The Portuguese Literature Challenge signoff with many thank-yous

Cruges, after a silence, shrugged and muttered:

“Even if I wrote a good opera, who would put it on?”

“And if Ega wrote a fine book, who would read it?”

The maestro concluded:  “This country is simply impossible.  I think I’ll have a coffee too.”  (The Maias, Ch. VIII, 192)

Now just hang on a minute, pal!  What have I been doing since August if not reading the finest Portuguese books?

When I launched the Portuguese Literature Challenge, I guessed that I would be sick of it all by the end of April.  Pretty close.  Know thyself.  So this is a wrap-up.  I do not have any original insights into Portugal or Brazil or their literatures but I did read a lot of good books in good company.

Although I wandered around plenty, three authors took up most of my time, as they should have.  I have written so much about them that I will limit myself to notes and thank yous.

Machado de Assis.  Shelf Love Jenny joined me for The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.  The last five novels of Machado (I only got to four of them) are uniquely odd and inventive.  My greatest surprise, though, was discovering Machado’s accomplishment as a short story writer.  I came across a critic who credited Machado with “at least sixty world-class masterpieces” of short fiction, which is absurd, but a couple dozen, now that is not absurd at all.  And how often does Machado show up in short story anthologies?  So I understand the special pleading.  I had no idea.  Rise and mel u wrote about Machado’s short stories, and mel’s post has links to posts about some other Brazilian short stories.

Eça de Queirós.  “[E]verything he wrote was enjoyable” says Borges, and with nine of his books behind me I will agree.  His character work is especially good.  Please see Richard and litlove, who both have interesting things to say about The Crime of Father Amaro, and Scott Bailey on The Illustrious House of Ramires.

As good as Eça typically is, though, his best book is clearly The Maias.  Also his longest, by far, sorry, but the length is part of what makes it the best.  The Maias has no more story or plot or characters than Amaro or Cousin Basilio, for example.  Very similar, actually, which likely frustrates some readers.  So the novel is not "epic Eça."  For whatever reason, Eça chose this particular book as his masterpiece and worked on it more.  It has a more complex, multi-layered pattern than the other books.  I am not sure that it is more meaningful than his other novels, but it is more intricate.  It has a higher thread count than his other tapestries.  Not everyone, I know, thinks this means "best."

Fernando Pessoa.  An original, an endless source of puzzles and ideas.  You do not even have to read his work for him to generate ideas, but just read about him and his system of heteronyms.   Please see seraillon for a recent post on The Book of Disquiet and a piece about Antonio Tabucchi and Pessoa.

I also want to thank Miguel of St. Orberose, whose blog and comments here pointed me in all sorts of useful directions.

What should I do next?  Austria, Italy?  19th century plays?  The 1890s?  Maybe too big, that one.  The late 1890s?  19th century literary criticism – but who would want to read along with that?  Mountaineering books?  Old timey kiddie lit?  Ideas welcome.

And thanks again for everyone’s assistance, participation, spurs to thought, and generally enthusiastic attitude.

That’s precisely what literature should do, be disquieting I mean - Antonio Tabucchi's Requiem

Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem: A Hallucination (1991) is a love letter to Portuguese culture.  Tabucchi is an Italian writer who became, through diligence and enthusiasm, a Portuguese adoptee.  Fitting its subject, Requiem is written in Portuguese.  The subtitle, the hallucination, is an addition to the English version,* but a useful one.

A Tabucchi-like narrator spends a hot July day – noon to midnight, actually – wandering in a dream Lisbon, revisiting its cultural treasures and sites from his past, encountering ordinary Portuguese and dead friends.  The climax of the novel is a dinner with Fernando Pessoa:

I know, he said, with me it always finishes that way, but don’t you think that’s precisely what literature should do, be disquieting I mean?, personally I don’t trust literature that soothes people’s consciences.  Neither do I, I agreed, but you see, I’m already full of disquiet, your disquiet just adds to mine and becomes anxiety.  I prefer anxiety to utter peace, he said, given the choice.  (99)

Requiem is honestly not an anxious or even disquieted novel.

Portuguese cuisine is one of the featured cultural treasures.  Oh yes yes:

I’ll tell you the ingredients for a real sarrabulho, I never measure anything, I do everything by eye, anyway, you need loin of pork, fat, lard, pig’s liver, tripe, a bowl of cooked blood, a whole bulb of garlic, a glass of white wine, an onion, salt, pepper and cumin.  (37-8)

No need to give the whole recipe here, I guess.  The result “looked revolting,” “drenched in a brown sauce that was probably made from wine or cooked blood [the latter!],” but has “the subtlest of flavors” (36).

Perhaps I overemphasize close attention to food in fiction.  I am only reflecting the attention I give it.

Close attention is also paid to a painting in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony.  Who says your culture’s treasures have to be from your own culture?  We study the details, the skate in the lower center, the  - well what is that in the upper right?

I know this painting like the back of my hand, he said, for example, you see what I’m painting now?. Well, all the critics have always said that this fish is a sea bass, but it isn’t at all, its’ a tench.  A tench, I said, that’s a freshwater fish, isn’t it?  It is indeed, he said, it lives in swamps and ditches, it loves mud, it’s the greasiest fish I’ve eaten in my life, where I come from they cook a rice dish made with tench which is just swimming in grease, it’s a bit like eels and rice only greasier, it takes a whole day to digest.  The Copyist paused briefly.  (65)

You see, it is not just me who gets distracted by the food.

A sort of story is carried along in Requiem, a plot about an old, tragic love affair, but that as the novel progresses that story recedes to the background, its incidents taking place not in but between chapters.  The Portuguese background moves to the front.  What a fine novel to round off my little Portuguese project.

I read the translation of my hero Margaret Jull Costa.  The seraillon blog is suffused with Antonio Tabucchi.

* No it's not! Please see Miguel's comment.

I play with everything I could have said - writing against disquiet

Friday is a holiday, so this will be the end of my wrassling with The Book of Disquiet.  I do not write anything for Wuthering Expectations when I have a day off.  Why I let my arbitrary work schedule determine my writing schedule is a mystery, but why I write anything at all is the greater mystery, the one to solve first.

Bernardo Soares and Fernando Pessoa take on the question in The Book of Disquiet.  As I read more of the novel, the central puzzle of the book moves from “Why do I exist?” to “Why does this book exist?”  The questions answer each other.  Soares exists to write his journal.  The journal exists so that Soares may exist.  Soares deflects his anxiety about meaninglessness by writing, by creating his own meaning.  His writing is – Jenny reminds me that Soares anticipates Albert Camus – Soares’s unending Sisyphean task, intensely purposeful even if otherwise empty.

