing to forget

is what’s useless — no one should forget.

But one can do what’s useless knowing

it’s useless, and although knowing

it’s useless and that its sense

cannot in any way be sensed,

still do: for it is harder

than not doing, and hardly

will one be able to say

with more disdain or say

more plainly to the reader Nobody

that what was done was for nobody.

Catecismo de Berceo

1. Fazer com que a palavra leve

pese como a coisa que diga,

para o que isolá-la de entre

o folhudo em que se perdia.

2. Fazer com que a palavra frouxa

ao corpo de sua coisa adira:

fundi-la em coisa, espessa, sólida,

capaz de chocar com a contígua.

3. Não deixar que saliente fale:

sim, obrigá-la à disciplina

de proferir a fala anônima,

comum a todas de uma linha.

4. Nem deixar que a palavra flua

como rio que cresce sempre:

canalizar a água sem fim

noutras paralelas, latente.

Berceo’s Catechism

1. Make the light word weigh

as much as the thing it tells

by isolating it from among

all the leaves it was lost in.

2. Make the loose word adhere

to the body of its referent,

fusing it into a solid, dense thing,

able to clash with the one next to it.

3. Don’t let its speech stick out

but impose the discipline

of speaking anonymously —

just another word in the line.

4. And don’t let the word flow,

like a river that keeps growing,

but channel the endless water

into parallel, unseen streams.

As águas do Recife

Os dois

touros

1. O mar e os rios do Recife

são touros de índole distinta:

o mar estoura no arrecife,

o rio é um touro que rumina.

Quando o touro mar bate forte

nele há o medo de não ficar,

de ter saído, de estar fora,

de quem se recusa a ser mar.

E há no outro touro, o rio,

entre mangues, remansamente,

mil manhas para não partir:

anda e desanda, ainda, sempre.

Mas se são distintos na ação,

mesma é a razão de seu atuar:

tentam continuar a ser da água

de aquém do arrecife, antemar.

A queda

de braço

2. Eis por que dentro do Recife

as duas águas vivem lutando,

jogando de queda de braço

entre os muros dos cais urbanos.

A que é mar porque, obrigada,

saltou o quebra-mar do porto

vem, cada maré, desafiar

a água ainda rio para o jogo.

A água que remonta e a que desce

travam então uma queda de braço:

aplicadamente e em silêncio,

equilibradas por espaços.

Um certo instante estão imóveis,

nem maré alta nem baixa, ao par;

até que uma derruba e vence,

e ao vencer, perder: se exilar.

The Waters of Recife

The two

bulls

1. The sea and the rivers of Recife

are bulls with different temperaments:

the sea stampedes against the reef,

the river is a bull that ruminates.

The bull that is sea beats hard

because it escaped, it is free

and dreads being pulled back in;

it no longer wants to be sea.

Standing in coastal swamps,

the other bull, the river,

has a thousand tricks for lingering:

it starts and stops, over and over.

Although their actions are different,

their reason for acting is the same:

they try to continue as water

on the reef’s near side, before sea.

The arm

wrestle

2. That is why inside Recife

the two waters live in conflict,

engaging in a daily arm-wrestle

between the walls of the city docks.

The water that’s sea, forced

to jump the jetty of the port,

comes with each tide to challenge

the water that’s still river to fight.

One rising and the other falling,

the waters begin their arm-wrestle,

assiduously and in silence,

now gaining, now losing, by turns.

For a moment they stand off, immobile

— neither high nor low water, but tied —

until one of them finally prevails,

and in winning, loses: it is exiled.

A arquitetura da cana-de-açúcar

Os alpendres das casas-grandes,

de par em par abertos, anchos,

cordiais como a hora do almoço,

apesar disso não são francos.

O aberto alpendre acolhedor

no casarão sem acolhimento

tira a expressão amiga, amável,

do que é de fora e não de dentro:

dos lençóis de cana, tendidos,

postos ao sol até onde a vista,

e que lhe dão o sorriso aberto

que disfarça o que dentro é urtiga.

The Architecture of Sugarcane

The porch of the manor house,

extending into the open air

and as cordial as lunch hour,

is not genuinely open-hearted.

The inviting porch of the mansion

(where no one is ever invited)

owes its friendly expression

to what is not inside:

to the white sheets of sugarcane

that wave in the sun, giving

the porch a welcome smile,

disguising the nettle within.

Rilke nos

Novos Poemas

Preferir a pantera ao anjo,

condensar o vago em preciso:

nesse livro se inconfessou:

ainda se disse, mas sem vício.

Nele, dizendo-se de viés,

disse-se sempre, porém limpo;

incapaz de não se gozar,

disse-se, mas sem onanismo.

Rilke in

New Poems

Replacing the angel with the panther

and making what was vague precise,

this was a book of unconfessions,

still telling, but not as a vice.

Here, by expressing at an angle,

he told his own self, yet kept clean.

Unable to resist consummation,

he told all, but without masturbation.

O autógrafo

Calma ao copiar estes versos

antigos: a mão já não treme

nem se inquieta; não é mais a asa

no vôo interrogante do poema.

A mão já não devora

tanto papel; nem se refreia

na letra miúda e desenhada

com que canalizar sua explosão.

O tempo do poema não há mais;

há seu espaço, esta pedra

indestrutível, imóvel, mesma:

e ao alcance da memória

até o desespero, o tédio.

The Autograph

Calmly the hand copies these

old verses, no longer restlessly

trembling, no longer the wing

in the poem’s searching flight.

The hand no longer devours

so much paper, nor forces

its explosion to fit

into tiny, florid letters.

The time of the poem is over;

there is its space, this unmoving,

unbreaking, unchanging stone,

and within the reach of memory

even desperation, tedium.

