Photo by Ana Cristina Gil, University of the Azores.
My apologies for not being on top of my game with regards to National Poetry Month Mailings this year. Samantha and I just returned from an emotional trip to our beloved island of São Miguel, in the Azores, after two years away.
It was emotion-filled not only because the pandemic kept us way for two years—we had tried to go back as recently as December, but Omicron dissuaded us—but because in the interim years we had determined that we want to divide our time between there and our new home in the Berkshires and this trip solidified and confirmed that plan.
On top of that, we held a ceremony to place a plaque at the Praça do Emigrante (Emigrant Square) honoring the memory and sacrifice of my two great-grandparents who emigrated from the island in 1906. Joining us were cousins from my family there, the Casquilho family, along with the director and staff from the Associação dos Emigrantes Açorianos.
It was a windy afternoon, and the waves were crashing against the rocky shore along the north coast of the island, as if the spirit of my great-grandparents were making their presence known.
All this to say that I’m behind in my weekly mailings and I apologize. This week, I’m going to share post one of my translations of the great Azorean poet Vitorino Nemésio, “Ship,” which I hope you will enjoy. It originally appeared in Gávea-Brown Journal and was reprinted in my new book, Wine-Dark Sea: New & Selected Poems & Translations. Here it is in the original Portuguese and in my translation:
Navio
Tenho a carne dorida
Do pousar de umas aves
Que não sei de onde são:
Só sei que gostam de vida
Picada em meu coração.
Quando vêm, vêm suaves;
Partindo, tão gordas vão!
Como eu gosto de estar
Aqui na minha janela
A dar miolos às aves!
Ponho-me a olhar para o mar:
—Olha-me um navio sem rumo!
E, de vê-lo, dá-lho a vela,
Ou sejam meus cílios tristes:
A ave e a nave, em resumo,
Aqui, na minha janela.
—Vitorino Nemésio, Nem Toda A Noite A Vida
___
Ship
My flesh is sore
from the landing of some birds
I don’t know where they’re from.
I only know that they, like life,
sting in my heart.
When they come, they come softly;
leaving, they go so heavy!
How I like to be
here at my window
giving my mind over to the birds!
I’m looking at the sea:
look at that aimless ship!
And, seeing it, give it a lamp[i],
or my sad eyelashes:
the bird and the ship, in a nutshell,
here, at my window.
—translated from the Portuguese by Scott Edward Anderson
[i] For “vela,” I like “lamp” here, rather than “candle” or “sail,” because it echoes the idea of lighting a lamp to draw in a weary traveler—although I think “salute” or “sign” might also work, although not technically accurate. Also “lamp” hearkens back to Nemésio’s stated desire, expressed in his Corsário das Ilhas, which I’ve been translating for Tagus Press, of wanting to be a lighthouse keeper.
WINE-DARK SEA BOOK LAUNCH & READING
March 2, 2022
In conversation with Kathryn Miles
On #pubday eve, Kathryn Miles and I got together to chat about my new book, Wine-Dark Sea: New & Selected Poems & Translations. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the book, specific poems, finding love at middle age, the idea of home, and the Azores — and I even read a poem in Portuguese.
Have a look here:
The book came out March 1st and is available through the links on my website: scottedwardanderson.com/wine-dark-sea
National Poetry Month 2021, Bonus Week: My translation of Vitorino Nemésio’s “A Árvore do Silêncio”
May 2, 2021
For my bonus post this year, wrapping up this Poetry Month featuring poets of the Azores and its Diaspora, I want to share one of my translations of the great 20th Century Azorean poet Vitorino Nemésio. (This translation appears in the current issue of Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters and Studies, along with four others.)
Photo by Manuel de Sousa, Creative Commons License
A poet, essayist, and public intellectual, Nemésio was born on Terceira Island in 1901 and is best known for his novel Mau tempo no canal (1945), which was translated into English by Francisco Cota Fagundes and published as Stormy Isles: An Azorean Tale.
