The Earth Is Round
The earth is round.
Along the edge of this immensely curved world,
your genealogy passed, wandering under the wind and stars.
Through echelons of the great chimerical sea
they were fletchers, boatmen, millers, squires, foreigners, apothecaries, vintners and masons.
They were cartographers and mercenaries, mariners and warriors, these people and these lands,
a lineage that in your blood finds a berth.
And now the world is round
the cosmos is a round infinity
lighthouses and mirrors are magnificent zeros
love is round like the breasts of barmaids
and the earth is round as an orange.
Even the amazing ocean is rounded like a balloon.
And circular are the coiled sails and ships along the horizon’s whirling funnel.
We all live in a beautifully round world.
Round are the stadiums and the roar of the crowds
when during night games the white spherical star rolls across the mowed grass.
Round are those who have fallen and coffins
that tumultuous death stamps round.
Life itself is a round thing
so that when we go wrong, we go wrong roundly,
in our innocent white lie we are deeply deceived
and when we fall, we fall roundly to the ground
procedurally round in the hypnotic day.
Our coins are round as Caesar’s image.
Round is demagogy, with its circumlocution and anacolutha.
Something not very round makes circular
the square yellow face of the poor.
Yes is a round syllable that dances
in conventionally round mouths,
round from so much denial and concession, lying and telling the truth,
and they round off more each passing year.
The screaking mouth of man, rhetorically round,
uses anaptyxis to flatter the powerful,
resorts to conjunctions for evictions, uses syllepsis for collateral,
applies litotes in denunciations and hypocorism in persecutions.
Man’s slobbering mouth distinguishes itself with anastrophe to indict the innocent
and hypallage to justify slaughter,
adopts the ablative absolute to incarcerate petty thieves,
does not give up on paragoge during the processions,
and lets the thick oil of hyperbole drip on his neighbor,
since the world, being round, is naturally hyperbolic
with all its inhabitants.
Fruit in 1940
Fruit was immovable and forgotten.
No one could ever reach it.
It was sort of carried along
by powerful fruit on the move.
We could contemplate it on your table
where no knife could split it.
We could contemplate it en route to the Indies,
in Porto Alegre or in any ballad.
There was someone who divided up the fruit
into four equal fruits
that remained
intact and forever fruit—
sweet, full, pungent, and luminous.
Identities
Victor Hugo was absolutely sure that Victor Hugo was a pseudonym for God,
and considered himself the property of the earth, sea, and sky.
Rimbaud did not know he was Rimbaud, which is why he abandoned his wanderings in Europe
and went to live in Africa.
Byron knew he was Byron
so much so that he fled England
and screwed his own sister.
Walt Whitman always deemed himself Walt Whitman.
He loved America, and the erect penises of his comrades
as though they were future skyscrapers.
Baudelaire saw in the mirror the abyss that he swallowed.
Paul Claudel believed he was the replacement for God
and spewed himself out in copious white lines
celebrating the beauty of the universe.
Tristan Corbière, on his deathbed,
heard the shrieking of gulls on the beach of his childhood
and convinced himself that he was Tristan Corbière.
In Paris, Jules LaForgue searched in vain for a place to sit.
It was winter. Every bench in the Luxembourg Gardens was wet
and moon-white death awaited him in a sky colder than earth.
The doubt of being Paul Valéry
tormented Valéry his whole life,
especially in the morning, when he would search for the lost self
among the night’s enigmatic dreams.
The conviction of being T.S. Eliot precisely upon waking
inspired his professorial air and impeccable white shirts.
The suspicion of being Rainer Maria Rilke
came to Rainer Maria Rilke in his final days
when, in the solitude of the Muzot castle,
he reached for a rose.
To be Mallarmé, Mallarmé hid himself like a faun in the woods of a blank page
and heard the song of the sirens
mingled with the train whistles of the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Paul Verlaine did not care whether he was or was not Paul Verlaine.
He knew that in fall the leaves are scattered by the wind.
This is fundamental.
The rest is literature.
Three Poems
Lêdo Ivo
translated from the Portuguese by Andrew Gebhardt
Read the original in Portuguese
Listen to ”Fruit in 1940” read in the original Portuguese by Gonçalo Ivo:
Lêdo Ivo’s published poetry spans seven decades and more than twenty-five books. He develops many motifs, and plays with multiple images across this vast body of work, so that you need to be familiar with many of his books to translate a single poem. The three poems reproduced here give a sense of his outlook and vision, his wit, and his idiosyncratic expression.
