IV
This afternoon the thunder rolled
Down the slopes of the sky
Like an enormous boulder . . .
Like someone at a high window
Shaking out a table cloth,
And the crumbs, falling together,
Make a little noise as they fall,
The rain rained down from the sky
Blackening the roads . . .
When the lightning made the air tremble
And everything shook
Like a mighty head saying No,
I don’t know why—I wasn’t afraid—
I started praying to Saint Barbara
As if I were someone’s aged aunt . . .
Ah, because praying to Saint Barbara
Would make me feel even simpler
Than I think I am . . .
Would make me feel familiar and homely,
Having spent my life
Tranquilly, listening to the kettle boil,
And having parents older than me.
And doing so as if I had flowered like that.
I felt like someone who could believe in Saint Barbara . . .
Ah, to be able to believe in Saint Barbara!
(Will anyone who believes there is a Saint Barbara
Think she’s an actual person and visible
Or what will he think exactly?)
(How artificial! What do
The flowers, the trees, the flocks know
Of Saint Barbara? . . . The branch of a tree,
If it could think, would never
Invent saints or angels . . .
It might think that the sun
Gives light and that a thunderstorm
Is a sudden loud noise
That begins with a flash . . .
Ah, how the simplest of men
Are sick and confused and stupid
Compared with the clear simplicity
And sheer health in existing
Of the trees and the plants!)
And thinking all this,
I again felt less happy . . .
Felt somber and sallow and gloomy
Like a day when all day the thunder threatens
But still hasn’t arrived by nightfall . . .
IX
I am a keeper of sheep.
The sheep are my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.
To think a flower is to see it and smell it
And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning.
That’s why on a warm day
I feel sad because I enjoy it so much,
And stretching out on the grass,
And closing my hot eyes,
I feel my whole body lying stretched out on reality,
I know the truth and I am happy.
XIII
Lightly, lightly, very lightly,
A very light wind passes,
Then departs, still very lightly.
And I don’t know what I’m thinking
Nor do I try to know.
XX
The Tejo is more beautiful than the river that runs through my village,
But the Tejo is not more beautiful than the river that runs through my village
Because the Tejo is not the river that runs through my village.
Big ships sail the Tejo
And on it still sails, at least
In the eyes of those who see in all things what isn’t there,
The memory of the caravels.
The Tejo comes down from Spain
And the Tejo enters the sea in Portugal.
Everyone knows that.
But very few know the name of the river in my village
And where it goes
And where it comes from.
And because of that, because it belongs to fewer people,
It is freer and bigger the river in my village.
The Tejo leads out into the world.
Beyond lie the Americas
And the fortunes of those who find them.
No one has ever thought about what lies beyond
The river in my village.
The river in my village doesn’t provoke any thoughts.
Anyone who stands next to it is simply there.
XLIX
I go inside, and shut the window.
They bring the lamp and bid me goodnight,
And my contented voice bids them goodnight too.
If only my life could always be this:
The day full of sun or bright with rain,
Or else stormy as if it were the end of the world,
The gentle evening, passing groups of people
Observed with interest from my window.
A last friendly glance at the tranquil trees,
And then, with the window shut, the lamp lit,
Without reading anything, or thinking anything, or sleeping,
Feeling life flow through me like a river along its riverbed,
And there, outside, a great silence like a sleeping god.
from The Keeper of Sheep
Alberto Caeiro
translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari
The five poems featured in this Summer 2020 issue are included in:
Alberto Caeiro. The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. New York: New Directions, 2020.
* The Portuguese spelling of these five poems follows the Portuguese critical edition published by Tinta da china in Portugal, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari.
Read the original in Portuguese
Listen to the original read by Patricio Ferrari:
All poetry poses translation challenges, in the sense that it requires such a close reading of the original and a kind of scrupulousness about even the tiniest of changes. It also involves listening. Listening to the original, and then listening to the translation. Is this new version true to the original (whatever that means, of course!) and is it true to the target language? Just one small example, from the opening line of Poem XIII:
Leve, leve, muito leve,
becomes:
Lightly, lightly, very lightly,
This rendering manages to retain several phonic rhythmic features from the original such as alliteration and lexical rhythm (“leve”/“lightly”). Even the poetic rhythm of the Portuguese line where the accented syllables occupy every odd position (i.e., 1–3–5–7) is fully reproduced in the stress pattern of the English translation. So much may be at stake in a single line of poetry. As translators, the issue uppermost in our minds is relations. The closing stanza of Poem IV, for instance:
E eu, pensando em tudo isto,
Fiquei outra vez menos feliz...