In 1932, the quincentennial year of Gonçalo Velho Cabral’s “discovery” of the Azores, Nemésio coined the term “açorianidade,” which he would explore in two important essays, and which would become the subject of much debate over the years. There are those who see the term as somewhat limiting: describing as it does a specific, fixed set of qualities of the island condition—insularity, for example—that belies a greater dynamism in the spirit of the islanders.
Nevertheless, I think its usefulness as a term is somewhat expanded when we look at what Nemésio himself said about it, reflecting the entirety of his term rather than one dimension of it. Instead of limiting it as a descriptor to what it’s like to be born on the islands, Nemésio asserted that it was appropriate, too, for those who emigrated from the islands, as well as those who later returned. (And, by extension, as I said in a recent interview, I like to think he intended it to continue through or beyond the generations.)
The term, wrote Antonio Machado Pires in his essay, “The Azorean Man and Azoreanity,” “not only expresses the quality and soul of being Azorean, inside or outside (mainly outside?) of the Azores, but the set of constraints of archipelagic living: its geography (which ‘is worth as much as history’), its volcanism, its economic limitations, but also its own capacity as a traditional ‘economy’ of subsistence, its manifestations of culture and popular religiosity, their idiosyncrasy, their speaking, everything that contributes to verify identity.”
As a “warm-up exercise” for translating Nemésio’s travel diary, Corsário das Ilhas (1956), for which I am currently under contract with Tagus Press of UMass Dartmouth (with financial support from Brown University), I started with some of his poems. And I hope to continue with more, because Nemésio is worthy of a larger audience here.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief tour of some of the poetry of the Azores and its Diaspora.
Here is Vitorino Nemésio’s “A Árvore do Silêncio” and my translation, “The Tree of Silence”:
A ÁRVORE DO SILÊNCIO
Se a nossa voz crescesse, onde era a árvore?
Em que pontas, a corola do silêncio?
Coração já cansado, és a raiz:
Uma ave te passe a outro país.
Coisas de terra são palavra.
Semeia o que calou.
Não faz sentido quem lavra
Se o não colhe do que amou.
Assim, sílaba e folha, porque não
Num só ramo levá-las
com a graça e o redondo de uma mão?
(Tu não te calas? Tu não te calas?!)
—Vitorino Nemésio de Canto de Véspera (1966)
_____________
THE TREE OF SILENCE
If our voice grew, where was the tree?
To what ends, the corolla of silence?
Heart already tired, you are the root:
a bird passes you en route to another country.
Earthly things are word.
Sow what is silent.
It doesn’t matter who plows,
if you don’t reap what you loved.
So, why not take them,
syllable and leaf, in a single bunch
with the graceful roundness of one hand?
(Don’t you keep quiet? Don’t you keep quiet?!)
—translated from the Portuguese by Scott Edward Anderson
from Gávea-Brown—A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters and Studies, vol. 43. Brown University, 2021
National Poetry Month 2021, Week Four: Adelaide Freitas’s “In the Bulge of Your Body”
April 30, 2021
Continuing to explore the poets and poetry of the Azores and its Diaspora, this week I’m featuring a poem by the late Adelaide Freitas, a wonderful Azorean poet, novelist, and essayist deserving of more attention.
Freitas was born 20 April 1949 in Achadinha, on the northeastern coast of São Miguel Island. She attended school in Ponta Delgada before moving with her family to the United States, where she attended New Bedford High School in Massachusetts. In 1972, she graduated with a BA in Portuguese from the Southeastern Massachusetts University (now UMass Dartmouth) and went on to earn a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York and a PhD in American Literature from the University of Azores. She lived in Ponta Delgada with her husband, Vamberto Freitas, and was a professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of the Azores.
In 2018, Adelaide Freitas was honored by the Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region of the Azores with the Insígnia Autonómica de Reconhecimento (Commendation of Recognition), just a few weeks before she passed away after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.
