In the Desert

In the Desert
By Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen


Half of me horse of myself I rein you in
I quell you by spur and rein

So that you don’t lose yourself in dead cities
So that you don’t lose yourself
Not even in Babylonian trades
Not even in Nineveh’s bloody rivers

I point your snout to the clean desert
To the clean perfume of the desert
To its end to end solitude

Because of that I quell I struggle I rein you in
And the bridle cuts the spur hurts the rein holds you back

To be able to release you in the desert
Where we are not us two but only one oneself
In the clean desert and its perfume of luminaries
In the vast clean brightness of the desert
Within each poem
Light and fire lost but so close
Where we are not us two but only one oneself



__________

Translated by António Dinis Lopes from the original poem "No Deserto" as found in Geografia, ed. Ática, 1967

Photo by Jennifer Allison, "Alone"
One Street Shy

Bicycles, Rivers, America, and Pessoa

A few days ago, I had a walk alongside the river Tagus with my French friend Caroline. A bicycle lane is being built there. There are some artists involved in the project, as painted along the lane there are a few lines from a poem.

The author of such poem is Alberto Caeiro (a Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym as you know). Alberto Caeiro is the master, in a zennish way, of Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa), and Fernando Pessoa (Fernando Pessoa).

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is said to be the four best 20th century Portuguese poets. And I agree.

So here it is, Alberto Caeiro’s chapter XX of his only poem “O Guardador de Rebanhos” (“The Keeper of Sheep,” according to some English translations), and my apologies if it doesn’t make any sense, for I was the one who transmorphfigurelated it. *

* * *

The Tagus is more beautiful than the river that runs through my village,
But the Tagus isn’t more beautiful than the river that runs through my village
Because the Tagus isn’t the river that runs through my village.

Large ships cruise the Tagus,
And across it also sails,
For those able to see in everything what isn’t there,
The memory of carracks.

The Tagus runs down from Spain
And the Tagus merges into the sea in Portugal.
Everyone knows that.
But only a few know which is the river of my village.
And to where it goes
And from where it comes.

And because of that, as it belongs to fewer people,
The river of my village is more free and longer.
Through the Tagus one reaches the World.
Beyond the Tagus lies America
And the fortune of those who find it. **

No one ever thought about what lies beyond
The river of my village.

The river of my village doesn’t make one think about anything.
Those who are near it are only near it.  ***

_________________________

* "The translator is a traitor."

** Of those who find the fortune or of those who find America? Ambiguity is such a playful device.

*** There’s a double meaning in the original: “He who is near it is alone near it.”

 

 

Piazza de Fiore... - by Natália Correia

V

Piazza de Fiore     

Hungarian fingers

were spelling out mimosas on my nape.

The windows had plump arms.

With golden spoons, the sky was having the broth

of the tiny alleys. Soprano fountains

were playing the city’s ‘Do.

Violin of yellow leaves,

the Tiber was opening the afternoon's peach.

On the day’s metallic surroundings

(the grinding of teeth of my sensations)

the sandpaper of goodbye was polishing

aeroplanes’ hooked nails.

Oh, the carnivorous smile of cities

which the lovers swing

on white public benches!

The farewell: a bird stuck

in an aluminium tear.

________ 

in Natália Correia’s «Motherland»

translated into Antonish by yours truly

In Crete with the Minotaur - Jorge de Sena

In Crete with the Minotaur

by Jorge de Sena

I

Born in Portugal, of Portuguese parents

and a parent of Brazilians in Brazil,

perhaps I will become North-American when I get there.

I will collect nationalities just like shirts are put on,

used and thrown away, with all due respect

paid to the clothes one wears and did their job.

I am my own fatherland. The fatherland

I write about is the language that by generational chance

I was born in. And the language of what I do and of what I live is this

rage of mine for the scarce humanity in this world

when I'm not believing in another world, and I would only want another that

would be this very same.* But, if one day I forget about everything,

I hope I will grow old

having coffee in Crete

with the Minotaur,

under the surveillance of shameless gods.

II

The Minotaur will understand me.

He has horns as the sages and the enemies of life do.

He is half bull and half man, as all men are.

He raped and devoured virgins, as all beasts have.

Son of Pasiphaë, he was brother to a Racine's verse,

which Valéry, the cretin, thought to be one of the most beautiful in the langue.

Brother also of Ariadne, we was trapped in a ball of string that messed him up.

Theseus, the hero, and, as all heroic Greeks, a son of a bitch,

laughed at his respectable snout.

