Two months ago I was in
Lisbon, climbing the hill of Alfama in order to visit the Castelo São Jorge. I
had just arrived from London and Lisbon was full of sunshine; I had already
decided that this was the most beautiful city in the world.
Castelo São Jorge, a Moorish citadel captured by the Portuguese
Christians in 1147 (José Saramago’s novel The History of the Siege of
Lisbon investigates this event) consists of a fortified area at
the top of one of Lisbon’s seven hills. It contains the ruins of a fortress, a
small archaeological museum, a dilapidated garden enclosure with fountains, a
courtyard with a miradouro (a view-seeing terrace), and ramparts
covering half the citadel which overlook the city of Lisbon. It’s one of the
few parts of Lisbon that survived the earthquake of 1755, and offers fantastic
views as well as historically interesting architecture.
The Castelo São Jorge was the first thing I had wanted to see
in Lisbon, and I began my excursion with a walk around the walls – mostly so
that I could continue looking at Lisbon from on high as well as making happy
sighs because everything was so amazingly beautiful. There were stone benches
for people to sit on, a wine-kiosk and a café; it was clearly a space made for
slow meandering. This was an approach I was prepared to take, and so I
meandered. Noticing some writing on a nearby bench, I meandered closer to have
a look, and discovered a poem by Sophia de Brello Meyner.
©
J. J. sarha
Here’s the thing – standing in front of this bench you are at the
top of the tallest hill in Lisbon, with the city on your right and the estuary
of the river Tejo on your left. There is a lot of water and a lot of sky, and a
lot of pale buildings to reflect the water and the sky. There’s a lot of light.
This is pretty much the perfect place in the world to read that poem – reading
it there will punch you right in the feelings. What interests me is that someone had decided to place this bench
there and to engrave it with poetry; someone had decided that this is what people
should think and feel when they stand there.
Specifically, this is what English-speaking people should experience – people who probably won’t know anything about Sophia de Mello Breyner or about Portuguese poetry, but who ought to know that this poetry exists, and that it is something that can contribute the view in front of them.
A good decision, I thought. I came home and looked into Sophia de Mello Breyner, and discovered
that she was a renowned twentieth-century writer, famous for writing children’s
stories as well as poetry, and that she had been a critic of Salazar’s
dictatorship and had briefly served as an MP for the Socialist Party. She is
the second woman to have been buried in the Pantheon after Amalia Rodrigues.
Three of Sophia de Mello Breyner’s collections have been
translated into English. Nevertheless, I was interested to see how her poetry
would work in Portuguese – I am a translator by hobby (and occasionally by
profession), and while my Portuguese is, ahem, limited, I was eager to see the
structure of the poems as well as any sonal qualities that might be missed in
the English version. My academic translations tend to aim towards word for word
transmission rather than elegantly formed English, so I was also curious to see
what kind of a poetic tension could take place between two languages.
What I found was A Bilingual Anthology of 28 Portuguese Poets, translated by
Richard Zenith and Alexis Levitin. It includes a general introduction to modern
Portuguese poetry – very useful for a newbie like me – and on page 5, there was
this:
Thinking is a
discomfort, like walking in the rain
When the wind
kicks up and it seems to rain harder.
Pensar incomoda
como andar à chuva
Quando o vento
cresce e parece que chove mais.
The author is Alberto Caiero, a shepherd-poet who mostly writes about sheep – this poem is called ‘The Keeper of Sheep’. Or rather, the author is Fernando Pessoa, the most famous Portuguese poet of the twentieth century, and Alberto Caiero is one of his heteronyms: fictional poetic personas with separate biographies, styles, and interests. Alberto Caiero is a shepherd-poet, but there is also Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer, and Ricardo de Reis, a classicist (further immortalised in another Saramago novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which Reis returns from Brazil after Pessoa’s death and has interactions with his ghost). Pessoa’s best-known work is The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego), written from the perspective of Bernardo Soares, an assistant book-keeper. (This is a book I’d brought with me to Lisbon, and consumed as appropriate with Portuguese wine, occasionally reading out loud to my travel companion. It’s about a depressed alcoholic trying to escape from or delve into his own brain, and it’s wonderful.) Being able to read Fernando Pessoa in the original is one of the reasons I am studying Portuguese.