“Fruit in 1940,” written in the later years of that decade, has the feel, in just thirteen lines, of an epic, and evokes social movements, popular culture, and the struggle for progress against intransigent forces. The poem works through repetition and the subtle pairing of opposites, such as imóvil/movimento, doce/acre, and dividiu/intacta. Since words like imóvil, acre, and iluminada could each accurately be translated a number of ways, one of the challenges was finding equivalent vocabulary that approximates the pitch and resonance of the original.
More than the dictionary definitions of words and grammatical conventions, a translation presents a kind of interpretation. In “The Earth Is Round,” first published in the early 1960s, the poet creates larger structures of repetition and uses language that seems to reach both toward the past and the future. One perhaps surprising choice in translating was to render berço as “berth” in the line “a lineage that in your blood finds a berth.” Whereas berço in Portuguese is a beautiful choice, automatically implying heredity and history, the literal English equivalents, such as “cradle,” which could imply lineage or provenance as in the expression “the cradle of civilization,” nevertheless seemed jarring and out of place in English. I liked “berth” for several reasons, including that it rhymes with the Portuguese word. A berço is a cradle or crib, and in the context of the poem obviously suggests ancestry and beginnings, as well as nurturing and protection. A berth is where a ship is moored, and suggests something similar to berço, but also picks up on the longer-term idea of provenance and sea voyages and medieval heritage evoked in the previous lines. (You also get the echo of the homonym birth/berth.)
Lêdo Ivo admired all of the poets catalogued in “Identities,” an inventive, wry, and philosophical poem written a few years before his death in 2012. The effects of the last lines partly depend on recreating the tone and pace of the original, which I hope to have succeeded in doing.
Overall, what makes these (and so many other) poems by Lêdo Ivo captivating is a kind of rhetorical alchemy and dexterity—something identified by a major figure in Brazilian modernism, Manuel Bandeira, who wrote in response to a letter from the aspiring sixteen-year-old poet, “There is a lot of verbal magic in your poems.”
“Fruit in 1940,” written in the later years of that decade, has the feel, in just thirteen lines, of an epic, and evokes social movements, popular culture, and the struggle for progress against intransigent forces. The poem works through repetition and the subtle pairing of opposites, such as imóvil/movimento, doce/acre, and dividiu/intacta. Since words like imóvil, acre, and iluminada could each accurately be translated a number of ways, one of the challenges was finding equivalent vocabulary that approximates the pitch and resonance of the original.
More than the dictionary definitions of words and grammatical conventions, a translation presents a kind of interpretation. In “The Earth Is Round,” first published in the early 1960s, the poet creates larger structures of repetition and uses language that seems to reach both toward the past and the future. One perhaps surprising choice in translating was to render berço as “berth” in the line “a lineage that in your blood finds a berth.” Whereas berço in Portuguese is a beautiful choice, automatically implying heredity and history, the literal English equivalents, such as “cradle,” which could imply lineage or provenance as in the expression “the cradle of civilization,” nevertheless seemed jarring and out of place in English. I liked “berth” for several reasons, including that it rhymes with the Portuguese word. A berço is a cradle or crib, and in the context of the poem obviously suggests ancestry and beginnings, as well as nurturing and protection. A berth is where a ship is moored, and suggests something similar to berço, but also picks up on the longer-term idea of provenance and sea voyages and medieval heritage evoked in the previous lines. (You also get the echo of the homonym birth/berth.)
Lêdo Ivo admired all of the poets catalogued in “Identities,” an inventive, wry, and philosophical poem written a few years before his death in 2012. The effects of the last lines partly depend on recreating the tone and pace of the original, which I hope to have succeeded in doing.
Overall, what makes these (and so many other) poems by Lêdo Ivo captivating is a kind of rhetorical alchemy and dexterity—something identified by a major figure in Brazilian modernism, Manuel Bandeira, who wrote in response to a letter from the aspiring sixteen-year-old poet, “There is a lot of verbal magic in your poems.”
Lêdo Ivo was born in Brazil’s northeast state of Alagoas in 1924, and wrote prolifically, producing poetry, essays, novels, and journalism. He also translated into Portuguese works by Jane Austen, Arthur Rimbaud, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Not much of his poetry has been translated into English; a novel, Snakes Nest, was published by New Directions in 1981. He wrote passionately of his beloved hometown, Maceió, but was equally a citizen of the world, at home writing from many places and perspectives. He was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and received numerous national and international awards for his writing, including the Casa de las Américas Prize for Brazilian literature in 2009. He died in 2012. The poems published here are read by his son, the painter Gonçalo Ivo.
Andrew Gebhardt is a writer and teacher who has lived in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, and Cyprus. He is currently working on translations of poems by Lêdo Ivo as well as the poet’s unique memoir, Confissoẽs de um poeta (Confessions of a Poet). The translations published here come from poems in several different books, written decades apart.
