Eugénio de Andrade: The black-eyed squirrels seek me out at night; or That's how a poem is made

I want to spend some time writing about some Portuguese poets I do not understand well and do not know much about.  Always a step ahead of myself, I am.

Eugénio de Andrade has come up at Wuthering Expectations before, in the context of my nearly fruitless attempt to study Portuguese.* His vocabulary is basic, the units with which he builds short, his aims modest, although also impossible.

The Art of Poetry

All the art is here,
in the way this woman
from the outskirts of Canton
or the fields of Alpedrindha
waters her four or five rows
of cabbages: the sure hand,
intimacy with the earth,
the heart’s commitment.
That’s how a poem is made. (1994)

Writing a poem is like watering cabbage; a poem is then, logically, like a cabbage.  Perhaps what Andrade does is a bit more rare than growing a nice cabbage.

Putting one of the cabbage-growers near Canton (Cantão) invokes** one of Andrade’s models, the classical poetry of China.  Haiku and other quiet, compressed forms are also suggested by different poems.  How much can a poet do with twenty or thirty words?  What can he capture?

Nocturne

The croaking of frogs is all the melody
the night has in its breast –
a song of marshes
and of rotting reeds,
at times with moonlight in its midst.

Andrade often seems to be trying to fix some precise moment or sensation or experience – something from nature, or thought, or a moment, often erotic, with a person – with as much linguistic music as possible.  The problem of translation is not to recreate the original melody of stresses and vowel sounds, but to write a poem that keeps the sense of the original while having any music at all of its own.

Upon a Body

I fall upon your body
just the way the summer spreads its hair
on the scattered waters of the days
and makes of peonies a golden rain
or gives the most incestuous caress.  (1971)

The translator I have been reading, Alexis Levitin, has been translating and working with Andrade for many years, so this will be as good as it gets.

My textbook is Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugénio de Andrade (New Directions, 2003), which includes selections dating from 1948 to 1998, crossing 24 books of poems.  The translator, Alexis Levitin, has a nice little biography of Andrade, the introduction to the book, and ten more poems, all at the Poetry International site.

I do not plan to write more about Andrade.  I am not sure I have written anything yet.  He defies me, however useful I might have found his book.  There are the squirrels, though.  Late in life he becomes fascinated by American squirrels.

Washington Square

Wherever I go, since Washington
Square, squirrels
pursue me.  Even in Camden,
next to Whitman’s tomb,
they come with the fall
to eat from my hand,  but it’s at night
that they seek me most: black eyes,
gleaming beads.
Now I shall lie down in the shade of the river
till one of them enters this poem
and makes his nest.  (1992)

  * The “nearly,” though, is worth it. Minimal knowledge gives high rewards with translated poetry.  Prof. Mayhew suggests that Spanish learners can use Antonio Machado like I have been using Andrade.

** Unless Cantão is a town in Portugal.  Or Andrade is thinking of Ohio.

bird or rose or sea - learning Portuguese the Eugénio de Andrade way

Who wants to help me learn Portuguese?  So kind, thank you.  My textbook is, as usual, Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugénio de Andrade (New Directions, 2003, tr. Alexis Levitin).

I picked an easy one (pp. 54-5).

Despertar

É um pássaro, é uma rosa,
é o mar que me acorda?
Pássaro ou rosa ou mar,
tudo é ardor, tudo é amor.
Acordar é ser rosa na rosa,
canto na ave, água no mar.

A little Spanish goes a long way here – it may help to know that “é” = “it is \ is it?” and “na” and “no” = “of the”.  I am not joking when I claim to use Andrade as a study aid.  The title of the poem is a vocabulary word by itself, and the nouns are all good basic ones – rose, sea, water, love, desire, song, and two words for bird, some repeated two or three or four times.

Some of Andrade’s poems are genuine lyrics, the words to an imaginary song.  They perhaps create their own music, this one, for example, with all of its soft, rolling “r”s.

