Translated by Jéssica Iancoski
The days aren’t hard
or compact,
they’re days of vacation,
bright and open days,
freed from the calendar,
days that recall those other days,
from some other childhood,
which perhaps never existed.
We want the sun
to stain our skin,
the sand to hurt us,
we spend all our money
on hot beers,
we let the water salt our bodies
and strip ourselves of so many other products
(the creams, the crimes).
Of these days we accept everything,
their excitement and excesses,
we light salty cigarettes
and let the light hurt our eyes,
we linger in conversations
brittle as these stars we find.
Apart from one another,
but at the disposal of the sun,
we accept each other
like one lizard
accepts another.
And at the end of the day
– the sun left its mark, our bodies traced,
there is nothing to tell
other than the sea and its repetition,
its waters taught us about an unstable silence,
made of foam,
we move in the rhythm
of the beach’s almond trees
– we are more porous
we’re thirstier,
we awaken in us
certain submarine thoughts
and a memory forged
in the light flesh of forgetting.
But this you can’t see in these photographs.
Paulo Leminski Filho (August 24, 1944 – June 7, 1989) was a Brazilian poet, translator, literary critic, biographer, teacher and judoka. He was noted for his avant-garde work, an experimental novel and poetry inspired in concrete poetry, as well as abundant short lyrics derived from haiku and related forms. Leminski was a polyglot; he knew French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Latin and Greek. He translated into Portuguese works by Petronius, John Fante, Alfred Jarry, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Yukio Mishima.
Translated by Rosaliene Bacchus
Cora Coralina is the pseudonym of the Brazilian writer and poet Anna Lins dos Guimarães Peixoto Bretas (August 20, 1889 – April 10, 1985). She is considered one of the most important Brazilian writers. Her first book (Poemas dos Becos de Goiás e Estórias Mais) was published in June 1965. She spent her working life as a confectioner in a small bakery, and where she drew upon her experiences of rural Brazilian culture to create her rich poetic prose, often featuring the Brazilian countryside, and in particular focusing upon life of the citizens who lived in the small towns across the state of Goiás.
I don’t know... If life is short
or too long for us.
But I know that nothing we endure
makes sense, if we don’t touch people's hearts.
Most times it’s enough to be:
the receptive shoulder
enveloping arm
comforting word
respectful silence
infectious joy
flowing tears
caressing look
gratifying wish
encouraging love.
And this is not something from another world.
It’s what gives meaning to life.
It's what makes life
neither short
nor too long.
But it would be intense
true, pure...
While it lasts.
Translated by Rosaliene Bacchus
I am a woman like any other,
I came from last century
and I brought with me all the ages.
I was born in the depletion of a mountain
Between the mountains and the hills.
“Far from everywhere”.
In a city from which they took
the gold and left the stones.
My childhood and adolescence took place
alongside this.
The jagged cliffs
responded to my desires.
And I immensely secluded in the highlands
that turned blue in the distance.
In a hunger for life I took
flight on the impossible wings
of dreams.
I come from last century.
I belong to a bridge
generation, between freedom
of the slaves and free work.
Between fallen monarchy
and the republic that installed itself.
All the rancidity of the past was
present.
The brutality, the incomprehension,
the ignorance, the carrancism.
Translated by Charlotte Markham
Don't let yourself be destroyed ...
Gathering new stones
and building new poems.
Recreate your life, always, always.
Removes stones and plants roses and makes sweets. Restart.
Make your life mean
a poem.
And you will live in the hearts of young people
and in the memory of the generations to come.
This fountain is for use by all thirsty people.
Take your share.
Come to these pages
and do not hinder its use
to those who are thirsty.
Translated by (?)
Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira Filho (April 19, 1886 – October 13, 1968) was a Brazilian poet, literary critic, and translator, who wrote over 20 books of poetry and prose. Bandeira's poems have a unique delicacy and beauty. Recurrent themes that can be found in his works are: the love of women, his childhood in the Northeast city of Recife, friends, and health problems. His delicate health affected his poetry, and many Many of his poems depict the limits of the human body. He contributed poems of political and social criticism to the Modernist Movement in São Paulo.
I am going away to Pasargada
There I am friend of the king
There I have the woman I want
On the bed that I shall choose
I am going away to Pasargada.
I am going away to Pasargada
Here I am not happy
There life is an adventure
I such a non-mattering way
That Joan the Mad Woman of pain
Queen and pretended insane
Is relative once removed
From the daughter-in-law I never had.
And how I will exercise!
I will pedal my bicycle!
I will ride the wild ass!
I will climb the greased pole!
I will bathe in the sea!
And when I am tired
I will lie on the banks of the river
And call the nymph of the water
To tell me the stories
That Rose used to tell me
When I was a boy
I am going away to Pasargada.