“Adelaide Freitas had gone silent years ago through the devastation of illness,” wrote one of her translators, Emanuel Melo, on his blog. “Her husband, Vamberto Freitas, himself a man of letters and important literary critic in the Portuguese diaspora, with enduring love and faithfulness kept her by his side, even writing about her, but above all loving her with steadfastness. In one of his blog posts he wrote how in the middle of a sleepless night, with her resting in the next room, he would take her books from the shelf and read her words to himself when he could no longer her the voice of his beloved wife.”
Her novel, Smiling in the Darkness, is an intimate portrait of what life was like on the Azores during the latter half of the 20th Century, and follows a young woman who struggles with the absence of her emigrant parents—who left her behind when they went to America—and her desire to explore the world beyond her island home. It was recently published in a translation by Katherine Baker, Emanuel Melo, and others. You can order a copy (and you should) from Tagus Press here: Smiling in the Darkness.
Here is her poem, “No bojo do teu corpo” in its original Portuguese and my English translation:
“No bojo do teu corpo”
No bojo do teu copo
olho translúcido o teu corpo
Vibra a alegria da tua emoção
e em mim se dilui a sua gota
Ballet agita o copo
treme a boca da garrafa
A mão abafa o vidro morno
cala-se enterrada a ternura dos lábios
A folha verde voa etérea
pousa no líquido desfeito
Dela nasce uma flor
e o mundo nela se espelha
branca a luz se intersecta
refrecta o whisky beijado
Guardanapo assim molhado
refresca a tua fronte
Gentil ela se inclina
no Outro se confunde
No tchim-tchim da efusão
treme bojo do teu corpo
—
“In the bulge of your body”
In the bulge of your glass
I see your translucent body
Vibrating with the joy of your emotion
and your drop dissolves in me
Ballet stirs the glass
the mouth of the bottle is trembling
The hand stifles the tepid glass
the tenderness of the lips is buried, remains silent
The green leaf flies ethereal
lands in the dissolved liquid
From it a flower is born
and the world is mirrored in it
white light intersects
refracting the whisky kiss
Such a wet napkin
refreshing your brow
Gently she leans
into the Other, gets confused
In the Tchim-tchim![1] of effusion
the bulge of your body trembles
—Adelaide Freitas (translated by Scott Edward Anderson)
[1] Tchim-tchim! is an expression like Cheers! An onomatopoeic phrase that connotes the clinking of glasses. I decided not to translate it here, although I could have gone with “cling-cling!” or something similar.
Photo by SEA.
If you’ve been following my blog for the past few years, you know that I’ve been on a journey of rediscovery—rediscovery of my Azorean Portuguese roots and heritage.
I’ve now been back to the island archipelago of my ancestors three times since my first return in 2018.
That first visit was under the auspices of a writing retreat offered by DISQUIET International, an organization that tries to link and foster relationships between Luso-American and Portuguese writers.
This journey has turned out to be more than just a heritage tour, for I’ve made many friends and discovered family I didn’t know I had there. And because I worked in nature conservation for so many years, I couldn’t help falling in love with the islands and their beauty and majesty, but also their fragility.
My own poetry and non-fiction have long been about a few essential themes: a longing for home and an appreciation and concern for the natural world. In the Azores, I’ve come to find a beautiful combination of both.
In addition to that longing (the Portuguese have a word for it, saudade, which I’ve defined elsewhere as a longing for lost things) is the feeling that I’ve found a home there, which I hope to fully realize in the not too distant future.
And my concern for the natural world there—in the face of future impacts of climate change on small island communities like the Azores—as well as the last remaining endemic species, is also deepening my relationship to the islands.
I’ve been exploring my love affair with the Azores in two works-in-progress (although, frankly, it’s showing up in just about everything I write these days): a research-driven memoir of my ancestry and heritage on the islands and a long poem that explores some of the same territory.
