Confessionário
Já não mais quero escrever poesia como certos anjos, é difícil esta vida de morrer assim pouco a pouco a noite toda, remendar a manhã com a restante saliva do sono neste país de devastação e sofrimento. Quero também a brisa das praias transparentes, um céu que trocasse as nuvens por algodão e um mar também azul atropelando-me as quilhas do coração. Beber café, decantar os livros? No more no more no more! Quero no amor outros domínios : uma mulher que não seja só carne e esquecimento, um copo de vinho brando da mais casta videira das palavras. Já não mais quero despertar assim com a alma toda pela boca.
Lisboa
Estou sentado em Lisboa a beber um copo num subúrbio qualquer de Maputo; é verão e sinto o frio de quem há muito se apartou da estação, ando, ando e ando e, nisso, por incrível, é minha cabeça quem chega mais longe que os próprios passos. Estou no mar navegando na solidão de um rio. As mãos tremem por dentro e os pulmões não respiram a graça do teu corpo matutino, suspendem-se sob uma frágil memória. Há um nome que se pronuncia no faiscar dos olhos; os corpos passam, os comboios passam, os ciganos passam, as aves é que não: estão presas no vidro aéreo de Lisboa, nos versos de Cesário estão presas as aves e a cidade inteira é um nome que não se desprende desta aluvião de visões. Estou em Lisboa e estou em lugar nenhum na geografia ardente do teu corpo.
[Sem título]
Move-se fugaz o rude animal nocturno, procura o equilíbrio perdido, sua vocação maternal, a integridade dura e concreta das pedras. Procura o seu espaço de afirmação, a substância felina, ferina, este trágico instinto que o faz engolir os filhos na incessante busca pela mutação perfeita. Oh, esta cidade condenou-me por tão pouco! Saio. Ergo-me ao dia e a manhã já é uma terrível desolação; tudo se esvai na pólvora do tempo. O cansaço monta tenda nas esquinas e as casas são uma imóvel melancolia inundadas de facturas de água e rostos tristes na televisão. As ruas repetem-se nos meus passos como palavras cruzadas, jogos perigosos, o puzzle dos nossos dias: polícias-ladrões-polícias, os anjos exactos rodam na mecânica dos automóveis. A céu aberto a morte segue lenta e vagarosa. Deus aqui é uma nota azul e compra-se num gospel centre aos domingos. Chegam-me ásperas as espinhas das palavras. Sou o rosto deste infame pescador que abandonou a metáfora, digo, a rede e perdeu o peixe veloz da alegria. Tudo está imensamente para além de mim; tudo demasiado para dentro como um aqueduto sombrio. Aqui o animal da sede nos devora, a cidade segue tranquila de óculos escuros.
Três poemas
Álvaro Fausto Taruma
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.