There´s everything in Pasargada
It´s another civilization:
It has s safe and sure way
To prevent knocking the girls up
It has automatic telephone
It has plenty of dope
It has beautiful prostitutes
For one to make love to.
And when I become sadder
So sad that I have no more hope
And when in the night it comes:
The desire to kill myself
— Ah, there I am friend of the king —
Then I have the woman I want
On the bed that I shall choose
I am going away to Pasargada.
Translated by John Nist
I would like my last poem thus
That it be gentle saying the simplest and least intended things
That it be ardent like a tearless sob
That it have the beauty of almost scentless flower
The purity of the flame in which the most limpid diamonds are consumed
The passion of suicides who kill themselves without explanation.
Translated by Elizabeth Bishop
To die.
To die body and soul.
Completely.
To die without leaving the sad remains of flesh,
Without leaving the bloodless mask of wax,
Surrounded by flowers,
Which will rot away — so happy! — one day,
Bathed in tears
Born less from grief than from the shock of death.
To die without leaving perhaps even a pilgrim soul…
On the way to heaven?
But what heaven can fulfill your dream of heaven?
To die without leaving a furrow, a trace, a shadow,
Without leaving even the remembrance of a shadow
In any human heart, in any human thought,
In any human skin.
To die so completely
That one day when somebody sees your name on a page
He will ask: “Who was he?...”
To die still more completely:
Without leaving even this name.
Translated by John Nist
Mário de Miranda Quintana (July 30, 1906 – May 5, 1994) was a Brazilian writer and translator. He became known as the poet of "simple things", and his style is marked by irony, profundity and technical perfection. The main themes of his poetry include death, the lost childhood and time. Quintana also worked as a journalist and translated into Portuguese innumerable books, such as Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
There they are, all the while
Standing there in my way:
They will well and wile
and I will while away!
Translated by John Howard
All of those who may
Forbid me to fly:
They will pass away
I’m passing by
Translated by Eduardo Miranda
All them folk there over yon
My path they do defy,
They’ll tweet along.
I Tweetie Pie!
Translated by Sarah Kersley
If you love me, love me discreetly
Don’t shout it from the rooftops
Don’t disturb the birds
Don’t disturb me!
If you love me,
That’s all right,
But take it easy, darling,
For life is short, and love is shorter still …
Translated by Giovanni Pontiero
Let me be what I am,
what I have always been,
a river that keeps flowing.
And my destiny is to follow...follow to the sea.
The sea, where everything begins again...
Where everything is renewed...
Translated by Eduardo San Martin
Carlos Drummond de Andrade was a Brazilian poet and writer, considered by some as the greatest Brazilian poet of all time. Drummond was born in Itabira, a mining village in Minas Gerais in the southeastern region of Brazil. Drummond, as a writer of the modernist style, follows the writing mechanic proposed by Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade; making use of free verse, and not depending on a fixed meter. In modernism, the predominant style which Drummond wrote in, styles were divided into lyrical and subjective or objective and concrete, Drummond would be part of the latter, similar to Oswald de Andrade.
When was born, one of the crooked
angels who live in shadow, said:
Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life.
The houses watch the men,
men who run after women.
If the afternoon had been blue,
there might have been less desire.
The trolley goes by full of legs:
white legs, black legs, yellow legs.
My God, why all the legs?
my heart asks. But my eyes
ask nothing at all.
The man behind the moustache
is serious, simple, and strong.
He hardly ever speaks.
He has a few, choice friends,
the man behind the spectacles and the moustache.
My God, why hast Thou forsaken me
if Thou knew'st 1 was not God,
if Thou- knew'st that 1 was weak.
Universe, vast universe,
if 1 had been named Eugene
that would not be what 1 mean
but it would go into verse
faster.
Universe, vast universe,
my heart is vaster.
I oughtn't to tell you,
but this moon
and this brandy
play the devil with one's emotions.
Translated by Elizabeth Bishop
And now, José?
The party's done,
the light put out,
the people gone,
the night gone cold,
and now, Jose?
and now, yourself?
your nameless self
who cuts them dead,
you maker of verse
who loves, protests,
and now, José?
You're loverless,
no podium,
no tenderness,
drink won't go down,
smoke won't suck in,
the mouth won't spit,
the night's gone cold,
dawn hasn't come,
the bus won't come
nor laughter come
nor Utopia come
and it's all done
and it's all fled,
the white mold grows,
and now, José?
And now, José?
your gentle word,
your flash of fever,
your greeds and fasts,
your library,
your vein of gold,
your suit of glass,
your incoherences,
your hates, and now?
Key in your hand,
you want the door,
there's no more door;
you want to drown
but the sea dried up;
you want your home
—what home is that?