Recently, Gávea-Brown, a bilingual journal of Portuguese-American language and studies from Brown University, published an excerpt from my poem, which I’ve been calling “Azorean Suite,” in the original English and in a translation by the Azorean American poet José Francisco Costa.
It’s been an amazing journey thus far and I hope to return to the islands as soon as possible. Meanwhile, here is a section from my “Azorean Suite.”
From “Azorean Suite”
“Is the island a cloud or is the cloud and island?” ~Nemésio
The sea surrounds, is ever-present
endless, the sea surrounds
and sea sounds swirl and sway
humid torpor of temperament
fog enshrouds
clouds caught on peaks
wrapping the mountain
a helmet of white, gray, ash
the ever-present volcanoes
threat of fire and destruction
threat of sea-wind and wave
thread of saudade woven
into the fabric of all life
on the islands—
saudades for the land
enshrouds the land
enshrouds the islanders
surrounded by sea.
#
São Miguel, island of my ancestors
who settled here in the original waves
1450s or earlier, as far as I can tell,
from the Alentejo, they came,
encouraged or escaping
I know not—
São Miguel, the green island,
jewel in the bracelet of archipelago,
formed by two volcanoes
reaching for each other
a chain of eruptions enclosing
the space between them
populated, like that chain, scattered
by wind and sea, until 1906,
when my great-grandparents left
for America—scattered across the sea.
#
My return, over a century later,
fills me with mixed emotions—
have I come “home” or simply returned
to reclaim a lost heritage
something denied to me
by my grandfather’s willingness
to forget the past, to relinquish
the “saudades de terra”
so much a part of the Azorean character—
the phrase can mean “longing for the land”
or “I miss the earth”
which seems so necessary now
with the threat of climate change
added to the island condition—
sea-surge from hurricane Lorenzo overflowing
onto the low-lying streets at sea’s edge
saltwater burning the wine grapes
flooding the edge of the villages
how high will the sea rise in the next century
how will the islanders survive
what becomes of saudades de terra
when the land is swallowed by sea?
and here is José Francisco Costa’s translation into Portuguese:
Excerto de Suite Açoriana
“A ilha é a nuvem ou a nuvem a ilha?” ~Nemésio
O mar é um cerco, é contínua presença
infinita, o mar é um cerco
e os sons do mar rodopiam e arrastam-se
húmido torpor do ser
nevoeiro mortalha
nuvens presas nos cimos
envolvendo a montanha
um capacete de branca, parda, cinza
a inescapável presença dos vulcões
ameaça de fogo e destruição
ameaça de vento e vaga de mar
fio de saudade urdido
no tecido da vida inteira
nas ilhas –
saudades da terra
mortalha da terra
mortalha de ilhéus
por mar cercados.
#
São Miguel, ilha dos meus antepassados
que aqui fizeram morada nas ondas originais
1450 ou antes, tanto quanto sei,
do Alentejo, vieram,
incentivados ou fugidos
Eu não sei—
São Miguel, a ilha verde,
jóia no bracelete do arquipélago
nascida de dois vulcões
no encalce um do outro
corrente de erupções estreitando
o espaço entre eles
povoado, como a tal corrente, espalhado
por vento e mar, até 1906,
quando os meus bisavós partiram
no encalce da América – espalhados em toda a largura do mar.
#
O meu regresso, mais de um século depois,
enche-me de um contraste de emoções –
terei regressado a “casa” ou só voltei
para reclamar uma herança perdida
algo que me foi negado
pela vontade de meu avô
de esquecer o passado, renunciar
às “saudades de terra”
parte tão importante do ser Açoriano —
a frase tanto significa “estar ansioso pela terra”
como “a terra faz-me falta”
o que hoje parece ser tão necessário
com a ameaça das alterações climáticas
a somar à condição de ser ilha —
gigantescas marés provocadas pelo furacão Lorenzo inundando
as ruas baixas à beira do mar
água salgada queimando as vinhas
cobrindo os limites das freguesias
até onde subirá o mar no próximo século
como irão sobreviver os ilhéus
o que resta de saudades de terra
quando a terra é engolida pelo mar?