I cure it [the “sinister absurdity” of the fear of “ceasing to exist”] by writing it down.  Yes, there is no desolation – if it is really profound and not just pure emotion – without the intelligence having some part in it, for which there exists the ironic remedy of saying it doesn’t exist.  If literature had no other purpose, it would have this one, if only for a few people …  I write the way others sleep…  (168, p. 151)

Writing is thus not creation but negation, or negation of negation:  “sometimes I write because I have nothing to say” (223, p. 209).  The word “because” is the Pessoan signature.  Writing leads not to anything of lasting value, or even to feeling, but to a “dream in prose.”  Soares, rereads “everything I have written” only to “find that all of it is worthless, that it would have been better off if I hadn’t done it” (241, p. 229).  Yet he continues, ending this passage with a grim metaphor:  “rereading, I see my dolls burst, the straw stuffing pouring through their torn sides, emptying without having existed.”  The metaphor in the earlier passage is even more nightmarish:

I write lingering over the words, as if they were shopwindows I can’t see through and which stand as half-meanings, quasi-expressions, like the colors of a cloth I never saw, harmonies made of I don’t know what objects.  I write lulling myself, like an insane mother lulling a dead child.  (223, p. 209)

Hmmm.  I will say that this is not exactly how I feel about Wuthering Expectations, although there have been times – well.

The end of the novel returns to writing.  “If I man only writes well when drunk, I would tell him: Get drunk” (274, p. 268), even at the price of liver disease – “the poems you write live forever.”  The Pickwick Papers and jolly, amiable Mr. Pickwick are suggested as models.  Literature is “the goal to which every human effort ought to strive” – every human effort!   “The novelist is all of us.”  In the last line, Soares writes like a cat – “I play with everything I could have said” (276, p. 270)

Now that in fact does exactly describe Wuthering Expectations.

I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake. - dreaming, screaming, nausea, and other signs of disquiet

What I would like to do is work through an interpretation of The Book of Disquiet.  What I am likely to do is string together a bunch of curious and odd quotations from the book and sprinkle them with light commentary.

Bernardo Soares is assistant bookkeeper at a shipping company and has been for a long time, almost timelessly.  His desk is a “bulwark against life” (58, p. 52).  For Soares, “against” is a good thing:  “Life disgusts me, like a useless medicine”  962, p. 55).  Soares eats every dinner at the same café, lives in the same apartment, and wanders the same Lisbon streets.  Although he contributes poems or other writings to avant garde magazines, he has no friends (or: Because he contributes etc.).  He has no family.  His father committed suicide when Bernardo was three (citation, please! – where is this passage?).

One direction – I am interrupting myself –  that might be fruitful would be to piece together the scattered reference Soares makes to his family and childhood and see how they relate to his existential crisis.  Say Soares is erecting a defense against the attraction of his father’s suicide.

Soares’s basic crisis is one of meaning and identity.  He not only assumes that his life is meaningless, but he is not entirely clear that he is living at all:

I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake.  I don’t know if I’m not dreaming when I live, if I don’t live when I dream, or if my dreaming and living aren’t mixed, intersected things, out of which my conscious being is formed by interpenetration.  (160, p. 146)

He is not sure he exists, everything may be a dream, and what if he is a character in a novel.  Soares returns to the difference between sleeping and waking repeatedly.  Other repeated metaphors of his condition:  illness, nausea, ennui.  Human contact is destructive:  “I feel physical nausea toward the common man, which is, in any case, the only kind there is” (60, p. 53).

I am omitting all of the amusing and inventive metaphors that accompany all of Soares’s simpler declaration.  If I paid closer attention to them they would like complicate – perhaps upend – everything I have said.

The Modernist mentalité is often characterized as fragmented, alienated, and neurotic, conditions caused by, say, the increasing separation between home and work or the isolation of urban life or sexual repression.  I am usually not sure how these ideas fit any particular Modernist text, so it is amusing to see them all concentrated in this one character, both effects and causes.  Soares may be a mess, but he is a representative mess, even if I, an ordinary fellow, only catch glimpses of myself in his life:

An enormous disquiet made me tremble making even the slightest gestures,  I was afraid of going mad, not of madness itself, but going mad.  My body was a latent scream.  My heart beat as if it were sobbing.  (114, p. 102)

I will remind myself that this kind of description of an extreme state or crisis is typically surrounded by passages describing shops and storms and so on (roof tiles in the moonlight are "liquid with a blackened whiteness," 113, p. 101).

The odd thing is that Soares has created a meaning for himself, has found a mechanism to prop himself up.  Perhaps this is obvious from the concept of the plotless fictional journal.  Soares works, eats, sleeps, dreams – and writes.  He writes this book.

So that will be Part IV of Disquiet week, tomorrow.  Friday is a holiday for me.

My implicit empire is going to be invaded by barbarians - cataloging The Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet could use – I could use – an index.  If I were to do something more thoughtful with the book, my first step would be to make my own, to create a typology for the entries.

There are, for example, the thunderstorm passages:

New light of a rapid yellow shrouds the mute blackness, but now there was a possible breath before the fist of tremulous sound quickly echoed from the other point; like an angry farewell, the thunder began not to be here…   A sudden amazing light splinters. […]  Everything froze where it stood.  Hearts stopped for a moment.  They are all very sensitive.  The silence is frightening, as if death itself were present.  The sound of the rain growing stronger is a relief, like the tears of the everything.  It’s like lead.  (33, pp. 29-30)

The storms recur, and are also used metaphorically.  I detect the hand of the poet in this passage.  Soares, and Pessoa, are especially good with colors, with light.  That is another category:  descriptions of Lisbon, of people, streets, sunsets, the river.  Sometimes descriptive passages lead Soares in philosophical directions, and other times the passages stand on their own.

The assistant bookkeeper writes well about office life, bosses, co-workers, so that’s another category:

I don’t know why – I suddenly realize it – I’m alone in the office.  Just now I sensed it vaguely.  There was in some aspect of my awareness of myself an expansion of relief, a deeper breathing with other lungs.  (137, p. 123)

Soares riffs on the pleasures of being the only person at work, but soon enough footsteps approach and Soares’s “implicit empire is going to be invaded by barbarians.”

Sleep and dreams.  Childhood and memory.  Reading, writing.  A long section about love comes towards the end.  Whether the love is directed at an actual or imaginary person is a matter of interpretation*, but “I” switches to “we” for long stretches (The Book of Disquiet uses the word “I” more than any text I have read recently aside from The Collected Wuthering Expectations).