José, what next?
If you'd just scream,
if you'd just whine,
if you'd just play
a Viennese waltz,
if you'd just sleep
or at least get tired,
if you'd just die ...
But you won't die,
you're tough, José!
Yourself in the dark
like a beast in a den,
with no pagan gods,
with no bare wall
to lean back on,
with no jet horse
that flees at a gallop,
you march, José!
José, how come?
Translated by Virginia de Araújo.
What can one creature do,
Among his fellow creatures, if not love?
Love and forget,
Love and mis-love,
Love, unlove, love?
Always, even to eyes gone glassy, love?
What else, I ask, can a loving being do,
Alone in a rotating universe, if not
To turn too, and love?
Love what the sea brings ashore,
Love what it buries and what, in the sea-breezes,
Is salt, or love’s yearning, or plain anguish?
To love solemnly the desert palms,
Love what is surrendered or pregnant with demands,
Love the barren, the unpolished,
A flowerless vase, an iron floor,
The inert breast, the street seen in a dream, a bird of prey.
This is our destiny: to love without accounting,
Distributing it to the faithless and the hollow,
An unlimited donation to complete ingratitude,
And, still from the emptied shell, the nervous, patient
Scrounging out of more and more love.
To love even our own lack of love, and in our parched state
To love the implicit water, the implied kiss, the infinite thirst
Translated by Harrison Tao.
Cecília Benevides de Carvalho Meireles (Rio de Janeiro, 1901–1964) was a Brazilian writer and educator, known principally as a poet. She is a canonical name of Brazilian Modernism, one of the great female poets in the Portuguese language, and is widely considered the best female poet from Brazil, though she combated the word poetess because of gender discrimination. Her style was mostly neo-symbolist and her themes included ephemeral time and the contemplative life.
I sing because the moment exists
And my life is complete.
I am not gay, I am not sad:
I am a poet.
Brother of fugitive things,
I feel no delight or torment.
I cross nights and days
In the wind.
Whether I destroy or build,
Whether I persist or disperse,
— I don´t know, I don´t know.
I don´t know if I stay or go.
I know that I sing.
The song is everything.
The rhythmic wing has eternal blood,
And I know that one day I shall be dumb:
— Nothing more.
I did not have this face of today
So calm
So sad
So thin.
Nor these eyes so empty
Nor this bitter mouth.
I did not have these strenghtless hands
So still
And cold
And dead.
I did not realize this change
So simple
So certain
So easy.
In what mirror did I lose my face?
Here is my life:
This sand so clear
With drawing that walk
Dedicated to the wind…
Here is my voice:
This empty shell
The shadow of a sound
Preserving its own lament…
Here is my grief:
This broken coral
Surviving its pathetic moment…
Here is my heritage:
This solitary sea —
On one side it was love
And on the other forgetfulness.
Translated by John Nist.
[MODERN BRAZILIAN POETRY, AN ANTHOLOGY. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962]
Marcus Vinicius da Cruz e Mello Moraes (October 19, 1913 – July 9, 1980), also known as Vinícius de Moraes and nicknamed O Poetinha (the little poet), was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As a poet, he wrote lyrics for a great number of songs that became all-time classics. He was also a composer of bossa nova, a playwright, a diplomat and, as an interpreter of his own songs, he left several important albums.
Above all, to my love I'll be attentive
First and always, with care and so much
That even when facing the greatest enchantment
By love be more enchanted my thoughts.
I want to live it through in each vain moment
And in its honor I'll spread my song
And laugh my laughter and cry my tears
When you are sad or when you are content.
And thus, when later comes looking for me
Who knows, the death, anxiety of the living,
Who knows, the loneliness, end of all lovers
I'll be able to say to myself of the love (I had):
Be not immortal, since it is flame
But be infinite while it lasts.
Translated by MariGoes
At last, after so many past mistakes
So much retaliation, so much danger
There reappears in another the old friend
Never lost, always found again.
It’s good to sit by his side again
With eyes that contain the familiar look
Always with me a little troubled
And as always particular with me.
A creature just like me, simple and human
Knowing how to move and be moved
And to disguise my own delusion.
Friend: a being life doesn’t explain
Which only goes on seeing another born
And multiplies the mirror of my soul...
Translated by Rosaliene Bacchus
Suddenly laughter became sobbing
Silent and white like the mist
And united mouths became foam
And upturned hands became astonished.
Suddenly the calm became the wind
That extinguished the last flame in the eyes
And passion became foreboding
And the still moment became drama.
Suddenly, no more than suddenly
He who’d become a lover became sad
And he who’d become content became lonely
The near became the distant friend
Life became a vagrant venture
Suddenly, no more than suddenly.
Translated by Ashley Brown
