PANORAMA
An elastic form shakes the wings in space
and laziness, the love of dreaming, infiltrates me.
In a corner of the earth a blonde woman
hangs herself and gets in the news.
A girl of broad chest and thin hips
comes from the bottom of the sea,
comes from that ship that sank and becomes a mermaid.
The youngest daughter of the neighbor
is laid out in the coffin there
in the visitation room with landscape,
a queasy smell of tuberoses and my sincere condolences.
Everything is in its place
my girlfriend is alone at the window
the dream is sleeping in the head of the man
the man is walking in the head of God,
my mother is in heaven in ecstasy,
I am in my body.
BOTH SIDES
This side has my body
has the dream
has my girlfriend in the window
has the screaming streets of lights and movements
has my love so slow
has the world beating in my memory
has the way to work.
On the other side there are other lives living off my life
there are serious thoughts waiting for me in the visitation room
there is my definitive bride waiting for me with flowers in her hand,
there is death, the columns of order and disorder.
BEGINNING
A vast hand will shake me in the pure morning.
Maybe I will be born in that moment,
I who am dying since the creation of the world,
I who bring strongly with me
The sin of our first fathers.
Space and time
Will come undone in the dress of the Big white bride.
I will finally be deciphered, the foreigner of life
Will rest for the first time in the familiar universe.
MOST STRONG IDEA
A most strong idea among all but one
Inhabits my brain night and day,
The idea of a woman, more dense than a form.
Idea that accompanies me
From one to another moon,
From one to another walk, from one to another anguish,
That plucks me from time and overflies history
That separates me from myself,
That cuts me in two with the divine glaive.
An idea that annuls the exterior landscapes,
That causes me terror and fever
That stands before the pyramid of orphans and the wretched
An idea that augers into every pore of my body
And it only doesn’t become the great caustic
Because it’s a relief against the much stronger and more violent idea of God.
Four Poems
Murilo Mendes
translated from the Portuguese by Lucas Lazzaretti and Brett DeFries
Read the original in Portuguese
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The poems translated here are selected from three books by Mendes written within the first 15 years of his career. “Panorama” and “Two Sides” (“Panorama” and “Os Dois Lados”) were published in Mendes’ first book, Poemas (Poems; Dias Cardoso, 1930); “Beginning” (“Começo”) in A Poesia em Pânico (The Poetry in Panic; Cooperativa Cultural Guanabara, 1937); and “Most Strong Idea” (“Ideia Fortíssima”) in As Metamorfoses (The Metamorphoses; Ocidente, 1944). Mendes’ work during this period is known for its dry wit and attentive imagism that evolves into more elevated mythological and metaphysical registers without losing a fundamental commitment to the resonant but often unmetrical rhythms of human speech. We hope that these translations have preserved this quality of Mendes’ verse by resisting the temptation to smooth out or familiarize their idiosyncrasies.
Murilo Mendes was born in 1901 in Juiz de Fora, Brazil and died in Lisbon in 1975. He is one of the most important figures of second-wave Brazilian modernism. Most often associated with the literary and visual surrealisms of France and Italy, but also in self-conscious dialogue with a wide swath of Western aesthetic traditions, Mendes’ erotically charged metaphysical verse is unique within Brazilian modernism and does not align with the dominant and more nationalist strand coming out of São Paulo, which is perhaps best exemplified by Mario de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. While readers remain vexed—was he a fabulist quietist, a Bataillean mystic, a eurocentric Catholic, an anti-war communist?—his work continues to attract serious critical interest and has been deeply influential for later Brazilian experimental poets like Roberto Piva. His work has been widely translated into other languages, but there are no English editions, and he remains virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. His first book, Poemas, received the Graça Aranha Prize, and in 1972 he received the Etna-Taormina International Poetry Prize. The Museu de Arte Murilo Mendes (The Murilo Mendes Art Museum) was founded in 2005 at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora to honor his life and work, and to conserve his library, papers, and art collection.
Lucas Lazzaretti is a Brazilian professor of philosophy, novelist, poet, and translator. His novels O escritor morre à beira do rio (7Letras, 2021) and Saturno translada: um ensaio romanesco (7Letras, 2022) have been praised by critics for their experimental narrative. His translations from English, Spanish, French, and Danish have been published in Brazil. He recently translated John Williams' novel Stoner and is currently translating William Gaddis' novel The Recognitions.
Brett DeFries is a poet and English professor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. He has published scholarship on John Donne and Thomas Traherne, and his poems have appeared in FENCE, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. He was a 2022–2023 recipient of a Fulbright Global Scholar research grant to cotranslate Murilo Mendes’ poetry into English.