Some passages are directly philosophical, working on fundamental questions of existence and knowledge.  Why do I exist, how am I different than other people, how do they see the world – big questions.  Some are metaphorical, moving from prose to prose poem, like 248, the “Funeral March for King Ludwig II of Bavaria,” which begins “Today, more slowly than ever, Death came to my doorstep to sell things” and ends “Flowers of the abyss, black roses, moonlight-colored carnations, poppies of a red that has light” (pp. 237 & 241)

Many passages contain aphoristic ideas that are ready, or nearly so, to be pulled from context.  I am terrible at remembering or even identifying these lines.  Levi Stahl has done better, featuring a couple of good paradoxes of perfection:

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it.  Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

I should have used this one last week:

Reading the classics, which do not talk about sunsets, has made many sunsets, in all their colors, intelligible to me.  (6, p. 8)

One could read The Book of Disquiet just for its well-phrased wisdom or anti-wisdom, for its wry understanding of human nature, without ever worrying so much about the puzzling fellow who is supposedly writing the whole thing.  That line about classics and sunsets makes Soares sound quite a bit sweeter than he really is.  I guess I am more interested in him than in his wisdom, so that is where I will go next.

* "My horror of real women endowed with a sex is the road that led me to find you" (199, p. 186). I have my guess.

Everything around me is evaporating - beginning the rambling, disconnected Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet begins with instructions:  how to organize The Book of Disquiet.  Instructions to an editor, presumably, not the reader:

The final organization of The Book of Disquiet should be based on a most rigid selection of the passages that exist in various forms, adapting the oldest, which do not contain Bernardo Soares’s psychology, as that true psychology is now pouring out.  Aside from that, a general revision of the style will have to be made, taking care that it not lose, in its intimacy, the rambling manner and the disconnected logic that characterizes it. (Entry 1, p. 3)

A strange way to begin any book, since the bound text I have been reading has already been organized, in this case into 276 numbered entries or passages, some just a line or two, some several pages long.   An Appendix keys the numbers to a different text, the 1982 Portuguese edition of the book which has at least 520 entries, and is thus less rigidly selected.

Your version of The Book of Disquiet, if it is not the 1991 Alfred Mac Adam translation (or, actually, the 1998 Exact Change edition), likely begins differently, its contents selected by differently rigid principles.

Who is supposed to adapt older passages?  Who is supposed to revise the style?  This note is actually from Pessoa to himself.  At the end of his life, he was preparing – or planning to prepare – a number of books for publication, including this one.  Who knows what decisions he might have made.

Or I could assume that even the first paragraph is part of the fiction of The Book of Disquiet, that despite the mention of Bernardo Soares it is in fact (in fictional fact) written by Soares, that it is a note from Soares to himself about how to organize his “real” journal, which then doubles as a real note by the real Pessoa about this novel he wrote, a novel in the form of a fictional journal.

For the next few days, I believe I will simply call this book a novel and its narrator a character.  The novel is a character study, without ordinary plot or story, arranged just as that first paragraph describes, not without logic but with disconnected logic.  The character, Soares, is “an assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon” who does little but work, eat in the same café, wander the city, sleep, and write this journal. – “[t]hese pages are the scribbles of my intellectual unawareness of myself” (177, p. 158).  He is suffering from some sort of crisis of identity, but if the crisis is permanent is it still a crisis or rather a condition of existence?

A question of interpretation:  is Soares an extreme case who highlights some important psychological feature of the modern personality, or is he an ordinary or representative man who expresses himself with unusual force:

Everything around me is evaporating.  My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality – it’s all evaporating.  I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else.  What I’m attending here is a show with another set.  And the show I’m attending is myself.  (12, p. 15)

Or Soares is nuts and it’s all a bunch of hooey.  I do not plan to follow that path, although it has the advantage of clear and accurate signage.  Instead, I will spend a few days making notes on Pessoa’s oddly organized, oddly argued, oddly compelling Book of Disquiet.

It was a very cordial moment of warm sympathy - why I never wanted to slap the protagonist of this Eça de Queirós novel

One thing I love about book blogs, and about amateur readers, is that they sometimes want to slap fictional characters, or strangle them.  Often Jane Austen characters for some reason.  Fanny Price in particular, which is especially funny, because readers want to slap her because she is inoffensive.  “Why don’t you sass back at your mean aunt?” Smack!  That’ll teach Fanny.*

Ruth Franklin and John Banville never say they want to slap characters when they review books.  I wish they would.  It always makes me laugh, this readerly frustration at characters who are not behaving as they should, which I fear typically means not behaving as sensibly as I would.  As if the story would be better if it were about me and my well-considered, commonsensical actions.

The fun of To the Capital, which spends nearly three hundred pages in the company of an eminently stranglable nitwit, is that the young, idealistic, shallow, weak-willed, talentless dreamer of a protagonist makes the wrong decision almost every time he is offered a choice.  He wants everything, and he wants it in a hurry: literary fame, with the accompanying praise and money and women; access to aristocratic salons, but also a leading role in radical politics, including the overthrow of the monarchy; and all of this without much in the way of work.  Artur’s fantasy sequences, his reveries about his rise to fame, are among the novel’s comic highlights.   I suspect that Eça’s bedrock critique is that Artur wants to be an artist without working to be an artist.

Artur arrives in Lisbon with some money, a lot of money, actually, which makes him a mark for sharpers:

Artur leaned back in satisfaction, pleased to be one of the clique…  Then Meirinho remembered that he ought to ‘stand a round’ with a bottle of champagne, but he quickly added, slapping his leg, that he was joking, it was a humorous remark.  Artur, however, insisted – he wanted to stand a round – and Meirinho at once asked for a bottle of Cliquot.  It was a very cordial moment of warm sympathy.  (125)

The novel would, of course, be much improved if Artur saw through that sponge Meirinho, husbanded his money and got a job as a copyist rather than hanging around with these journalists and writers.

Artur self-publishes his derivative poems to no acclaim (“his book seemed to pass over the city like a drop of water over rubber,” 201), commits a number of absurd social faux pas, including the low comedy of letting a fat woman at a party sit on his top hat, and squanders his remaining money on a Spanish prostitute,  a romance that ends in the only way it could.  So naïve, so stupid.  Yet I never wanted to slap him; I never urged him to make the right choice.  I was enjoying his suffering too much, enjoying Eça’s tour of Lisbon in the company of this all-too-recognizable fool.

I have been using the John Vetch translation of To the Capital.

*  Slap.  Strangle.  Shake, strangle, and hug.  Some of the violence is in the comments, not the body of the post.

His eyes were feasting greedily on the details. - another good Eça de Queirós novel

To the Capital, another posthumous Eça de Queirós novel, this one published in 1925, a quarter century after Eça’s death, that’s the book I want to write about.  It is a fine novel, comparable in style to Eça’s best books, although narrower in conception.  We always stay as close as possible to Artur, a young poet and dreamer, who has the good luck to escape the torpor of the Portuguese countryside for Lisbon, thrilling Lisbon, the capital of everything:  fame, literature, sex, politics, society, fashion, and everything else worth knowing about.  The fact that much of this is imitative of French society, fashion, etc. is part of Eça’s ongoing satire about Portuguese culture.

