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.