Fiquei sombrio e adoecido e soturno…
becomes:
And thinking all this,
I again felt less happy…
Felt somber and sallow and gloomy…
The “eu” (“I”) moves from the first to the second line, and then, out of necessity, because in English the verb needs a subject, “felt” (translating “fiquei”) shifts forward from the beginning of the line to the middle. So, while we could not preserve the anaphora (i.e., repetition of “fiquei” at the beginning of those two lines), the stress does then fall more strongly on “felt”: “I again felt” – rather than “I felt again,” again for reasons of phonic rhythm and stress. This, which is another plus, keeps the assonance of the original. We managed—probably accidentally—to preserve the repeated vowel sounds: “vez menos”/“felt less.” Then, in the third line, we were able (more consciously) to find equivalents for the sibilant s’s in “sombrío” and “adoecido,” which become “somber” and “sallow,” and which also have the merit of echoing the heavy, despondent tone of the Portuguese adjectives. All of these decisions, some serendipitous, some deliberate, went into translating just those three lines. Caeiro strove to write simply, and while these may be “simple” poems, there was nothing simple about the translation process.
Leve, leve, muito leve,
becomes:
Lightly, lightly, very lightly,
This rendering manages to retain several phonic rhythmic features from the original such as alliteration and lexical rhythm (“leve”/“lightly”). Even the poetic rhythm of the Portuguese line where the accented syllables occupy every odd position (i.e., 1–3–5–7) is fully reproduced in the stress pattern of the English translation. So much may be at stake in a single line of poetry. As translators, the issue uppermost in our minds is relations. The closing stanza of Poem IV, for instance:
E eu, pensando em tudo isto,
Fiquei outra vez menos feliz...
Fiquei sombrio e adoecido e soturno…
becomes:
And thinking all this,
I again felt less happy…
Felt somber and sallow and gloomy…
The “eu” (“I”) moves from the first to the second line, and then, out of necessity, because in English the verb needs a subject, “felt” (translating “fiquei”) shifts forward from the beginning of the line to the middle. So, while we could not preserve the anaphora (i.e., repetition of “fiquei” at the beginning of those two lines), the stress does then fall more strongly on “felt”: “I again felt” – rather than “I felt again,” again for reasons of phonic rhythm and stress. This, which is another plus, keeps the assonance of the original. We managed—probably accidentally—to preserve the repeated vowel sounds: “vez menos”/“felt less.” Then, in the third line, we were able (more consciously) to find equivalents for the sibilant s’s in “sombrío” and “adoecido,” which become “somber” and “sallow,” and which also have the merit of echoing the heavy, despondent tone of the Portuguese adjectives. All of these decisions, some serendipitous, some deliberate, went into translating just those three lines. Caeiro strove to write simply, and while these may be “simple” poems, there was nothing simple about the translation process.
Alberto Caeiro was a heteronym created by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), a prolific Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, editor, and translator who gave birth to more than a hundred aliases. Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro lies at the very core of his literary universe. Born in Lisbon on 16 April 1889, Caeiro died of tuberculosis in 1915. Pessoa himself gave 8 March 1914 as the date of Caeiro’s poetic arrival in life, describing it as a “triumphal day,” in a letter to the Portuguese literary critic Adolfo Casais Monteiro. Alberto Caeiro was the author of The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and more than fifty uncollected poems. A great part of Caeiro’s body of poetical works remained unpublished during Pessoa’s lifetime.
Margaret Jull Costa has worked as a translator for over thirty years, translating the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists (Javier Marías, José Saramago, and Eça de Queiroz) and poets (Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Ana Luísa Amaral). Her work has brought her many prizes, among them the 2008 Pen Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz (New Directions, 2007). In 2013, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature; and in 2018, she was awarded the Ordem Infante D. Henrique by the Portuguese government and a Lifetime Award for Excellence in Translation by the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, New York.
Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. Born in Merlo to Piemontesi and Calabresi immigrants, he left Argentina at the age of sixteen to attend high school and play soccer in the United States as part of the Rotary Exchange Program. His most recent translations include Verde amargo / Bitter Green by Martin Corless-Smith (with Graciela S. Guglielmone; Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022), The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa (with Margaret Jull Costa; New Directions, 2023), and Habla terreña (Field Talk) by Frank Stanford (with Guglielmone; Pre-Textos, 2023). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Southwest Review, and Fence, among others. Since 2017, he has resided in New York City, where he is currently working on “Elsehere,” an exophonic trilogy of multilingual poetry. Additionally, he teaches the Master of Fine Arts at Sarah Lawrence College, collaborates with the Endangered Language Alliance, and hosts the World Poetry in Translation reading series.