Proust e seu livro

De certo o sabia, quem viveu

com a vida e a obra emaranhadas,

que viveu fazendo-as, refazendo-as,

elastecendo-a em tempo e páginas,

que vestiu sua obra, por dentro,

percorrendo-a, viajando em seu barco,

de certo viu que um dia acabá-la

era matar-se em livro, suicidá-lo.

Proust and His Book

He whose work and life

were inexorably entwined,

who lived to make and remake them,

stretching them in time and pages,

who wore his work inside himself,

exploring it, sailing in its ship,

must have known its final line

would spell a double suicide.

from A escola das facas / The School of Knives 1980

Menino de engenho

A cana cortada é uma foice.

Cortada num ângulo agudo,

ganha o gume afiado da foice

que a corta em foice, um dar-se mútuo.

Menino, o gume de uma cana

cortou-me ao quase de cegar-me,

e uma cicatriz, que não guardo,

soube dentro de mim guardar-se.

A cicatriz não tenho mais;

o inoculado, tenho ainda;

nunca soube é se o inoculado

(então) é vírus ou vacina.

Plantation Boy

The cut sugar stalk is a sickle.

Cut at a sharp angle it gains

the whetted edge of the sickle

that cut it to a sickle: a mutual giving.

When I was a boy, the edge of a stalk

once cut and almost blinded me,

and a scar, which left no visible mark,

knew how to make its mark inside me.

Though I no longer have the scar,

what was inoculated is in me still;

I have never discovered

if it is a virus or vaccine.

Horácio

O bêbado cabal.

Quando nós, de meninos,

vivemos a doença

de criar passarinhos,

e as férias acabadas

o horrível outra-vez

do colégio nos pôs

na rotina de rês,

deixamos com Horácio

um dinheiro menino

que pudesse manter

em vida os passarinhos.

Poucos dias depois

as gaiolas sem língua

eram tumbas aéreas

de morte nordestina.

Horácio não comprara

alpiste; e tocar na água

gratuita, para os cochos,

certo lhe repugnava.

Gastou o que do alpiste

com o alpiste-cachaça,

alma do passarinho

que em suas veias cantava.

Horácio

The perfect drunk. .

When we as children

went through the craze

of raising birds

and, vacation ended,

the here-we-go-again

of school had pulled us back

to the hated grindstone,

we left with Horácio

our childish savings,

enough to keep

alive the birds.

A few days later

the songless cages

were aerial graves

of Northeast death.

Horácio bought no seed,

and to refill dishes

with water that cost nothing

must have disgusted him.

He spent what was for birdseed

on alcoholic seed,

soul of the bird

which in his blood was singing.

A voz do canavial

Voz sem saliva da cigarra,

do papel seco que se amassa,

de quando se dobra o jornal:

assim canta o canavial,

ao vento que por suas folhas,

de navalha a navalha, soa,

vento que o dia e a noite toda

o folheia, e nele se esfola.

The Voice of the Canefield

Spitless voice of the cicada,

of dry crumpling paper,

of the newspaper when it folds:

so is the singing of the canefield

in the wind which through its leaves

from razor to razor breathes,

wind which all night and day

leafs through it and is flayed.

Forte de Orange, Itamaracá

A pedra bruta da guerra,

seu grão granítico, hirsuto,

foi toda sitiada por

erva-de-passarinho, musgo.

Junto da pedra que o tempo

rói, pingando como um pulso,

inroído, o metal canhão

parece eterno, absoluto.

Porém o pingar do tempo

pontual, penetra tudo;

se seu pulso não se sente,

bate sempre, e pontiagudo,

e a guerrilha vegetal

no seu infiltrar-se mudo,

conta com o tempo, suas gotas

contra o ferro inútil, viúvo.

E um dia os canhões de ferro,

sua tesão vã, dedos duros,

se renderão ante o tempo

e seu discurso, ou decurso:

ele fará, com seu pingo

inestancável e surdo,

que se abracem, se penetrem,

se possuam, ferro e musgo.

Fort Orange, Itamaracá

The rough stone of war,

its rugged, granitic grain,

was besieged and overrun

by moss and mistletoe.

Next to the stone which time

erodes, beating like a pulse,

the uneroded cannon metal

seems eternal, absolute.

But the punctual trickling

of time penetrates all;

even if not felt, its pulse

continues its pointed beating,

and the vegetal guerrillas

can count on time’s trickle

in their silent infiltration

against the widowed iron.

And one day the hard fingers,

the cannons’ vain rigidity,

will also surrender to time

and its rhetoric, its regularity;

trickling, unheard and unchecked,

it will force them to embrace,

penetrate and possess

each other, iron and moss.

A voz do coqueiral

O coqueiral tem seu idioma:

não o de lâmina, é voz redonda:

é em curvas sua reza longa,

decerto aprendida das ondas,

cujo sotaque é o da sua fala,

côncava, curva, abaulada:

dicção do mar com que convive

na vida alísia do Recife.

The Voice of the Coconut Grove

The language of the coconut grove

is not of the blade but round:

in curves it voices its long prayer,

which it must have learned from the waves,

whose accent, like its speech,

is concave, curved, arched:

diction of the sea with which it lives

the wind-whipped life of Recife.

A escola das facas

O alísio ao chegar ao Nordeste

baixa em coqueirais, canaviais;

cursando as folhas laminadas,

se afia em peixeiras, punhais.

Por isso, sobrevoada a Mata,

suas mãos, antes fêmeas, redondas,

ganham a fome e o dente da faca

com que sobrevoa outras zonas.

O coqueiro e a cana lhe ensinam,

sem pedra-mó, mas faca a faca,

como voar o Agreste e o Sertão:

mão cortante e desembainhada.