The Minotaur will understand me, will have coffee with me, while

the sun sets serenely on the sea, and the shadows,

filled with nymphs and unemployed ephebes,

will close down most sweetly in the cups,

like sugar that we stir with the dirty finger

of investigating life's origins.

III

It is there that I want to find myself again out of having let

life scattered in pieces throughout the world, as it was said

by that poor devil** who the Minotaur did not read, because,

as everyone, he doesn't speak Portuguese.

So do I don't speak Greek, according to reliable sources.

We will talk in Volapük, now

that none of us understands it. The Minotaur

didn’t speak Greek, wasn’t Greek, lived before Greece,

before all this learned shit that has been covering us for centuries,

crapped by our slaves, or by us when we are

the slaves of others. Having coffee,

we will tell each other of our sorrows.

IV

With fatherlands we are bought and sold, when there is lack

of fatherlands that are sold expensively enough so that there's shame

of not belonging to them. Nor I, nor the Minotaur,

will have any fatherland. Only coffee,

aromatic and quite strong, not of Arabia or of Brazil,

of Fedecam***, or of Angola or of nowhere. But coffee

nonetheless and that I, with filial tenderness,

will watch dripping from his chin of a bull

down to his knees of a man who doesn't know

from whom he inherited, if from his father, if from his mother,

the twisted horns that ornate

his noble forehead more ancient than Athens, and, who knows,

than Palestine, and other touristic locations,

all highly patriotic.

V

In Crete, with the Minotaur,

without verses and without life,

without fatherlands and without spirit,

without anything, without anyone,

save for the dirty finger,

I will have my coffee in peace.

_______

* Jorge de Sena's phrase is ambiguous in Portuguese, it means the opposite as well. I failed so far to find an equivalent in English.

** I'm like the Minotaur here. I haven't read the "poor devil" nor know who he is yet.

*** Federation of Chambers of Commerce. In Portuguese, fede means “it stinks”.

Translated by António Dinis Lopes.

It might be interesting to compare it with the translation of George Monteiro.

Poem for Galileo - by António Gedeão

I am looking at your portrait, my old man of Pisa,
that portrait of yours that everyone knows,
in which your fair head awakens and blooms
over a modest piece of cloth.

That portrait in the Gallery of the Offices in your old Florence.
(No, no, Galileo! I did not say Holly Office.
I said Gallery of the Offices.)
That portrait in the Gallery of the Offices in ornate Florence.

Do you remember? The Vecchio bridge, the Loggia, the Piazza della Signoria…
I know… I know…
The sweet banks of the Arno river at the lacklustre hours of melancholy.
How I long for those, Galileo Galilei!
Look. Do you know? There in Florence
a right hand finger of yours is kept in a reliquary.
Word of honour that it is!
How the world goes around!
Perhaps there are even people thinking
that you have entered the calendar.

I would like to thank you, Galileo,
for the brightness of the things you gave me.
I,
and how many millions of men like myself
who were enlightened by you,
I was going to swear — what a nonsense, Galileo!
— and I would swear betting my own head
without the least hesitation —
that the bodies fall the faster
the heavier they are.

For is it not evident, Galileo?
Who believes that a bolder falls
as fast as a shirt button or as a beach pebble?
Such was the intelligence that God gave us.

I was now recalling, Galileo,
that scene in which you were sitting on a stool
and had before you
a bar of learned men, rigid, wearing toga and hood,
looking at you severely.
They were all preaching to you,
that how it was possible that a man of your age
and of your condition
had become a menace
to Humanity
and to Civilization.
You, embarrassed and culpable, bit your lips in silence,
and examined, full of piety,
the impenetrable faces of those wise men in a row.

Your eyes used to the observation of satellites and of stars
descended from their heights
and landed, like bewildered birds — I almost can see them —
on the pregnant faces of those most reverend creatures.
And you kept saying yes to all, yes sir, that all was exactly
as their highnesses desired,
and you would say that the Sun was squared and the Moon pentagonal
and that the stars danced and sang
hymns to the universal harmony at midnight.
And you avowed that you would never repeat,
not even to yourself, in the own intimacy of your thoughts, free and calm,
those abominable heresies
you taught and described
for the eternal damnation of your soul.
O Galileo!
Your learned judges, great lords of this tiny world, hardly know
that as they were, stiff in their armchairs,
were running and rolling through space
at thirty kilometres per second.
You were the one who knew, Galileo Galilei.