One piece of the satire is that To the Capital, like The Maias and Cousin Basilio, is partly a parody of a French novel, not of Flaubert this time but Balzac.  Artur arrives in Portugal with two manuscripts, his tickets to literary fame and its traditional perquisites (money, women), a book of poems (Enamels and Jewels, copying Gautier) and a play.  Lucien de Rubempré, the hero of Lost Illusions (1837-43) arrives in Paris from his French village with nothing but a book of his poems and part of a historical novel.  Artur, unlike Lucien, has some money, although it sure goes fast; Lucien has his enormous personal beauty which eventually leads Balzac in a direction the less Romantic Eça would never follow; please see A Harlot High and Low (1838-47) for the crazed details.

Artur agrees with me:

Lisbon! – he visualized the life that filled it, violent and grandiose, like the world of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine; it was from French novels that he reconstructed Lisbon society… he pictured himself sitting in the cafés, between the gilt mirrors, weighing up the buzz of literary discussions; at theatre entrances, he saw a multitude, crowding together, eager for art…  mingled with the mystery of the vast city, he imagined the existence of tormented personalities of romance or of the theatre – Rastignacs tortured by ambition, Vautrins fearlessly hunting lions… (53)

A couple more characters I had to look up because they are not from Balzac follow.  Rastignac and Vautrin actually appear in Lost Illusions, but Artur does not seem to have read it (he presumable knows them from Père Goriot), which makes for a fine joke, that he misses the one novel that could almost be about himself.

I am only going on about Balzac because it is amusing to see what Eça is doing.  Any reader who cares can just look up Rastignac and Artur’s first opera (Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, about Vasco da Gama!) and just get on with the story, or not with the story, exactly, but the scene, like the scene at the opera:

Intimidated by the murmur of voice rising in the auditorium, Artur did not stir.  His eyes were feasting greedily on the details.  And from the lofty position of the boxes, with their rich and shaded hues, from the chandelier with tits ornamental prisms projecting into shaded areas, its varnished contrasts of white and gold, the regal dignity of the tribunal, enclosing with a cherry-coloured velvet curtain between the herculean caryatids of the kings, the style of men’s coats, it all spread like evidence of the grandeur of the capital and the magnificence of the monarchy. (109-10)

And on and on and on like that, wonderfully thick.  Eça is suggesting, perhaps, that I must read his novel like Artur attacks Lisbon, with an appetite for the details.

This cost me fifteen francs. - Eça de Queirós in decadent Paris

Eça de Queirós often – always? – ends his novels with a coda, the ending after the ending.  In The City and the Mountains, someone needs to return to Paris.  The hero and fool of at the center of the novel has settled in the country, learned his lessons about living a useful life, and is now fixed in place, so Eça sends a different character, his narrator.  Come to think of it, given that the novel has a first-person narrator, who else could go?  The resulting chapter is a strange one.

The narrator discovers that Paris has gotten worse, that its pleasures have become bitter, that the city is not just decadent but corrupt.  In a foodie novel like this one, the food has to  be similarly ruined:

[A] fearful battle ensued between me and the flounder.  The wretch, which had clearly taken against me, would not allow me to detach from its spine so much as a tiny fragment of flesh,  It was as dry, burned, and impenetrable as shoe-leather, and my knife bent on it, impotent and tremulous.  I summoned the pallid waiter, who, equipped with a sturdier knife, and pressing down hard on the floor with the heels of his buckled shoes, finally managed to wrench from the stubborn creature two strips of flesh, as small and thin as toothpicks…  This cost me fifteen francs.  (264-5)

Later, the sauces all taste of hair oil.  Technically, I am bored by the conventional comparison with shoe leather, but am thrilled by the waiter and his shoes.  I imagine Buster Keaton in the role.  I included the last line, about the cost of the meal, to make sure that we all recognize the Paris of a century ago in the Paris of today, even if we have never had quite such bad luck with the food.  We have not, have we?  If you ate at Quick Burger or Flunch, that’s no one’s fault but your own.

The primary signs of the corruption of Paris are the usual, sex and money.  Virtually the first thing the narrator sees is “an enormous poster on which a naked woman, with bacchantic flowers in her hair, was disporting herself, holding in one hand a foaming bottle and brandishing in the other, as if to display it to the whole world, a brand-new type of corkscrew” (261).  The overwhelming irony is that the narrator quite openly visits the city for sexual adventures.  This time, though, the women, the buildings, the theater (“great streams of obscenities”), everything is spoiled.  The new-fangled bicycle craze makes the city uglier (“Old men with scarlet necks pedalled plumply by”).  Students openly jeer their professors just for kicks (this is a particularly odd episode).

Eça, and the narrator, lay it on awfully thick, much too thick for me to take the chapter too seriously as meaning much about Paris itself, or the city, or civilization, but instead as a comic twist:  the hero of the novel, in moving from urban decadence to rural idyll, has destroyed his friend’s pleasure in Paris.  The hero’s happiness has corrupted the narrator, spoiling him for sophistication.

Alternatively, the narrator is just a mouthpiece for Eça, the narrator’s rants are the author’s, and the last chapter of The City and the Mountains reveals a narrowing of Eça’s imaginative spirit near the end of his life.  I generously give the author credit for the former interpretation, but cannot dismiss the latter.

Then come and admire the sheer beauty of simplicity, you barbarian! - Eça de Queirós in the countryside

I am looking back at the St. Orberose overview of the novels of Eça de Queirós, where he describes The City and the Mountains as “a simplistic demonization of urban life and glorification of the countryside.”  The second half of his phrase is true.  Wealthy and jaded Jacinto, surrounded by gadgets and luxury, is unable to find anything meaningful in his life in Paris, but in the Portuguese mountains gradually discovers how to live a useful, fulfilled life.