—Scott Edward Anderson (translation into Portuguese by José Francisco Costa)
This excerpt, from a long poem-in-progress, originally appeared in Gávea-Brown—A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies
(I want to thank Onésimo Teotónio Almeida and Jennifer Currier for publishing my poem, and José Francisco Costa for his translation.)
National Poetry Month 2019, Week Four: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s “25 de Abril”
April 25, 2019
(Photo by SEA)
Today, 25 April, marks the 45th Anniversary of Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution,” when a military coup toppled the fascist, authoritarian government, leading to a period of freedom and democracy after 48 years.
In addition to ridding the country of the “Estado Novo” regime, the revolution of 25 April 1974, led to the end of Portuguese colonization and its attendant wars in Africa. Decolonization began shortly after the Carnation Revolution and, by the end of 1975, the former colonies of Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Mozambique gained independence.
Dubbed the Carnation Revolution because the flowers were offered to military personnel by civilians on the streets of Lisbon as a symbol of the peaceful transition of power, an action initiative by activist Celeste Caeiro. The coup itself was apparently triggered by a Portuguese song featured in the 1974 “Eurovision” song contest—the same contest that launched the Swedish band ABBA, which won that year with “Waterloo.”
Portugal’s entry, a fairly innocuous love-ballad called “E depois do adeus” (“And after the farewell”) by Paulo de Carvalho, was used to signal the rebels, who launched the coup when it was broadcast by a Lisbon radio station at 22:50 on 24 April. A second song, “Grândola Vila Morena” by Zeca Afonso, announced when the coup leaders had seized control. A 2000 film by Maria de Medeiros, Capitães de Abril, dramatizes the story.
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919-2004) is one of the most important Portuguese poets of the 20th century and, in 1999, became the first Portuguese woman to receive the Camões Prize, the most prestigious award in Portuguese literature.
In 2014, ten years after her death—and on the 40th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution—Andresen’s remains were transferred to the Panteão Nacional, in the Church of Santa Engrácia, only the second Portuguese woman to receive this honor. (The other was fado singer Amália Rodrigues.)
“Poetry is my understanding of the universe,” Andresen once said. “My way of relating to things, my participation in reality, my encounter with voices and images.”
Her poem, “25 de Abril,” is the most famous poem of the Carnation Revolution, simple and elegant in its observation of the morning when the country emerged from “the night and the silence” of almost fifty years of authoritarian rule.
Here is Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s “25 de Abril” in the original Portuguese and in my English translation:
“25 de Abril”
Esta é a madrugada que eu esperava
O dia inicial inteiro e limpo
Onde emergimos da noite e do silêncio
E livres habitamos a substância do tempo
—-
“25th of April”
This is the dawn I expected—
the first day, whole and clean,
where we emerge from the night and the silence.
And free, we inhabit the substance of time
(Translation by Scott Edward Anderson)
Poems of Displacement, Love, and Other Modern Tamil Concerns
March 23, 2014
IN OUR TRANSLATED WORLD: Contemporary Global Tamil Poetry, edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam (TSAR Publications, Toronto, Canada)
My first encounter with Tamil poetry came in the form of a short poem by Auvaiyar, written two millennium ago:
Bless you, earth:
field,
forest,
valley,
or hill,you are only as good
as the good young men
in each place.
This poem appeared in a book of classical Tamil poetry called Poems of Love and War from the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil, selected and translated by A.K. Ramanujan, which featured poems from around 100 BC to AD 250, and late classical poems from the 5th and 6th centuries.
The poems were divided into two distinct sections, “Akam” (pronounced “aham”) which were love poems, and “Puram,” which were about heroes and battles. Akam means heart or household, and the poems are distinguished by the landscape each poem evokes and, in turn, the particular experience of love each landscape connotes. The Tamil called this “Tinai” in their poetics.