The School of Knives

On reaching the Northeast the trade wind

sweeps through coconut and cane fields;

coursing through the green blades,

it whets itself on cleavers, on daggers.

Flying over the fertile Mata,

its hands, which were round and female,

acquire the appetite and teeth of knives,

with which it flies over other regions.

The coconut tree and cane stalk teach it,

not with the grindstone but knife to knife,

how to fly through the Sertão backlands,

sharp hand drawn and ready to strike.

Barra do Sirinhaém

1

Se alguém se deixa, se deita,

numa praia do Nordeste,

ao sempre vento de leste,

mais que se deixa, se deita,

se se entrega inteiro ao mar,

se fecha o corpo, se isola

dentro da própria gaiola

e menos que existe, está;

se além disso a brisa alísia

que o mar sopra (ou sopra o mar)

faça com que o coqueiral

entoe sua única sílaba:

esse alguém pode que ouvisse,

assim cortado, e vazio,

no seu só estar-se, o assovio

do tempo a fluir, seu fluir-se.

2

Se alguém se deixa, se deita,

numa praia do Nordeste

ao sempre vento de leste;

mais que se deita, se deixa,

sente com o corpo que a terra

roda redonda em seu eixo,

pois que pode sentir mesmo

que as suas pernas se elevam,

que há um subir do horizonte,

que mais alto que a cabeça

seu corpo também se eleva,

vem sobre ele o mar mais longe.

Essas praias permitem

que o corpo sinta seu tempo,

o espaço no rodar lento,

sua vida como vertigem.

The Sandbank at Sirinhaém

1

If you let go and you lie down

under the steady eastern wind

of a beach in Northeast Brazil,

more than letting go, you lie;

if you give yourself up to the sea,

your body closes in, isolates

itself inside its own cage,

and less than existing, you are;

if furthermore the trade wind

stirred by the sea (or stirring it)

makes the coconut trees

intone their single syllable,

you may be able to hear,

in this detached and empty

state, just being, the whistling

of time flowing, your flowing.

2

If you let go and you lie down

under the steady eastern wind

of a beach in Northeast Brazil,

more than lying, you let go,

you feel with your body that

the Earth turns round your axis,

and you can even feel

that your legs are lifting,

that the horizon is rising,

that higher than your mind

your body also rises,

covered by the furthest sea.

These beaches make it possible

for the body to feel its time,

space in its slow turning,

your life as revolution.

A cana-de-açúcar menina

A cana-de-açúcar, tão pura,

se recusa, viva, a estar nua:

desde cedo, saias folhudas

milvestem-lhe a perna andaluza.

É tão andaluza em si mesma

que cresce promíscua e honesta:

cresce em noviça, sem carinhos,

sem flores, cantos, passarinhos.

Sugarcane Girl

Sugarcane is too virtuous

to be seen, alive, in the nude:

leafy skirts from a young age dress

and re-dress her Andalusian leg.

Because she is so Andalusian,

she grows up promiscuous and pure:

as a novice, without caresses,

without songs or birds or flowers.

A cana e o século dezoito

A cana-de-açúcar, tão mais velha,

que o século dezoito, é que o expressa.

A cana é pura enciclopedista,

no geométrico, no ser-de-dia,

na incapacidade de dar sombras,

mal-assombrados, coisas medonhas,

no gosto das várzeas ventiladas,

das cabeleiras bem penteadas,

de certa esbelteza linear,

porte incapaz de se desleixar,

e que vivendo em mares, anônima,

nunca se entremela como as ondas:

mas guardam a elegância pessoal,

postura e compostura formal,

muito embora exposta à devassada

luz sem pudor, sem muros, de várzea.

Sugarcane and the Eighteenth Century

Much older than the eighteenth century,

sugarcane can tell its history.

Sugarcane is a pure encyclopedist

in its fondness for daytime and geometry,

in its refusal to make shadows,

frightful things, phantoms,

in its taste for lowlands well aired,

for well-combed heads of hair,

for a certain linear grace,

a bearing that’s never careless;

and living by the sea it remains

anonymous, never making waves.

But it has an elegance all its own,

a sense of proportion, a formal pose,

despite its exposure to the wide-open,

unwalled, shameless light of the lowlands.

from Agrestes / Rough & Rude 1985

O nada que é

Um canavial tem a extensão

ante a qual todo metro é vão.

Tem o escancarado do mar

que existe para desafiar

que números e seus afins

possam prendê-lo nos seus sins.

Ante um canavial a medida

métrica é de todo esquecida,

porque embora todo povoado

povoa-o o pleno anonimato

que dá esse efeito singular:

de um nada prenhe como o mar.

The Nothing That Is

A sugarcane field is so vast

that all measures of it are vain.

It has the sea’s unending

wide-openness, defying

numbers and their ilk

to trap it in their assertions.

In the canefield one forgets

to measure anything at all,

for although it is populous,

its population is anonymous,

making it resemble a pregnancy

of nothingness, like the sea’s.

Bancos & catedrais

Quando de carro comigo

por Sevilha, Andaluzia,

passando por cada igreja,

recolhida, te benzias.

Pela larga Andaluzia

ninguém se engana de igreja:

amplas paredes caiadas

com portais pardos, de pedra.

Contudo, quando comigo

pela Vila de Madrid

notei que tu te benzias

passando o que, para ti,

lembrava vulto de igreja.

O que era monumental

fazia-te imaginar:

eis mais outra catedral.

Sem querer, não te enganavas:

se não eram catedrais

eram matrizes de bancos,

o verbo de onde as filiais.

Só erravas pela metade

benzendo-te em frente a bancos;

quem sabe foram construídos

para lucrar desse engano?