But there were other gems in this anthology; for example, Eugénio de Andrade, a friend of Sophia
de Mello Breyner and a translator of Federico Garcia Lorca.
OUTROS RITMOS, OUTROS MODOS
Não é o mar, não é o vinto, é o sol
que me dói da cintura aos sapatos.
Sol de fins de julho,
ou de agosto a prumo: finas
agulhas de aço.
É o sol destes dias, aceso
na folhagem.
Bebendo a minha água.
Colado à minha pele.
É doutro território, doutro areal.
Tem outros ritmos, outros modos,
outros vagares para roer
a cal, morder-me os olhos.
Até quando cega canta ao arder.
It isn’t the sea, it isn’t the wind, it’s the sun
that aches in me from my waist to my shoes.
The sun of late July,
or perpendicular in August: fine
needles of steel.
It is the sun of these days, burning
in the foliage.
Drinking my water.
Stuck to my skin.
It’s from another realm, another stretch of sand.
It has other rhythms, other modes,
other lazing times in which to gnaw
limestone, bite my eyes.
Even as it blinds, it sings as it burns.
I’ve been studying Portuguese with Duolingo since May – I have a
basic grasp of grammar and some vocabulary, but I would struggle to have a
conversation beyond ‘two tickets please’. My Portuguese is enough, however, to
engage with this poem; I know that ‘não’ means ‘no’, and while the English
translation of the first line is both accurate and pleasing, looking at the
Portuguese version tells me that there is an emphasis on the ‘no’. This in the
English version is given to the objects it denies, the sea and the wind and the
sun. Portuguese, like Latin but unlike English, is somewhat flexible with word
order, which allows such emphasis to be allocated.
Examining the sentence structure from the third line onwards, I am
able to note that the sun becomes the focal point of the argument, and that it
maintains this centrality until the end. The English translation makes it clear
that the sun constitutes the question which the poem is trying to answer; why
does it work the way it does, on our eyes and on our skin? The sun in Lisbon is
everywhere – I know myself that it can give both sunburn and lots of feelings –
but does it borrow that light from somewhere else, other rhythms, other modes (outros
ritmos, outros modos)? Is this why it works so insidiously? The
Portuguese in this poem may be beyond my skills to translate, but reading it
like this still allows me to interact with it. It also tells me things about
how poetic rhythms work in Portuguese and how assonance can be made to serve
rhyme.
My anthology is full of equally exciting texts, but I’m going to
limit myself to just one sonnet, ‘Standing at Fearful Attention’ by Alexandre O'Neill.
Perfilados de medo, agradecemos
o medo que nos salva da loucura.
Decisão e coragem valem menos
e a vida sem viver é mais segura.
Aventureiros já sem aventura,
perfilados de medo combatemos
irónicos fantasmas à procura
do que não fomos, do que não seremos.
Perfilados de medo, sem mais voz,
o coração nos dentes oprimido,
os loucos, os fantasmas somos nós.
Rebanho pelo medo perseguido,
já vivemos tão juntos e tão sós
que da vida perdemos o sentido…
Standing at fearful attention, we’re grateful
to fear, which keeps us from going mad.
Decision and courage are bad
for our health; life without living is safer.
Explorers whose exploits are history,
standing in fear we struggle against
ironic ghosts in our ongoing quest
for what we weren’t and never will be.
Standing in fear with no voice of our own,
just teeth that gnash on our hearts in fury,
we are the madmen, we are the ghosts.
A flock of sheep pursued by fear,
we live so together and so alone
that life’s meaning has disappeared.
Sources:
Richard Zenith
(ed.), 28 Portuguese Poets. A Bilingual Anthology (Dublin:
Dedalus Press, 2015).