Whether Jacinto’s restlessness has anything to do with Paris or his salvation with the Portuguese countryside is the question, though.   I am not convinced.  He is a spiritual seeker, who succumbs to every passing intellectual fashion:  Nietzscheism, Ruskinism, Ibsenism (“a real plague!”):

“Then Tolstoyism took over, and neo-cenobitic renunciation was all the rage.  I can still remember a dinner were a great monster of a Slav appeared, hair all dirty and disheveled, and when he wasn’t casting lewd glances at the poor Countess d’Arche’s décolletage, he was wagging his finger and growling: ‘We seek the light deep down, in the very dust of the earth!’”  (100)

Jacinto finally succumbs to Schopenhauer and Pessimism, allowing him to blame Life for his ills, rather than himself, and obsessively reading Ecclesiastes while unknowingly reinforcing its message.  Perhaps all is not vanity, but this is:

At other times, I would find him early in the morning lying on the sofa in a silk dressing gown and imbibing Schopenhauer, while the pedicurist knelt before him on the carpet, respectfully and expertly buffing his toenails.  Beside him lay a Saxe porcelain tea cup, full of that Mocha coffee sent by the emirs of the desert and which he never found strong enough or sufficiently aromatic.  (113)

So the move to the mountains in the center of the novel is just a device to separate Jacinto from all of his shiny stuff and his thirty thousand volume library and allow him to embrace a new enthusiasm, authentic country living.  It is Jacinto who glorifies the countryside more than the novel’s author, who takes it up as a new ideology (see p. 173, the home of my title).  He overflows with schemes of improvement, like a pointlessly elaborate English dairy.  He wants to plant trees, but:

“An oak tree takes thirty years before it reaches its full beauty!  It’s so discouraging!  It’s fine for God, who can afford to wait”…

He folded his hands on his knees and muttered again:

“Everything takes such a long time.”  (192-3)

Jacinto has another eighty pages in which to learn that he, too, can afford to wait.  Perhaps it is not so surprising that, in the end, a woman is involved, one who emerges from the most fairy tale-like chapter in this fairy take-like novel.  As wisdom goes, it is all pretty commonsensical.

I see that I have not gotten to the first part of Miguel’s description.  I would like to modify it – “an ambiguous demonization of urban life.”  “Demonization” is exactly right, and I know just which part of the book he means, a sour pickle of a chapter.  I believe I will save it for tomorrow, which means To the Capital gets bumped to next week.  Even these minor Eça novels are plump and rich.

The verb rigidly defined the action - Machado de Assis in the courtroom and dressing room

The pair of Machado de Assis stories Clifford E. Landers translated for Words without Borders a couple of years ago are excellent; perhaps I should say more about them.  Curious reader can test my impressions against them and can come back here and really rake me over the coals.  One is “A Visit from Alcibiades”; t’other is “Justice Unbalanced.”  The former is the only English translation of the story; the latter exists in another version more accurately but somehow irritatingly titled “Wallow, Swine!” (“Suje-se Gordo”).

“A Visit from Alcibiades” is deliberately minor, but still tasty.  The narrator, reading Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades,  somehow summons the Athenian general and dandy.  After some fuss, the story turns out to be a satire on clothes – thus the need for Alcibiades in particular.  The narrator is going to dress the Athenian for a ball:

"Black tubes!" he exclaimed.

These were the black trousers that I had just put on.  He exclaimed and laughed, a cynical laugh in which surprise mingled with mockery, greatly offending my sensitivity as a modern man.  Because, Your Excellency will note, although to us our times may seem deserving of criticism, even of execration, we dislike it when an ancient ridicules them to our face.

That last line is prime Machadian (Assisisian?) humor, as is an earlier aphorism, “death is the ultimate sarcasm.”  Next in the narrative comes, each more absurd than the last, the cravat,  then the frock coat, then, as a climax, the hat, and I suppose I should stop there.  I said it was minor!  But the sense of Machado in the story is strong.

“Justice Unbalanced” is more clearly one of those Masterpieces of World Literature.  The narrator tells us about two terms on a criminal jury.  In the first trial, he and his fellow jurors convict a man of a minor forgery.  The narrator is shocked by a “corpulent and redheaded” fellow juror who seems to judge the guilt of the defendant by the pettiness of his crime.  I am going to switch to the quite different, more vivid version of the story found in The Devil’s Church and Other Stories and the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story:

“And all for twenty dollars, a pittance.  Let the swine wallow in his filth!  Wallow, swine, wallow!”

“Wallow, swine!”  I confess I was astonished.  Not that I understood him nor felt that he was being fair, and that’s why I was astonished.

The big twisteroo occurs when the narrator again serves on a jury, and the defendant turns out to be the red-headed juror, now thin, charged with embezzling a huge amount of money.  No matter what the other evidence might be, the narrator is sure of the man’s guilt.  I will switch back to Landers for contrast:

The verb rigidly defined the action.  "Steal something big!"  It means a man shouldn't commit an act of that kind except for a considerable sum.  No one should defile himself for a few coins.  If you're going to steal, steal something big!

The story ends on an ambivalent note with the narrator drawing a quite different lesson from the story than I did, one that focuses my attention on his motives and psychology.

A couple of days ago I claimed that the stories of Machado de Assis were unlike his novels, but my last claim is exactly of a piece with the novels.

I hope someone is currently translating another collection of Machado de Assis stories for me.

It doesn’t mean anything, but it’ll become popular right away - pop Machado de Assis

The Machado de Assis short story “The Celebrity” (“Um Homem Célebre”) caught my attention with its subject.  It is an 1888 story about a pop musician, a songwriter.  I do not know any earlier fiction on the subject, although I wish I did, because I would like to read it.  This one begins:

“Oh, so you’re Pestana?” asked Miss Mota, with a sweeping gesture of admiration.  And immediately correcting her familiar address: “Pardon my manners, but… are you really he?”

Annoyed and dispirited, Pestana answered yes, it was he.

The celebrity Pestana is at a party where he has just played, as a special favor to his hostess, his newest hit song “Don’t Kid Me Honey.”

The very latest – published just three weeks earlier, there was no longer a nook or cranny of the city, however remote, where it wasn’t known.  The tune was on everybody’s lips.

“Don’t Kid Me Honey” is a polka.  Pestana writes hit polkas.  Walking home after the party, he finds that last line to be literally true, to his frustration.  Pestana  surrounds his piano with portraits of “Cimarosa, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Bach, Schumann, and three others,” and wants to compose “just one immortal page,” but inspiration never comes.  Or actually it does, frequently:

He began to play something that was his very own, with genuine inspiration: a polka, a frolicsome polka, in the language of the billboards.  No resistance on the part of the composer.

It is the ur-plot for the popular artist, isn’t it?  The bestselling author who wants critical acclaim, the hack painter who wants not just success but respect.  This part of Machado’s story is not so original.  Or perhaps it is, and I am only remembering the mass of later stories on the same theme.

The polka writer marries a consumptive woman hoping that she will be his muse, and an ironic twist or two follows.  She does inspire him, and he composes, in secret, a nocturne for her:

One Sunday, however, he could no longer hold back, and he called his wife to hear him play a passage of the nocturne.  He didn’t tell her what it was or who had composed it.  He stopped suddenly and looked at her questioningly.

“Don’t stop,” said Maria, “it’s Chopin, isn’t it?”

Pestana became pale, stared out into space, repeated one or two passages, and got up.  Maria sat down at the piano and after making an effort to recall it to her memory, executed the piece by Chopin.