Banks & Cathedrals

Traveling with me by car

through Seville, in Andalusia,

before every church we passed

you quietly crossed yourself.

Nowhere in Andalusia

could a church ever be mistaken;

all have broad, whitewashed walls

with doorways of gray stone.

But when we were in the city

Madrid, I noticed you still

crossed yourself each time

we passed what to your mind

recalled the form of a church.

The monumental features

made you think immediately:

ah! another cathedral.

You were not far off the mark,

for although not cathedrals

they were central banks,

the Word from which the branches.

You were only half in error

to cross yourself before banks.

Weren’t they built in the first place

to profit from that mistake?

Homenagem renovada a Marianne Moore

Cruzando desertos de frio

que a pouca poesia não ousa,

chegou ao extremo da poesia

quem caminhou, no verso, em prosa.

E então mostrou, sem pregação,

com a razão de sua obra pouca,

que a poesia não é de dentro,

que é como casa, que é de fora;

que embora se viva de dentro

se há de construir, que é uma coisa

que quem faz faz para fazer-se

— muleta para a perna coxa.

Renewed Homage to Marianne Moore

Crossing deserts of coldness

which slight poetry will not risk,

she who walked through verse

in prose arrived at poetry’s limit.

She was able to show, without preaching,

by the reason of her spare work,

that poetry is not on the inside

but is, like a house, something outside,

and before one lives inside it

it must be built — this something

one makes to make oneself able,

this crutch for the one who is lame.

A água da areia

Podem a ablução, os muçulmanos,

com areia, se não têm água;

fazem da areia um outro líquido,

eficaz igual no que lava.

A areia pode lavar neles

qualquer espécie de pecado;

na ablução ela flui como a água,

dissolve o mal mais empedrado.

Sandwater

Muslims may perform their ablutions

with sand when there is no water;

they treat the sand as another liquid

just as effective for their washings.

The sand is able to wash

any kind of sin from their souls;

for ablutions it flows like water,

dissolving evils as hard as stone.

No Páramo

No Páramo, passada Riobamba,

a quatro mil metros de altura,

a geografia do Chimborazo

entra em coma: está surda e muda.

A grama não é grama, é musgo;

e a luz é de lã, não de agulha:

é a luz pálida, sonolenta,

de um sol roncolho, quase lua.

In the Páramo

In the Páramo, past Riobamba,

some fourteen thousand feet high,

the geography of Chimborazo

goes into coma, deaf and mute.

The grass isn’t grass, it’s moss,

and the light has no needles, it’s woolen:

it is the pallid, somnolent light

of a castrated sun, almost moon.

A cama e um automóvel

Morrer é andar de automóvel:

tem todas as marchas, tem breques,

e o motor que vai mansamente

pode que sem mais se acelere

para cumprir o diagnóstico

de algum doutor acelerado

que previu a morte a tal hora,

ela, que se é certa é sem prazo.

Se demora, a morte é a viagem

de automóvel liso na estrada:

a cama do doente é o automóvel:

viaja sem chegar, sem mapas.

The Bed and the Car

Death is like riding in a car:

it has various gears, and brakes,

and the softly running motor

can unexpectedly accelerate

the fatal diagnosis of a doctor

who spoke too quickly when he set

a day for death, which, even if

imminent, obeys no schedule.

When it delays, death is an outing

on the highway in a smooth-riding car,

the sickbed is the car, traveling

without maps, and without ever arriving.

Direito à morte

Viver é poder ter consigo

certo passaporte no bolso

que dá direito a sair dela,

com bala ou veneno moroso.

Ele faz legal o que quer

sem policiais e sem lamentos:

fechar a vida como porta

contra um fulano ou contra o vento;

fazer, num dia que foi posto

na mesa em toalha de linho,

fazer de seu vivo esse morto,

de um golpe, ou gole, do mais limpo.

Right to Death

To live is to be able to carry

a passport in one’s pocket

that confers the right to get out,

with a bullet or a slow poison.

It makes it legal to act

without policemen or laments:

to shut life as one shuts a door

to the wind or an unwanted visitor;

to make of one’s life (on the day

this passport is placed

on the linen-covered table) a corpse,

with a clean sharp bang, or swallow.

Questão de pontuação

Todo mundo aceita que ao homem

cabe pontuar a própria vida:

que viva em ponto de exclamação

(dizem: tem alma dionisíaca);

viva em ponto de interrogação

(foi filosofia, ora é poesia);

viva equilibrando-se entre vírgulas

e sem pontuação (na política):

o homem só não aceita do homem

que use a só pontuação fatal:

que use, na frase que ele vive

o inevitável ponto final.

A Question of Punctuation

No one rejects man’s right

to punctuate his own life —

to live as an exclamation mark

(they say he has a Dionysian heart),

or to live as a question mark

(formerly philosophy, now poetry),

or to balance oneself between commas

without final punctuation (politics);

man only rejects that a man

himself write the fatal mark —

affixing to the sentence of his person

the inevitable period, period.

from Crime na Calle Relator / Crime on the Calle Relator 1987

O ferrageiro de Carmona

Um ferrageiro de Carmona

que me informava de um balcão:

“Aquilo? É de ferro fundido,

foi a fôrma que fez, não a mão.

Só trabalho em ferro forjado

que é quando se trabalha ferro;

então, corpo a corpo com ele,

domo-o, dobro-o, até o onde quero.

O ferro fundido é sem luta,

é só derramá-lo na fôrma.

Não há nele a queda-de-braço

e o cara-a-cara de uma forja.

Existe grande diferença

do ferro forjado ao fundido;

é uma distância tão enorme

que não pode medir-se a gritos.

Conhece a Giralda em Sevilha?

Decerto subiu lá em cima.