Hence your merciful eyes,
hence your heart filled with compassion,
compassion for those men who do not need to suffer, fortunate men
whom God freed from searching for the truth.
Hence, stoically, meekly,
your resistance to all tortures,
to all anguishes, to all hindrances,
while they, from the height of their inaccessible heights,
have been falling,
falling,
falling,
falling,
always falling,
and always,
uninterruptedly,
in the direct reason of the square of the times.

___________________


Poem for Galileo (1982)
by António Gedeão (Rómulo de Carvalho, 1906-1977)
translated from the original in Portuguese by António Dinis Lopes

Poems and haikus by Ákos Fodor

Metaoptic
Keep a careful watch on the world,
Because you make it as you have seen it.


Little Renaissance
Because of love, I tossed and turned in bed without sleeping
Until dawn -- then
I counted, there were two holes in her nose.
I smiled and fell asleep.


Invocation
The fifth string that is tighten onto my violin;
I pluck the Invisible before starting to play
I tune myself to the absolute silence, because
Without the (normal) A sound of death, every
music is false, every word is
meaningless, my Euridicée
Euridicée


Notability
He never did anything for a while that is worth mentioning. And neither later.
But at the end in his last will, cut into stone,
He left the stone and chisel for us.


Be solved
Incurable mortality is my problem
And the remedy for it


Sleeping-pill
Every loss is relief wrapped in pain  


Haiku
A bird was standing on my legs, then it flew away -
I became more heavy


Romance
See, this kind woman grew older near me in the subway;
She changed her advantageous profile-position, and faced me.


Canticum Canticorum
I miss you as much as if you weren't here


Freedom
Before leaving, you find in the basket of your balloon
the dearest, the kindest which is really the only One.
And always, this is the very exact weight, even more:
this is the excess weight.
                           You can choose:


Judgement 
You will never
Forgive me
That you didn't love me. 


Status
To this wooden-world,
Nailed through the five bleeding wounds of the senses


X-ray image of an "HOMAGE"
I AM a GREAT admirer of you


Adolescent
Poor squanderer


Devotion and horror - song about time
              The    candle of    our
                   being together
                      is burning

But leave me... - Nichita Stanescu

Your hair has lost more of its colour with the sun,
my queen in black and of salt.
The shore has left the sea and followed you
like a shadow, like an unarmed serpent.
Declining summer ghosts pass by,
through the vessels of my marine soul.
And my life is lighted,
under your green eye at noon,
but grey as the ground at dusk.
Oh, I run and jump and pour out.
But leave me a minute.
But leave me a second.
But leave me a leaf, a bit of sand.
But leave me a breeze, a wave.
But leave me a season, a year, some time.

_____

 

Translated by António Dinis Lopes

All love letters - Álvaro de Campos

All love letters are

Ridiculous.

They wouldn't be love letters if they weren't

Ridiculous.

In my time I also wrote love letters,

exactly as the others,

Ridiculous.

Love letters, if there is love,

Must be

Ridiculous.

But, after all,

Only the creatures that never wrote

Love letters

Are the ones who are

Ridiculous.

I long for that time when I wrote

Without noticing it

Love letters that were

Ridiculous

The truth is that nowadays

My memories

Of those love letters

Are the ones which are

Ridiculous.

(All words longer than three syllables

Along with uncountable feelings,

Are naturally

Ridiculous.)

--Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa)

_________

Adapted to English by António Dinis Lopes

Halfway Through the Path - Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Halfway through the path there was a stone
there was a stone halfway through the path
there was a stone
halfway through the path there was a stone.

I will never forget that event
in the life of my so weary retinae.
I will never forget that halfway through the path
there was a stone
there was a stone halfway through the path
halfway through the path there was a stone.


Carlos Drummond de Andrade

* * *

All translations are of my full responsibility. Blame it on me ;-)

Ancient wisdom for modern times

(...) Alexander was sailing with a powerful Armada in the Eritrean Sea conquering India, and because a pirate was brought to his presence, who was robbing fishermen in those waters, Alexander admonished him for having such an evil trade; but he, who was not scared nor slow of mind, answered thus: 'Enough, my lord! I, who rob with one ship, am a thief, and you, who rob with an Armada, are an emperor?' And so it is. Robbing a bit is guilt, robbing a lot is greatness; robbing with not much power makes the pirates, robbing with a lot of it makes the Alexanders. (...)

in Father Antonio Vieira's "Sermon of the Good Thief," 1655

________

Translated by António Dinis Lopes