Confessionary
I no longer want to write poetry like certain angels, it is so difficult to live while dying bit by bit across the space of the night, just to patch up the morning with what is left of the drool on the pillow in this country of devastation and suffering. I, too, want to feel the breeze of a transparent beach, a sky with cotton for clouds and a sea that is just as blue getting caught in my rudder. To have a coffee and read some books aloud? No more no more no more! I want something else from love: a woman who is not mere skin across an abyss, a nice cup of wine from the purest vine of words. I no longer want to wake up like this, with my whole soul in my mouth.
Lisbon
I’m sitting in Lisbon having a drink in some Maputo suburb; it’s summer and I can feel the unseasonal cold of someone who has parted long ago, I walk and walk and walk, and, as incredible as it may seem, my head is traveling further than my feet. I’m at sea, sailing along the lonely course of some river. My hands tremble from the inside and my lungs long to breathe the light of your morning body, they dangle from this fragile memory. There’s a name in the language of flickering eyes; bodies pass; trains pass; wanderers pass, but not the birds, trapped in Lisbon’s glass sky, the birds are trapped in Cesário’s verses and the whole city is a name that will not come unstuck from what floods my eyes. I’m in Lisbon and I’m nowhere in the burning geography of your body.
[Untitled]
The raw animal of the night moves quietly, it searches for a lost balance, its maternal vocation, the hard, concrete integrity of stone. It looks for that space of affirmation, that feral, feline substance, this tragic instinct that makes it swallow its children in search of the perfect mutation. Oh, this city has condemned me for so little! I leave. I rise to face the day and the morning is already a terrible desert, everything fades away in the gunpowder of time. Exhaustion stakes out a tent in the corners and the homes are a built-in melancholy flooded with water bills and sad faces on the television. The streets repeat themselves behind me like crosswords, dangerous games, the puzzle of our days: cops and robbers and cops, precise angles spin along the axes of automobiles. Death meanders across the open sky. Here God is a blue bill that you buy on Sundays in a gospel center. Words reach me as ragged needles. I am the face of the infamous fisherman who abandoned the metaphor, I mean, his net and lost the quick-swimming fish of joy. Everything is immensely beyond me: everything turned so far inward like a shadowy aqueduct. Here the animal of thirst devours us, the city still calm in its dark glasses.
Three Poems
Álvaro Fausto Taruma
translated from the Portuguese by Grant Schutzman
Read the original in Portuguese
Listen to "Confessionary" read in the original Portuguese by the poet:
Born in Mozambique in 1988, Álvaro Fausto Taruma writes poetry that is extraordinarily personal. His long, twisting sentences often echo the frenetic energy of a journal. While Mozambique’s most famous authors, José Craveirinha, Paulina Chiziane, and Mia Couto, for example, have dealt often with themes of nation and national belonging, Taruma frequently focuses on the individual. This emphasis on the intimate serves not only to express his own view of being-in-the-world, but also functions as an implicit rebuke to the pressure on literature from the post-colonial world to center itself on the experience of post-colonial nationhood. His poems, then, serve not just as windows into Mozambique, but also as alternative, personalized lenses through which to experience the world.
The poems here, like much of Taruma’s poetry, read like a cascade of images. They draw the reader downward, generally eschewing line breaks and periods as they pull you toward their end. They vary greatly across theme and style. Taruma plays with the unit of the sentence and inverts conventional word order. His emphasis on wordplay and that which language struggles to account for puts pressure on the translation of his poetry, as the translator must convey those same absences across linguistic space. This diary-esque style, in which what would perhaps conventionally be periods become commas or simply empty spaces between thoughts, amplifies the differences in word order between Portuguese and English. I often had to reformulate entirely long sentences with complex subordinated clauses to preserve the order of the poet’s chain of thought. At the same time, I sought to maintain the poems’ velocity, avoiding too many constructions that might lose the reader in Taruma’s waterfalls of imagery.
The external and the internal often mirror one another as devastation in the outer world reflects turmoil in the speaker’s mind. The collapse of the boundaries between the individual and their surroundings renders the mind in images, allowing us to read space as emotion. Taruma establishes a new sort of poetic world, in which the interaction between external and internal are made palpable.
The poems here, like much of Taruma’s poetry, read like a cascade of images. They draw the reader downward, generally eschewing line breaks and periods as they pull you toward their end. They vary greatly across theme and style. Taruma plays with the unit of the sentence and inverts conventional word order. His emphasis on wordplay and that which language struggles to account for puts pressure on the translation of his poetry, as the translator must convey those same absences across linguistic space. This diary-esque style, in which what would perhaps conventionally be periods become commas or simply empty spaces between thoughts, amplifies the differences in word order between Portuguese and English. I often had to reformulate entirely long sentences with complex subordinated clauses to preserve the order of the poet’s chain of thought. At the same time, I sought to maintain the poems’ velocity, avoiding too many constructions that might lose the reader in Taruma’s waterfalls of imagery.
The external and the internal often mirror one another as devastation in the outer world reflects turmoil in the speaker’s mind. The collapse of the boundaries between the individual and their surroundings renders the mind in images, allowing us to read space as emotion. Taruma establishes a new sort of poetic world, in which the interaction between external and internal are made palpable.
Álvaro Fausto Taruma was born in Maputo, Mozambique in 1988. His first collection of poetry Para Uma Cartografia da Noite (Towards a Cartography of the Night; MUNDAC, 2016) was deemed “the best book of poetry by a Mozambican author since Monção [Monsoon] by Luís Carlos Patraquim” by the journal Caliban. His second collection, Matéria Para Um Grito (Material for a Scream; Cavalo do Mar, 2018) won the BCI Literature Prize for Book of the Year. His most recent collection, Animais do Ocaso (Animals of Sunset), was released in 2021 by the Lisbon-based publisher Editora Exclamação.
Grant Schutzman is a poet and translator of Spanish and Portuguese literature. He is fascinated by multilingual writing and that which has been deemed the untranslatable. His poetry is forthcoming in Eunoia Review and translations are forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation and Ezra.