Reparou nas flores de ferro

dos quatro jarros das esquinas?

Pois aquilo é ferro forjado.

Flores criadas numa outra língua.

Nada têm das flores de fôrma

moldadas pelas das campinas.

Dou-lhe aqui humilde receita,

ao senhor que dizem ser poeta:

o ferro não deve fundir-se

nem deve a voz ter diarréia.

Forjar: domar o ferro à força,

não até uma flor já sabida,

mas ao que pode até ser flor

se flor parece a quem o diga.”

The Ironware Shop in Carmona

In an ironware shop in Carmona

the man at the counter answered me:

“That thing there? It’s cast iron,

made by a mold, not the hand.

“I only work in forged iron,

the kind of iron that’s wrought;

body against body I subdue it,

bending it into what I want.

“Cast iron requires no struggle:

you just pour it in the mold,

without any of the face-to-face

or arm-wrestle of a forge.

“There’s a vast difference

between cast iron and forged;

the distance is so great

that no shouting can bridge it.

“Do you know the Giralda in Seville?

No doubt you climbed to the top.

And did you notice the iron flowers

in the vases on all four corners?

“Well, they are made of forged iron.

Flowers created in another language.

Not at all like cast-iron flowers

molded after those of the fields.

“Let me give a bit of advice

to you whom they call a poet:

iron should never be cast,

nor your voice be diarrhea.

“Forge your iron; shape it by force,

not into a flower you already know

but into what can also be a flower

if you think it is and say it is so.”

Notes

A Few Matadors

Manuel Rodríguez, “Manolete,” perhaps the most legendary matador of the twentieth century, was born in Córdoba in 1917 and died, gored, in 1947.

The Word Silk

Although the Portuguese word for silk, seda, seems like it could be related to sedante, “sedative” (third stanza), in fact there is no etymological connection.

Yes Against Yes

Only the first half the poem is included here. Two more poets — Portugal’s Cesário Verde and Brazil’s Augusto dos Anjos — and two more painters — Juan Gris and Jean Dubuffet — are considered in the second half.

Rivers for a Day

The Sertão is the arid and impoverished hinterland of Northeast Brazil.

Psychoanalysis of Sugar

In primitive, unmechanized sugar mills, clay was added to the sugar as part of the bleaching process.

The Kingdoms of Yellow

The Mata is the fertile coastal region of Pernambuco where sugarcane is grown. In the fourth line of the second stanza, the word sarro does not mean “pus” but refers to the white coating (or “fur”) on the tongue resulting from hunger or sickness.

Fort Orange, Itamaracá

Itamaracá is an island off the coast of Pernambuco.

The Sandbank at Sirinhaém

The Sirinhaém is a river that empties into the Atlantic in southern Pernambuco.

In the Páramo

Chimborazo is the highest mountain (20,561 feet) in Ecuador, where the poet served as the Ambassador of Brazil from 1979 to 1982.

Afterword

“A stone is a stone is a stone” could not be a poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto, but it could be an epigraph to his poetry, a notice at the gates that the language within is plain and direct and that the subject matter is mineral, touchable, weighable, thingish. A stone is preferable to a rose for the simple reason that it is harder. This poet never liked what was easy. In “The Unconfessing Artist” he recognized that doing something is as useless as not doing anything, yet he insisted that it’s better to do. Why? Because it’s harder than not doing. It was only hard things like stones that held any poetic attraction for João Cabral. He considered poems made out of flowers to be, at best, a redundancy. Whereas poems made out of what’s harsh, rugged and lifeless might add a new sliver of something — perhaps beauty — to the world and might even, in a slight way, change how we see.

Stones have no fragrance, but they are heavy with substance and endure. João Cabral, whose second book was titled The Engineer, wanted each of his poem-building words to “weigh as much as the thing it tells.” By fusing “the loose word” to “the body of its referent,” it would become, according to the “Catechism” he attributed to Berceo (p. 201), the first poet known by name to have written in Spanish, “a solid, dense thing, / able to clash with the one next to it.”

Yet another quality of stone, besides its hardness and resilience, is its sheer and utter stoniness. What you see is what it is, the same material throughout. There is no “inner stone” to probe, ponder, or dress with theories. João Cabral was suspicious of whatever was invisible. He was not a strict materialist, but he preferred solid matter, because it is surer, clearer, and common to all. When he was 32 years old he published an essay criticizing the Brazilian poetry of his own generation for being “made of super-realities, made with exclusive parts of man,” with no greater ambition than “to communicate extremely subtle details, for which the only useful writer’s tool is the lightest and most abstract part of the dictionary.” Cabral preferred “the prosaic word” that is “heavy with reality, dirty with the coarse realities of the outside world.”

One possible explanation for João Cabral’s poetic preference is simple: he was writing out of what he knew. His education by stone was the one he received growing up in Northeast Brazil, the country’s poorest region, largely taken up by the dry and desolate hinterland known as the Sertão. João Cabral was not from the interior but from Recife, on the coast, where thousands of Sertanejos (people from the Sertão) poured in during the drought years. To get there, many of the migrants would follow the path of the Capibaribe River, settling along its shores when at last they reached the city outskirts. The Capibaribe and the poor who inhabit its banks became recurring and indissociable topics in Cabral’s poetry. So destitute were these people — destitute of material means and of any real hope — that their existence was almost wholly defined by the muddy river, making it hard to know “where man (…) begins from the mud” or even “where man begins / in that man” (The Dog without Feathers). If there was any lingering consciousness in this dehumanizing environment, it belonged not to man but to the river, credited with knowing how the river dwellers “wither / even beyond / their deepest rubble.” Rubble — crushed stone — in place of a soul.