The subtropical climate of Tamil Nadu in southern India ranges from seaside to mountains, agricultural fields to forests, and desert. Each landscape is associated with a certain mood and the poems typically feature a flower, tree or plant of the corresponding biome. For example, as Ramanujan points out in his translator’s note, “Kurinci, a mountain flower; neytal, blue lily; mullai, jasmine; maratam, queen’s flower; palai, a desert tree.”
The poems are distinguished by straight-forward emotions and plain language (at least in translation), with a simplicity rivaling Chinese and Japanese poetry.
Take Kapilar’s poem of longing, “What She Said to her friend” (p. 13):
You ask me to forget him,
How can I?
His mountain,
wearing its dark raincloud
white-crested
as a bean flower
the east wind opens,
his mountain,
that blue sapphire,
is never out of sight.
We know from the Tinai that each landscape corresponds to a phase or experience of love: union/mountains; separation/desert; patience waiting/forest; anxious waiting/seaside; and infidelity and resentment/lowland farms. In the poem above, the speaker is clearly longing for the union or reunion with her lover on his mountain, which she keeps in her memory.
Tamils have a strong attachment to their language, which is central to their identity. Many refer to it as Tamil̲an̲n̲ai, “the Tamil mother.” It is one of the oldest surviving classical languages in the world, and written Tamil is a beautiful Brahmic script. Thankfully, this anthology is bilingual, which allows the reader to see the poems (if not read them) in their original form.
Poets such as Mahakavi Bharathiyar and Bharathidasan — the latter a kind of Tamil Fernando Pessoa who wrote many of his poems in various pseudonyms — brought Tamil poetry into the modern era. Their work gave Tamil poets freedom from the constraints of traditional Tamil poetics and expanded the subject matter available to Tamil poets.
In Our Translated World: Contemporary Global Tamil Poetry is a recent anthology of contemporary global Tamil poetry, published by the Tamil Literary Garden of Canada and TSAR Publications in Toronto. The work of the Tamil poets in this anthology clearly bears the mark of its modern predecessors, but also the influence of modern and contemporary poetry from Europe and Asia.
Not surprising, given the book is a selection of recent poems from Tamils around the world. Indeed, the anthology, edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam, features around 80 poems from Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Tamil diaspora in England, Canada, and elsewhere.
As Chelva writes in the introduction, “for Tamils, particularly in the last three decades, the experiences have been one of displacement, trauma, nostalgia, and despair.” This is especially true of Sri Lankan Tamils, as many tried to escape ethnic conflicts on that island nation.
For some Sri Lankans, such conflict breeds a conflicting nature. For example, Chandra Bose Sudhakar, who defends his choosing a life of books,
Life began with some books:
that the words in books
produce no rice became
the problem of our lives.
For Sudhakar, “books swallow the howls/ of my tormented heart” and offer the Sri Lankan poet, who was killed by armed men in his house in 2007, a kind of acknowledgment he couldn’t find elsewhere.
Some poems in the collection have echoes, intentional or not, of classical Akam poems, such as this one by Majeed, which sounds to me like a desert or separation poem:
You live on
in the empty spaces
that cannot be filled
with anything else.
Or consider the seaside imagery of another poem by Auzhiyaal, which could be in the voice of an anxious lover trying to find solace in the littoral environment:
At the end of each day
our minute secrets
rise again
a pregnant silver fish
a sea weed
a pink sea rock.
The freedom afforded by contemporary poetics may bely an ignorance of Tamil classical themes and symbolism, as some of the poets freely mix landscapes, emotions, and place, such as in this poem by Rashmy,
Parting is always bitter;
everywhere, eventually brackish;
trembling flesh,
nerves starved with lust,
the soul’s love
draining, filled to the brim.
From our paddy fields
gold-hued grains
we will harvest
the day after yesterday.