That is pretty good, but honestly my favorite parts of this story are the passages about the business of pop songwriting.  Pestana’s publisher is always ready with a title.  The one written in the passage up above, for example, is “Please Keep Your Basket to Yourself, Ma’am.”  It is another smash hit.  Sometimes the titles are political, “The Law of September 28” Or “Bravo for the Timely Election!”  Early on Pestana asks his publisher what the title means and is told “’It doesn’t mean anything, but it’ll become popular right away.’”

Like a good novelty song, a song about something songs are not often about, “The Celebrity” is a fine novelty story.

I found “The Celebrity” in The Devil’s Church and Other Stories.

Cataloguing 40 of at least 60 masterpieces of world literature by Machado de Assis

More of a catalogue than real writing, that is what I will do today.

I mocked (gently, gently) the editor of the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story for his amusingly precise insistence, borrowed from another critic, that “at least sixty [of Machado’s stories] are masterpieces  of world literature” (38).  What amuses me, aside from the vague pedantry, is wondering what the rest of the list would look like.  Chekhov wrote at least 100 masterpieces of world literature; Hemingway wrote at least 40 MoWL; Flannery O’Connor did not write many stories, but at least 20 are MoWL.  I am just guessing at the numbers.  An odd exercise.  Suddenly the world is overflowing with masterpieces.

Not that the general point is wrong.  I have now tracked down all of the short Machado that I can find in English, forty stories if I am counting correctly, almost all from the post-1880 Phase II of Machado’s career, written alongside his five great novels.  It seems like a shame and a mistake that, just to pick a prominent example, the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction does not have a Machado story.  Note to Norton: “Father versus Mother” is the one you want.

Machado’s stories have been translated and collected in three books:

The Psychiatrist and Other Stories, tr. William Grossman and others, University of California Press, 1963.

The Devil’s Church and Other Stories, tr. Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu, University of Texas Press, 1977.

A Chapter of Hats and Other Stories, tr. John Gledson, Bloomsbury, 2008.

The Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story has three that do not appear in the above, and Words without Borders has two fine Clifford Landers translations online, one of which is the only English version.  I think.  Let me know if I am wrong about any of this.

The three collections are all strong.  The degree of overlap is high and irritating, yet all three books have a number of excellent stories found nowhere else.  The Devil’s Church is an unusually ugly book, with an odd font and pointless clip-art illustrations, but the stories are first-rate.  The title story of The Psychiatrist, more of a mini-novel than a short story, is enough to recommend that collection, but A Chapter of Hats has the most stories, also a recommendation.

I would not be surprised if all sixty MoWL would fit in a single 400 page book, but such a book does not exist.  During Machado’s lifetime these stories were published in five short collections.  A set of translations of those five books is a pleasant thing to imagine, and would be even more pleasant to own.

Machado’s short fiction is surprising in how much it is unlike the novels.  The author’s puzzle-solving and digressive how-fiction-works tomfoolery are reserved for the novels.  The short stories are focused and more directly purposeful.  While the novels are always about the Rio de Janeiro upper class, the stories explore every corner of the city.

I think I will spend the next couple of days looking at a few of them, not to worry about their status as MoWL, but just to enjoy what I found in them.

The attentive reader has four stomachs in his brain - instructions for reading Machado de Assis

For, the attentive, truly ruminative reader has four stomachs in his brain, and through these he passes and repasses the actions and events, until he declares the truth which was, or seemed to be, hidden. (142)

Machado de Assis, and the narrator of Esau and Jacob, seem to have called his attentive readers cows.  Never mind that.  My question is, what truths are at issue here?  What is hidden, and what merely seems to be hidden?

The context of the quotation is that the father of the novel’s heroine has changed political parties for reasons of ambition – his wife’s ambition, specifically.  The mystery, for the narrator, is why the man abandoned his principles so easily; the hidden truth is the role of the wife.  Machado’s novels, with their fractured chronologies and digressions, can superficially resemble puzzle novels – Dom Casmurro­ more than superficially – but the greatest puzzles are those of motive:  why do people do the strange things that they do?  Within the novel, it is Counselor Ayres who is continually working to solve the mysteries, ruminating along with the reader.  In this case, the narrator (also Counselor Ayres) simply tells the reader the “truth”:

Note that I have spared him [me, the reader] Ayres’ work; this time I did not oblige him to find out everything for himself as he has been obliged to do on other occasions. (142)

Then he calls me a cow; I have inverted the quotation.  My point is that the mysteries of Esau and Jacob are not so different than those of Henry James or Marcel Proust, however differently they are presented.

The central mystery of Esau and Jacob is the heroine Flora’s love for the twin brothers of the title.  Does she love Pedro or Paulo or both?  Is there a way to choose between them?

The girls that saw them go by on horseback, along the shore, or up the street, fell in love with that perfect order of form and motion.  Their very horses were exactly alike, almost twins, and beat their hooves in the same rhythm, with the same vigor, with the same grace.  Don’t go imagining that the tossing of their tails and of their manes was simultaneous: it is not true, and might make one doubt the rest.  But the rest is certain. (73)

Neither James nor Proust are likely to scold the reader for extending an image too far.  I usually emphasize, when I am writing about tricky narrators, the bumps and sharp turns in the way they tell the story.  But Machado is clear in Esau and Jacob that the central issue is how we read it.

Esau and Jacob by Machado de Assis - have faith in the narrator of these adventures

Esau and Jacob, 1904, seventh novel  by Machado de Assis, fourth of his amazing late run.  This one, Esau and Jacob is another ingenious masterpiece, although not a particularly welcoming one.  I suspect it requires a bit of commitment to the Machado project.

The obstacle, for me, was a theme that fussed with late nineteenth century Brazilian politics.  Helen Caldwell, the novel’s translator and premier Machado scholar, makes a convincing case that the novel works as an allegory – over here is the soul of Brazil, over there a cluster of symbols of Brazilian monarchism, and on like that.  Oh no no no.  Knowing about this interpretation helps explain some of the flatter parts of the novel, but it is not needed for the hilly and even mountainous passages, so let us never mention it again.

If you want to write the book, here is the pen, here is paper, here is your humble admirer; but, if you only want to read, keep quiet, and go from line to line, I will grant you permission to yawn through a couple of chapters, but wait for the rest, have faith in the narrator of these adventures. (72)

Yes, have faith!  For Esau and Jacob is another of Machado’s brilliantly digressive narrated novels.  As another anonymous narrator explains in a preface that the text in front of me is the seventh manuscript volume of the notebooks of the recently deceased Counselor Ayres.  I know something the contemporary reader would not have known, that Machado’s next and final novel is titled Memorial de Aires (1908).  Most curious.