To Waken

Is it a bird, is it a rose,
is it the sea that wakens me?
Bird or rose or sea,
all is fire, all desire.
To awake is to be rose of the rose,
song of the bird, water of the sea.

The one little bend the translator has to make is in the sonorous fourth line.  “Ardor” and “amor” are related but distinct, while “desire” and “fire” are much the same thing, one just a metaphor of the other.  But Levitin is able to shadow  the rhythm, keep the internal rhyme, and even mimic the soft “r” sounds.  His melody is at least an audible variation of Andrade’s.

As for the content of the poem, I wish I woke up feeling like that.  Not before coffee; rarely after.  But I suppose the waking is metaphorical, the surprise of the bird or rose or sea (or, who knows, a poem) lifting us out of our sleepy ordinary life once in a while.

This fog where the light of Lisbon begins - trying to learn Portuguese

A logistical note:  During the Scotch Challenge, I hit my mark like a pro, posting right along with my co-readers.  My library access is not as good as it was then, and for some reason I have picked a language where my library is particularly weak, although it is strangely well-supplied with Machado de Assis.  I may need a little extra warning if we want to preserve simultaneity.  If we do not, that is fine; I can catch up.  Maybe I will just order a big pile of books and salt them away.

The Portuguese Reading Challenge has a second piece, a much greater challenge for me:  I am going to learn some Portuguese.  Note my strained confidence.  No, I will.  In the past, I have had two great successes with teaching myself the rudiments of a language (German and Turkish), and one complete wipeout (French).  I acknowledged my failure and took a couple of years of classes at the Alliance Française, covering the equivalent of first semester college French, and as a result my French, however appalling, is alive, while I remember only a few words of German and Turkish.  I claim to have “some Spanish” as well, acquired in the classroom, cemented, however roughly, by a couple of months of immersion.

For Portuguese, Spanish is an asset but also a trap, a path to disastrously bad pronunciation.  I have been following, weakly, Prof. Mayhew’s advice for learning a language, just listening to some Portuguese every day.  The podcasts at Escriba Café have been especially enjoyable.  It is too bad that I cannot tell you what that site is, since I do not understand Portuguese.

I do not plan to learn Portuguese, not really, but I have discovered that knowing the most elementary elements of a language – pronunciation, numbers, the most basic words – allows the tourist, or reader, to leap ahead.  I just want to be able to compare a translation of a translated poem to the original.

For example: a poem from Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugénio de Andrade, tr. Alexis Levitin, 1974, pp. 116-7.

Lisboa

Esta névoa sobre a cidade, o rio,
as gaivotas doutros dias, barcos, gente
apressada ou com o tempo todo para perder,
esta névoa onde começa a luz de Lisboa,
rosa e limão sobre o Tejo, esta luz de água,
nada mais quero de degrau em degrau.

Lisbon

This fog upon the city, the river,
seagulls of another day, boats, people
in a rush, or with all the time in the world,
this fog where the light of Lisbon begins,
rose and lemon upon the Tagus, the light of water,
I wish for nothing else as I climb from street to street.

The translation is nearly literal.  I need almost nothing to see this.  No rhymes to worry about, although the vowel sounds of the last three lines are abandoned.  The repetition of “Esta névoa / This fog” is the most artificial or poetic device, and it is intact. I presume that “o tempo todo para perder” is an idiom, something “like “all the time to lose,” fair game for the substitution of an English equivalent.  The cognate, perhaps false, in the phrase “gente apressada” has a nice feel – “pressed people” – but that’s not really English.

I have spent so little time with the language, but I know that “o” and “a” and “as” are “the,” that “e” is “and,” that I need to pronounce all of the vowels.  The vocabulary in the poem is so simple, isn’t it?  Those gavotting seagulls stand out, allowing me to pick up a new word.  Only “de degrau em degrau” remains a total stumper.

Perhaps I should abandon Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese and just study the poems of Eugénio de Andrade.  I am not sure that I would learn any less Portuguese.