Another long poem, O Rio (1954; The River), was narrated by the Capibaribe itself, being a chronicle of the journey it makes from its source to Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, passing first through barren country where the inhabitants “arm themselves / with the qualities of stone” in order to fight against it, and continuing through the coastal region known as the Mata, where sugarcane is grown.

It was on the family’s sugar plantations that João Cabral spent his early childhood and received much of his tough “education.” However green and lush the Mata may be, life for those who cut and milled the sugarcane was as gray and meager as in the arid Sertão. A son of privilege, João Cabral never suffered any privation, but he saw it close up, every day, and he remembered what he saw. In the evening the sugar mill workers would gather around and hear the little boy recite popular verse narratives, published in pamphlet form and sold in the marketplace. This kind of versified storytelling — traceable to the narrative poetry traditions of medieval Iberia — became the major vehicle for what could be called Cabral’s “socially engaged” poetry. If this term is used here with reservations, it is because the poet himself never employed any such epithet. The great originality of his poetry in this vein is its absolute objectivity, not only in its dispassion but also in the way it objectifies the poem’s subject.

In “Party at the Manor House,” the plantation owners and their politician friends talk about the sugar mill workers as subhuman creatures, hardly distinguishable from the sugar which is the beginning, middle and end of their exploited lives. Like the poor of Recife who stagnate along the banks of the Capibaribe River, the sugar mill workers have no inner “spiritual man” that can remain untouched by the condition that defines them. The twenty stanzas of this poem amount to a biology of their species, matter-of-factly described “in child form,” “in female form,” “in the form of an old man,” and so forth. In fact there is no “engagement” with the mill worker’s condition. The poet merely reports; let the reader react. Cabral’s childhood contact with those workers, acting as a vaccine (see “Plantation Boy”), gave him a permanent immunity to facile emotional responses. His poetry displays no pity, and hence no condescension.

João Cabral moved with his family to Recife when he was ten years old, and in his late teens he began to frequent the Café Lafayette, where the city’s intellectuals met. A voracious reader, he was especially fond of certain French authors, including Mallarmé and Valéry. He was twenty years old when he met Murilo Mendes and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, probably the two Brazilian poets who most influenced his work, and they helped him publish his first book, Stone of Sleep, in 1942. The poetic images in these early poems were taken from the world of sleep and dreams or else were wrapped in a dreamy, surrealist aura, but the young poet treated them as hard objects, organizing them with careful deliberation, like a cubist his ensemble of fragmented shapes. One of the poems pays homage to Picasso in his cubist period, and another to the surrealist André Masson. Painting was a lifelong passion of Cabral, who published a book-length essay on Joan Miró in 1950. Mondrian was another painter he held in special regard.

Shortly after his first book was published, João Cabral moved to Rio de Janeiro, and in 1945 he was admitted into the Brazilian foreign service. In that same year he published The Engineer, which set in place his definitive program of poetry as lucid construction. The engineer of the title poem has a dream, but it is of “clear things: / surfaces, tennis, a glass of water” and is surrounded by “light, sun, and the open air.” If poetry in his first book still depended on inspiration from dreams, now it is the fruit of sleepless nights during which the poet agonizes before a blank sheet of paper to generate a mere twenty words to be used

in his efficient machine.

Always the same twenty words

he knows so well: how they work,

their evaporation, their density

less than the air’s.

(“The Lesson of Poetry”)

Those twenty words mark the limits of inspiration; even if the poet produces more words, they still weigh less than air. But Cabral will put them into his poem-machine, where they will become the indispensable components of taut, interlocking verse structures. Eschewing verbal effusion and the piling on of images, he exploited to exhaustion the single word, the single image: water, wind, knife, stone. From their being used so insistently and in such varying formulations, these words acquired functional weight and substance, independent of whatever weight their literal meaning carried.

In “Antiode,” published in 1947, the poet tells how he rejected the word “flower” in favor of the unpoetical “feces.” To rehabilitate the flower for use in poetry, he had to strip away all its lyrical overlay, reducing it to a “verse / inscribed in verse,” an “explosion / made to work / like a machine, / a vase of flowers.” In a process analogous to the Freudian sublimation of sexual energy into the creative forces of civilization, Cabral reined in direct emotion as well as aesthetic or intellectual exaltation, harnessing their energy to generate his smooth-running poetry, which depended not so much on the words — or flowers, emotions, images, ideas — themselves, but on their dynamic arrangement. The machine functioned on its own, with no need for the reader to relate to the man who created it.

This freeing of the poem from the poet has its price. The relationship with the author created by a well-made poetry of personal confession or remembrance will more easily captivate and move the average reader. The resolute impersonality of Cabral’s work — in which the word “I” rarely occurs — puts a heavy burden on technical accomplishment, and demands readers who appreciate that accomplishment. “Impersonal” does not mean “unfeeling,” however. The poet’s rigorous configurations placed words in a state of high tension capable of provoking, at certain moments, emotions of a rare order, and these were by no means an accidental by-product of his art. According to Cabral, his constructivist approach to poetry owed its greatest debt not to any of the writers and painters he admired but to Le Corbusier, whose theoretical works he had read already as a teenager. But if the Swiss architect’s most famous proposal was to see a house as a “machine à habiter” (machine to inhabit), Cabral chose another phrase of Le Corbusier for the epigraph to The Engineer: “machine à émouvoir” (machine for stirring emotion).