Counselor Ayres is then the writer and narrator of Esau and Jacob.  He is an omniscient narrator, wandering into any character’s thoughts, prayers, or private moments as he likes.  One character whose thoughts receive particular attention is Counselor Ayres, who functions, as per his diplomatic title, as an adviser to the protagonists of the novel.  Nowhere outside of the preface is there a hint that this same Counselor Ayres is telling the story.  The reader only knows the truth from the preface.

Very clever, having the narrator as a character while never letting on, except that someone else spoils (or enhances) the joke.  Some readers may not be all that interested in cleverness.  Fair enough.  I recommend the earlier Dom Casmurro to their attention, a devilishly clever book, but less merely clever.

Ayres narration is primarily about a pair of young twin brothers who fall for the same woman, the mysterious Flora.  “Mysterious” is Ayres’s word, Ayres the character, not the narrator; the character Ayres is puzzling away at the motives and behavior of Pedro and Paulo and Flora just as the narrator is, perhaps our one clue within the text that they are one and the same.  Flora becomes something of a real character while the twins are part of the book’s flatness, really brought into service only to help create Flora.  At the point where Flora is introduced (the passage I quoted above is about the narrator’s irritation that the reader has likely predicted her existence before he could properly introduce her), I realized that the novel’s title is a red herring – Esau and Jacob did not fight over a woman, no one is going to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage , etc.  And if I have been misdirected by the title, who knows what else has tricked me.

I begin to write about the actual story and characters and find myself back to the cleverness of how the story is told.  That is the kind of novel Esau and Jacob is; those are the novels Machado de Assis wrote.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: Our attention to the world is the observance they claim, or Writing insists on solitudes and deserts

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is a poet of the sea, but which sea?  She is a dedicated Hellenist, and a characteristic poetic effect is a blurring of the difference between Portugal’s ocean and Greece’s Mediterranean.  When Sophia, a dedicated Catholic, discovers the gods in the landscape, which gods does she mean?

She shares her interest in Greece and its gods with an earlier Portuguese poet, an imaginary one, the sad Epicurean Ricardo Reis.  Reis insisted that he was a true pagan, and that his encounter with the shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro showed him how to turn his beliefs into poetry.  Reis perhaps taught Sophia something similar:

Homage to Ricardo Reis III

The gods are absent yet they preside.
    We inhabit this
    Ambiguous transparency.

Their thought emerges when everything
    Suddenly becomes
    Solemnly exact.

Their gaze guides ours:
    Our attention to the world
    Is the observance they claim.

I cannot tell if Sophia is speaking to Reis or as Reis.  The poem is meaningful either way; the poets share their purpose, even if the absent gods are less metaphorical for Reis than for Sophia.

Our world is transparent yet ambiguous - an obscure enough adjective.  The transparent becomes visible, the ambiguous fixed, when we direct attention to the things of the world, to their exactness.  Or the confused invisibility then becomes “exact” as the result of our attention.  “Lord, free us from the dangerous game of transparency” she writes in “On Transparency.”  Sophia is positing a corollary to Heisenberg’s much-abused Uncertainty Principle: we can observe either the position or momentum of a particle with precision, but not both; but without “attention to the world” we know nothing at all.  The poet is the operator of the electron microscope.  Like Coral the cat, the poet asks each thing its name.

Lest Sophia de Mello Breyner seem too mystical,  the editor of the Marine Rose collection sets beside the pair (only two, unfortunately) of Homage to Ricardo Reis poems an alternative description of the poet’s vocation.  What can Sophia share with Lord Byron, a writer of satire and long narrative poems about pirates and lady-killers?  The title is the first clue:

Writing

In Palazzo Mocenigo where he had lived alone
Lord Byron used every grand room
To watch solitude mirror by mirror
And the beauty of doors no one passed through

He heard the marine murmurs of silence
The lost echoes of steps in far corridors
He loved the smooth shine on polished floors
Shadows unrolling under high ceilings
And though he sat in just one chair
Was glad to see the other chairs were empty

The empty chairs imply full ones, and in fact Byron’s life in Venice at this time was manically social:

By the end of the year 1818, in which he had begun his greatest poem, Don Juan, he was to be discovered morosely climbing the balcony of an 18-year-old Italian heiress at midnight.  He afterwards told Medwin that he was indifferent to the outcome of the affair, and did not care whether the police officer had come to have him shot or married. (Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, 420)

Sophia is interested in the first part of that passage, the writing, amidst chaos, of the great poem, as her poem concludes:

Of course no one needs so much space to live
But writing insists on solitudes and deserts
Things to look at as if seeing something else

We can imagine him seated at his table
Imagine the full long throat
The open white shirt
The white paper the spidery writing
And the light of a candle – as in certain paintings –
Focussing all attention

Byron, too, if guided by the gaze of the gods and giving them the observance they claim.  He is a poet.

Translations are again from Ruth Fairlight's Marine Rose.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: Fantastic sea gods stroll at the edge of the world, or She asked each thing its name

Three collections of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen exist in English, I think, all minuscule.  Their titles help place the poet:  Log Book; Shores, Horizons, Voyages; and Marine Rose.  I have read that last one (tr. Ruth Fairlight, Black Swan Books, 1988).  Portuguese literature from its roots is a literature of the sea; Sophia* is a poet of the sea.

Beach

The pines moan when the wind passes
The sun beats on the earth and the stones burn.

Fantastic sea gods stroll at the edge of the world
Crusted with salt and brilliant as fishes.

Sudden wild birds hurled
Against the light into the sky like stones
Mount and die vertically
Their bodies taken by space.

The waves butt as if to smash the light
Their brows ornate with columns.

And an ancient nostalgia of being a mast
Sways in the pines.

Just taken as a bundle of imagery I find a lot to like here.  The first two lines may be ordinary scene-setting, but the salt-crusted sea gods are excellent.  Are they purely imaginary, or is Sophia transforming Speedo-clad bathers into deities?  The lines about the birds are all about motion, about moving faster than the eye.  The waves I do not quite see – are the columns the rays of the sun (the light that is being smashed)?  The pines return with added weight, the brilliantly paradoxical addition of the fate they might have had back in the time of the sea gods, who are as likely to be Portuguese explorers as Neptune and his court.

Marine Rose ends with an essay by Kenneth Krabbenhoft that makes as much use of Heidegger as I can take.  Such philosophical firepower is hardly necessary, but the connection is not fanciful.  Besides a common interest in ancient Greece, Sophia is, like Andrade, a poet of the moment, of something like Heidegger’s Being (Dasein).  How that helps me more than this, I do not understand:

In the Poem

To bring the picture the wall the wind
The flower the glass the shine on wood
And the cold chaste severe world of water
To the clean severe world of the poem

To save from death decay and ruin
The actual moment of vision and surprise
And keep in the real world
The real gesture of a hand touching the table.

