A terra é redonda
A terra é redonda.
Por uma fímbria deste mundo imensamente curvo
a tua genitura passou, errante, sob o vento e as estrelas.
Junto aos degraus do grande mar quimérico
eram aljubeteiros, bateleiros, acenheiros, escudeiros, forasteiros,
[almotacéis, adegueiros e mesterais.
Eram xartres e besteiros, marinheiros e guerreiros, essas gentes e essas geiras,
linhagem que em teu sangue fita um berço.
E agora o mundo é redondo
o cosmo é um infinito redondo
os faróis e os espelhos são espléndidos zeros
o amor é redondo como os seios nos balcões
a terra é redonda como uma laranja.
Mesmo o oceano atônito é rotundo como um balão.
E redondos são, no vertiginoso horizonte de funil, as velas enfunadas e os navios.
Vivemos todos num mundo belamente redondo.
Redondos são os estádios e os gritos das multidões
quando, nos jogos noturnos, a branca estrela esférica rola na relva rente.
Redondos são os defuntos e ataúdes
que a morte tumultuosa estampilha de redondo.
A própria vida é uma coisa redonda
de tal modo que, quando erramos, erramos redondamente,
em nosso engano ledo e cego ficamos redondamente enganados,
e, quando caímos, caímos redondamente no chão
protocolarmente redondo no dia hipnótico.
Nossos moedas são redondas como a efígie de César.
Redonda é a demagogia, com os seus rodeios e anacolutos.
Um não bem redondo torna circular
a cara amarela e quadrada dos pobres.
O sim é uma sílaba redonda que baila
nas bocas ortodoxamente redondas,
redondas de tanto negar e conceder, mentir e dizer a verdade,
e que se arredondam mais cada ano que passa.
A chiante boca do homem, retoricamente redonda,
vale-se do suarabácti para adular os poderosos,
recorre ao assíndeto para o despejo, usa a silepse na penhora,
pratica lototes nas denúncias e o hipocorístico nas perseguições.
A babosa boca do homem cerca-se de hipérbatos para acusar o inocente
e de hipálages para justificar as matanças,
adota o ablativo absoluto para pôr na cadeia os pequenos ladrões,
não abre mão de paragoge durante os desfiles
e faz escorrer sobre o próximo o óleo espesso das hipérboles
que o mundo, sendo redondo, é naturalmente hiperbólico
com todos os seus habitantes.
A fruta em 1940
A fruta era imóvel e esquecida.
Ningem podería jamais alcançá-la.
Ela era uma forma passageira
de grande fruta em movimento.
Podíamos contemplá-la sobre a tua mesa
onde nenhuma faca poderia parti-la.
Podíamos contemplá-la no caminho das Índias,
em Porto Alegre ou em qualquer balada.
Houve alguém que dividiu a fruta
em quatro frutas iguais
que permaneceram
intactas e sempre fruta
doce, madura, acre e iluminada.
Identidades
Victor Hugo tinha certeza absoluta de que Victor Hugo era um pseudônimo de Deus,
e se considerava propietário do céu, da terra e do oceano.
Rimbaud não sabia que era Rimbaud, por isso abandonou os velhos parapeitos da Europa
e foi viver na África.
Byron sabia que era Byron
tanto assim que abandonou a Inglaterra
e comeu a própia irmã.
Walt Whitman sempre se julgou Walt Whitman.
Amava a América e os pênis erectos dos seus camaradas
como se eles foram futuros arranha-céus.
Baudelaire viu num espelho o abismo que o tragou.
Paul Claudel pensava ser o suplente de Deus
e se derramava em caudalosos versos brancos
para celebrar a beleza do universo.
Tristan Corbière, no leito de morte,
ouviu o grasnido das gaviotas na praia da sua infância
e se convenceu de ser mesmo Tristan Corbière.
Em Paris, Jules LaForgue procurou em vão um lugar onde sentar-se.
Era inverno. Todos os bancos do Jardim de Luxemburgo estavam molhados
e a branca morte lunar o espereitava no céu mais frio que a terra.
A dúvida de ser Paul Valéry
perseguiu Valéry a vida inteira
especialmente durante a manhã, quando ele procurava o eu perdido
entre os enigmáticos sonhos da noite.
A convicção de ser T.S. Eliot assim que ele acordava
daí as suas impecáveis camisas brancas e o ar professoral.
A suspeita de ser Rainer Maria Rilke
acudiu a Rainer Maria Rilke nos seus dias finais
quando, no solidão do castelo de Muzot,
estendeu a mão para colher uma rosa.
Para ser Mallarmé, Mallarmé se escondia como um fauno no bosque de uma página em branco
e escutava o chamamento das sereias
misturado aos silvos dos trens da gare Saint-Lazare.
A Paul Verlaine não interesava ser o não ser Paul Verlaine.
Ele sabia que no outono as folhas das árvores são arrastradas pelo vento.
E isto é essencial.
O resto é literatura.
Três poemas
Lêdo Ivo
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.