In 1947 João Cabral took up his first foreign post, as the Brazilian vice-consul in Barcelona. Over the next forty years he held posts in England, Spain, France, Switzerland, Paraguay, Senegal (where he rose to the rank of ambassador in 1972), Ecuador, Honduras, and Portugal. All left explicit traces in his poetry, but Spain — where he spent a total of fourteen years, in Barcelona, Madrid and Seville — became the second geographical pole around which his poetry flourished. This was not a pole of opposition but one that echoed, in a European register, Cabral’s native Pernambuco. The relative socioeconomic backwardness of Franco-ruled Spain, the arid, harshly lit landscapes of Castile, and the stark essentiality of Andalusia’s cante hondo, the singing style typical of flamenco, had their counterparts in Northeast Brazil, which — perhaps not by chance — was never a theme in Cabral’s poetry until he went to Spain.

The reciprocal relationship of the two regions is demonstrated in Landscapes with Figures (1956), where there is a pendular shift of geographical setting from one poem to the next (in the full-length work). This alternation between Pernambuco and Spain would occur throughout the rest of the poet’s career, sometimes within a single collection and sometimes on a larger scale, with entire books set in or evoking one or the other of the two places. Landscapes also set the technical parameters of Cabral’s most typical machine mold: sixteen of the eighteen poems are built out of quatrains, and perfect or assonantal rhyme (more frequently the latter) is employed throughout in an abcb scheme. And the machine worked. Cabral put almost nothing into it and managed to pull out stunning poems. The landscapes are all bleak or empty — three cemeteries, the “anonymous, plainfaced” sugarcane field, a “place in La Mancha / where the Castilian plain is hardest,” the “almost static” Capibaribe flowing through Recife’s “sclerosis and cement” — and the figures that inhabit them mostly dead or destitute; but the poet was able to find or create life in these desolate scenes.

Uma Faca Só Lâmina (1956; A Knife All Blade) was Cabral’s most technically brilliant poem-machine. Three words, or images, or metaphors — a knife, a clock, and a bullet — weave in and around and in place of each other over the course of 352 verses, divided into eleven sections of eight stanzas with four lines containing seven syllables each. Perhaps because he realized that this poem smacked of an exercice de style, he published it and Landscapes with Figures in a book that also contained a lower-tension, higher-access poetry. Titled Duas Águas (Two Waters) and including both new and older works, the book’s subtitle indicated the two broad divisions of Cabral’s entire poetic output: Poetry of Reflective Concentration and Poetry for Wider Audiences. The latter category encompassed Cabral’s long narrative poems — The Dog without Feathers and O Rio — and the previously unpublished Morte e Vida Severina (Death and Life of a Severino), a verse drama. A staged version of this new work, with music by singer and composer Chico Buarque, won prizes in Brazil and France in 1966 and brought international renown to Cabral. “There are many of us Severinos / all with the very same life,” explains the protagonist, an archetype of the desperate Sertanejo who migrates to Recife from the drought-scourged Sertão.

This, Cabral’s most popular work, was not one he cherished, judging it less well crafted than others. But it served, in his overall production, as an antidote to the danger that “work can become exercise, an activity performed for its own sake” and leading ultimately to “the death of communication.” Cabral followed up this warning, issued in a lecture delivered in 1952, with an indictment of poets who don’t take into consideration their readers, “the essential counterpart to the activity of creating literature.” A poet’s richness, he argued, “can only originate in reality.” Death and Life of a Severino, in keeping with the implied agenda, was grounded in the reality of Pernambuco not only thematically but formally, for it picked up on a local tradition of verse plays accompanied by music and dancing.

Cabral’s more rigorously constructed work, his “poetry of reflective concentration,” reached its highest level of achievement in the 1960s, with the publication of Four Spot (1960), Serial (1961) and Education by Stone (1966). Although the poet claimed to be indifferent to music, the title of the second book recalls the serial technique of dodecaphonic composers, and the arrangement of its component parts lives up to the ideal. Obsessively driven by the number four, the book’s sixteen poems all have four parts consisting exclusively of quatrains. In the first poem each part has two quatrains; in the second poem, four quatrains; in the third poem, six quatrains; in the fourth poem, eight. The series repeats, occurring four times in all. Education by Stone, on the other hand, is a kind of poetic equivalent in verse to Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues. Its forty-eight poems — all of which contain either sixteen or twenty-four verses divided into two parts of varying length — are formulated like theorems whose truth is tested by antithesis. Counterpoint abounds, with frequent syntactic and semantic inversions, and the second part of each poem is usually a corollary, an analogue, or mirror version of the first part.

The play of oppositions is greatest in “The Sea and the Canefield” and “The Canefield and the Sea.” The first line of the first poem, “What the sea learns from the canefield,” is negatively restated in the fifth line, “What the sea doesn’t learn from the canefield,” and then inverted in the first line of the second part, “What the canefield learns from the sea,” which is in turn negatively restated in the fifth line. The poem’s sixteen verses are all repeated in the inversely titled poem, “The Canefield and the Sea,” but in different order, and with the verb “learn from” being replaced by its linguistic counterpart, “teach.” The most famous poem in this collection, “Weaving the Morning,” uses the interconnected cries of cocks crowing at dawn as a metaphor for the human solidarity that enables each day to take shape and proceed smoothly.

The intricately woven poems of Education by Stone are Cabral’s best demonstration of how words, things and people are inextricably connected, and of how it is possible to highlight, reinforce and augment those connections, thereby increasing meaning in language and in life itself. What João Cabral ultimately wanted to offer his readers was not finished poetic products but their example, their lesson, an education in how to make words into stones useful — and used — for building. His ideal for his verbal edifices is expressed in “Tale of an Architect,” where architecture is conceived as the construction not of walls but of openness, with houses consisting exclusively of doors (“doors-leading-to, never doors-against”) and a sheltering roof.

It is hard to imagine how Cabral’s poetry could have developed any further as architecture or engineering, and the poet did not attempt a repeat performance of his achievement but chose instead to explore other paths. The eighty poems of Catchall Museum (1975) were, as the title suggests, a diversified miscellany, with themes ranging from Mauritania to Proust to soccer (Cabral was a champion player as an adolescent), but close to half of the compositions comment on writers and artists in epigrammatic fashion.