In a short talk included in Marine Rose, Sophia says “For me, poetry has always been the pursuit of what is real.”  The creation of the poem, an act of imagination, is what “keeps” the gesture of the hand “real.”  Or so the poet argues.  Prove her wrong!

One last tiny sea poem:

Coral

He went and came
And asked each thing
Its name.

No, that’s a trick.  It’s not a sea poem at all – Coral, a note tells me, is a cat.

The Poetry International site has a number of Richard Zenith’s translations of Sophia, plus a sweet personal essay about her which inventories the art in her apartment.  And do not miss St. Orberose, where one can enjoy Sophia alongside three other tantalizing contemporary female poets.  Marvel at the way Adília Lopes can write a good poem which includes the line "I need a hug."  I would not have thought it possible.  The poem is called "I don't like books."

*  How nice to discover that the poet with the multi-part name is typically just called Sophia.

Jorge de Sena: An Inventory, or The letters lose themselves.

An odd thing about Jorge de Sena, I mean for a poet as obscure in English-speaking countries as he is, is that translations of his individual books outnumber books of selections of his poems.  I believe the only English Selected Poems is from 1980, just after his death.  Subsequent volumes of his short stories have been translated, as well as little books or booklets like the ones I read, Metamorphoses and The Evidences.

I wonder if his books have such a strong conceptual bent that they resist selection.  A few years after Metamorphoses, all poems about images, Sena published The Art of Music (1968).  The Poetry International site features a poem from the book which fills me in on the concept:

Chopin: An Inventory

Almost sixty mazurkas; about thirty etudes;
two dozen preludes; a score of nocturnes;

[etc., etc., but the inventory soon expands]

a talent for concertizing; many mundane successes; an unhappy passion;
a celebrated liaison with a famous woman; other assorted liaisons;

[an ingenious conceit, isn’t it?]

the repugnant possibility…
of becoming
a piece de non-résistance for performers who play for those who believe
they like music but really don’t

Ouch, ouch.  Well, I should track down this book, too.

I mentioned yesterday that the sonnet sequence titles The Evidences had stumped me.  How irritating.  Fight back!

Let’s see.  The title is peculiar.  Not quite English.  Evidences, plural.  Evidence of many things or many of one thing?  I’ll skip to the end, Sonnet XXI.

Ash-colored light is darkening the day,
so pale on rooftops in the distance there.
I barely see to write, and anyway
pain more free than hand guides me and may
look on its like in me, and ease my care.

At the fearful end that waits me from afar,
I can ask no comfort, can voice no plea.
From freedom the sheet unfolded to the air
will shroud my face.  Nor know if thought is there
or if I’ll think as I escape from me.

The fading letters are lost.  Night again,
my love, my life, who spoke was never me.
For us, for you, for me, who spoke was pain.
And the pain is evident – and set free.

Earlier in the book, the poet has some sort of crisis – political, railing against the “slimy and crustaceous” powers, and sexual, which begins to threaten the integrity of the sonnets themselves.  The translator absolutely has to keep the rhymes, since Sena uses them to tell the story.  In this final poem, although the form is odd, order has been restored.  Night falls; the poet has to put down his pen as the letters fade.  Or he could turn on a light.  Whichever.  The sheet that is both paper and a shroud suggests that the evidence is perhaps of the poet’s self, its nature or even existence.

That’s a start.  I now see that the some of the obscurity of The Evidences belongs to the translator (Phyllis Sterling Smith, Jorge de Sena Center for Portuguese Studies, 1994), not the poet.  She keeps “meus cuidados,” “my cares,” but finds no better rhyme than the thumping dud “there.”  The Portuguese rhyme word is “telhados,” rooftops, so the whole line has to be scrambled just to get us “there.” 

Many of the lines I find most puzzling in English look more straightforward in Portuguese, although Sena’s writing is more complex than Eugénio de Andrade’s, so I am mostly guessing.  I do not think this translation has solved the puzzle of these poems.  To the next translator: learn to love the slant rhyme.

Jorge de Sena: Even your skeletons will be looted for bones to pass for mine; or The shape of a god lounging where sand and water meet

In a nice coincidence, Miguel at St. Orberose just put up a long, action-packed piece about a Portuguese poet I did not know, Alexandre O’Neill.  Miguel provides generous evidence of O’Neill’s quality.  He has a spikier feel than Eugénio de Andrade or the other writers I have been reading, Jorge de Sena and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen.  They are all from the same generation, born around 1920 – what a cohort of poets. Miguel writes “if it sounds like Portugal has too many poets, it does: I read somewhere it annually publishes as many poetry books as the United States.”  May your country have too many poets.

With Andrade and Mello Breyner, I read career-spanning selected volumes, as one does and often should do, but with Jorge de Sena I tried a couple of short individual books, The Evidences, a sequence of twenty-one sonnets from 1955 and Metamorphoses, a 1963 book of poems that respond directly to images – paintings, sculptures, the “forest” of the Cordova Mosque, a photograph of the Sputnik I satellite.

The Evidences was completely incomprehensible.  Metamorphoses was immediately pleasing.  Easier, I guess.  The images are helpful, giving the reader something on which to knock the poem.   When a statue of Demeter in the British Museum is described as:

Monster in vast pleats, no head,
no legs, no arms.  A mountain
of hips and trunk.  Cliffs
 for breasts.

the monster and the mountain are immediately visible, and when the poet plunges into the volcano to form the marble (“slowly pushed, pushed up \ through gaping crust”), the change is only logical, as is the statue’s final transformation into “immaculate flesh” at the end of the poem.  Yes, I see it, even though the reproductions of the photographs in the 1991 Copper Beech Press edition are kinda crummy.  Who cares – the poems brighten the photos.

Poets sneak into the images.  A stone bust of Camoens inspires “Camoens Addresses His Contemporaries,” in which the touchy epic poet curses his plagiarists with:

and everything, everything you studiously pilfer,
will be reclaimed in my name.  Even
the miserable particle of invention
that you squeezed out on your own, without theft,
even that will be mine, considered mine, counted mine.
You will have nothing upon nothing:
even your skeletons will be looted for bones
to pass for mine,  so that other thieves,
like you, on their knees, can put flowers on my tomb.

Now there’s a scary curse, to be pillaged by scholars and critics.  Sena himself was a distinguished thief, I mean critic.

The book’s final two poems are not paired with images, but instead evoke Ovid.  A stone caryatid comes to life, or might, and the gods frolic on the shore – “frolic” is my G-rated description:

Only echoes of laughter
remain and, in our memory, the shape
of a god lounging where sand and water meet.

Translations by Francisco Cota Fagundes and James Houlihan.  A little biography of Sena along with several of the poems from Metamorphoses are on display at the Poetry International site – the one about Goya is especially good, and the rest of the Camoens poem is there, too.

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.