Others call out the connection, such as Anar does in her poem “Marutham,” with its rich depiction of the farm fields and rice paddies indicative of the agricultural landscape and a hint of possible infidelity in the lines,
The fragrant smell of
ripe paddy in the fields,
offers a giddy sense of joy.
As much as the poets in this collection have deep memories of their Tamil past and poetry, the poems in this collection are, as the editor writes in his introduction, “a form of transformation, a gesture about the future. Whether the poems are ostensibly realistic or self-consciously fantastic, the poems move beyond ethnographic detail to offer an imaginative sense of the Tamil experience.”
And for poetry readers, the Tamil experience is a rich and rewarding one in the hands of the poets, translators, and editor of In Our Translated World.
##
The author’s Portuguese grandfather, Ed Perry.
My Portuguese grandfather was part of a generation of immigrants who wanted to be completely American.
On that path, he became the first Portuguese member of the Metacomet Country Club in Providence, Rhode Island, and was later two-term president of the club.
He served as secretary of the Rhode Island Golf Association, overseeing thirty years of Rhode Island Championship events. He was chiefly responsible for the establishment of the Northeast Amateur Tournament.
He married into a family that had been in America since 1637, the Burgesses of Sandwich, MA, and made a successful career as a celebrity underwriter for New England Life Insurance Company.
In his striving to assimilate, however, much of what was Portuguese about him was kept under wraps. He embraced America as a nation rather than hyphenation. I favored my mother’s side; my father’s side was Scotch-Irish. I looked more “Portagee” than most of my family. Too often this fact manifested itself in jokes not worth repeating here.
Throughout my childhood, there was little mention of the great Portuguese achievers: the explorers (Henry the Navigator, Magellan, De Gama), painters (Nuno Goncalves, Josefa de Obidos, Viera da Silva, Paula Rego), or writers (Camoes, Pessoa, Saramago). Even if I knew of them, I never thought of them as Portuguese.
Only much later did I understand how rich my heritage was. My grandfather seemed to take pride when, shortly before his death, I pursued him about the family history from his side of the Atlantic. He came from the Azores, the tiny archipelago in the middle of the ocean, which is still a place of myth and magic to me. He called me “amigo – one of us.”
In the search for my “lost” heritage, I discovered the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s great poet of the 20th Century. Pessoa, like his hero Walt Whitman, “contained multitudes.” Only in Pessoa’s case, this was quite literally true. Pessoa took on what he called “heteronyms”: pseudonyms that were more than noms de plume. For each persona, Pessoa created a unique personality, creative style, and body of work.
The most successful of Pessoa’s heteronyms was the shepherd-poet, Alberto Caeiro. Caeiro, like Robert Burns and John Clare before him, was a genius plucked straight from the fields. Whereas Burns and Clare were truly of the fields, Alberto Caeiro sprung from the field of Pessoa’s imagination. Pessoa wrote the poems of Alberto Caeiro from the top of his dresser in a Lisbon apartment.
In many ways, Caeiro in Pessoa’s invention is a pure nature poet. Perhaps only poet Gary Snyder achieves greater reconciliation with nature in his work. One of my favorite Pessoa-Caeiro poems is “Só a Natureza é Divina” (Only Nature is divine…) Here it is in the original Portuguese and in my translation:
| Só a natureza é divina, e ela não é divina…Se falo dela como de um ente É que para falar dela preciso usar da linguagem dos homens Que dá personalidade às cousas, E impõe nome às cousas. Mas as cousas não têm nome nem personalidade: Bendito seja eu por tudo quanto sei. |
*
Only Nature is divine, and she is not divine…
If I speak of her as of an entity
It is for to speak of her it is necessary to use the language of men,
Which gives personality to things,
And imposes names on things.
But things have neither name nor personality:
They exist, just as the sky is big and the land is wide,
And our hearts are the size of a closed fist…
I am blessed by everything as far as I know.
I enjoy everything as one who knows the sun is always there.
–Fernando Pessoa (writing as Alberto Caeiro) translated from the Portuguese by Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 