In 1980 The School of Knives, set entirely in Pernambuco and based largely on childhood reminiscences, surprised everyone with its unprecedented autobiographical content. We are still in school, but now the subject is the lesson of his upbringing, and the knives of the title mean something different from what they once did. In A Knife All Blade the knife represented linguistic incisiveness and sharpness of vision, as it did in the poem “Yes Against Yes,” where it served as a writing instrument for Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge, two of the poets Cabral held up as models of compositional precision. In his 1980 work the knife became the razor-sharp leaf of sugarcane (in the title poem) as well as the scar-inflicting sickle of his childhood on sugar plantations (in “Plantation Boy”). The engineer’s principles were still at work but had been internalized, and the new cutting edge — made of memory and milieu — conferred a more intimate tone on the poems.

True to his own program but again taking everyone by surprise, João Cabral returned to “poetry for wider audiences” in 1984 with the publication of Auto do Frade (The Friar), which tells the last day in the life of Frei Caneca, who was sent to his death by the Portuguese court in 1825 for spreading republican ideas and for his role in the Pernambuco revolutionary movement of the previous year. Consisting of seven dialogues between the condemned Carmelite friar and the people of Recife who make up the chorus, it packed the same dramatic force as his first verse play, Death and Life of a Severino, and was poetically superior.

The title Agrestes (1985) means “rough, wild, rustic”; it also alludes to the semiarid, rocky region of Northeast Brazil known as the Agreste and situated between the Mata (on the coast) and the Sertão (in the interior). This compendium of ninety poems forms a kind of inside-out autobiography, the negative of a missing photo, in which the author reveals himself obliquely, through the topics he addresses. It begins with poems about Pernambuco, particularly childhood visions of it, and ends with poems that comment on death in Cabral’s customarily detached fashion. In between there are poems about places where he served as a diplomat — West Africa, Ecuador, and Spain — and about his favorite writers and artists, including Valéry, Paul Klee, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore, this last being the subject of three poems. In “Renewed Homage to Marianne Moore,” Cabral characterized the American poet’s concept of poetry as a crutch for a lame leg, as something that is created not to express what one has but to substitute for what he or she is missing. This recalls a distinction Cabral made, in an interview published in 1974, between “crutch poets” and poets he called “bleeders.” Writing, for the bleeders, is an overflow of their intense inner feeling, whereas crutch poets write to make up for what they do not feel, at least not in a spontaneous, emotional way.

In 1987, with the publication of Crime na Calle Relator (Crime on the Calle Relator), Cabral’s poetry shifted in yet another direction, toward storytelling. The sixteen poems that make up the collection narrate tales and anecdotes culled from his own experience or from what he learned secondhand. Half of the stories are set in Spain, and Cabral’s last collection was dedicated entirely to Spain, or rather, to his favorite city there or anywhere: Seville. Cabral may have been a “crutch poet,” but Seville brought out a bit of the “bleeder” in him. Which isn’t to say that his poetry became a mere outpouring of heartfelt sentiment, for it was the very sparseness of expression and economy of gestures that Cabral admired in certain bullfighters, in the “cante a palo seco” (a severe, a cappella style of singing), and in flamenco dancing. But the world of Andalusia aroused an exuberance in Cabral that was otherwise rare. Flamenco music was the only kind he ever admitted to liking, and the women he loved were Sevillian, even if they had never lived there and had no Spanish blood. The leadoff poem of his last book, Sevilha Andando (Seville Walking), published in 1989, is titled “The Woman from Seville Who Didn’t Know It” and pays homage to his very Brazilian second wife, the poet Marly de Oliveira. (His first wife, Stella Maria Barbosa de Oliveira, died in 1986; the couple had five children.) Women and Seville were frequent poetic subjects as far back as Four Spot, though they tended to function as tropes. In Seville Walking, Cabral delighted in them directly and sensually.

Reading Cabral’s last two books, we might suspect that he never really needed a crutch; that instead of making all those constructivist, thinglike poems to fill up an inner void, he could simply have spent more time in Seville, which drew out hidden, perhaps repressed facets of his personality. But we might as readily suspect that the city that had such a liberating effect on this poet was not the Seville that lies north of Cádiz and west of Córdoba but the Seville he invented, word-stone by word-stone, over several decades of his writing life.

Whatever the case, the world João Cabral re-created in poetry — a kind of verbal reconstitution of what is — will endure for a long time, both as a highly original artistic monument and as an invaluable didactic example. He has shown us a new way to make poetry and, what is more, a new way to see things. More modestly but no less importantly, he has directed our vision to certain plain and concrete things that we might never have stopped to consider before. “A stone is a stone is a stone” could not have been a João Cabral poem, but it could have been the conclusion to a poem, or to his entire poetic enterprise — hard and heavy, like everything real.

Richard Zenith, 2004

Content

Joao Cabral de Melo
Education by Stone

About the Selection and Translation

Acknowledgments

Education by Stone Selected Poems

from Pedra do sono / Stone of Sleep 1942

from O engenheiro / The Engineer 1945

from Psicologia da composição / Psychology of Composition 1947

from Paisagens com figuras / Landscapes with Figures 1956

from Quaderna / Four-spot 1960

from Dois parlamentos / Two Parliaments 1961

from Serial / Serial 1961

from A educação pela pedra / Education by Stone 1966

from Museu de tudo / Catchall Museum 1975

from A escola das facas / The School of Knives 1980

from Agrestes / Rough & Rude 1985

from Crime na Calle Relator / Crime on the Calle Relator 1987

Notes

Afterword