Ballad of Love Through the Ages - Carlos Drummond de Andrade

As every Brazilian school-boy knows, today marks the 510th Anniversary of the "discovery" of Brazil in 1500 by the Portuguese admiral Dom Pedro Álvares de Cabral.  To celebrate the fact that I still remember his full name AND the size of his fleet (13 ships, 1,500 hundred men) from grade-school history classes, today's poem comes from Brazil: another one by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, the acknowledged greatest 20th Century poet writing in Portuguese.   As in my comments with his first poem here, I wish that you could read and hear it in the original.  However, this is the next best thing: a translation by Mark Strand, a poet in his own right, who, like Elizabeth Bishop, brought the necessary poetic soul, skills, and sensitivity to do it justice.  This isn't a poem at Drummond's lyrical best or most complex in meaning or imagery, but it has always charmed me because of its simplicity, humor, and scope. 
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Ballad of Love Through the Ages
                                                                   transl. by Mark Strand
From the beginning of time,
I liked you, you liked me.
I was Greek, you were Trojan,
Trojan but not Helen.
I sprung from a wooden horse
to kill your brother.
I killed, we quarreled, we died.

I became a Roman soldier
persecutor of Christians.
At the catacomb door
I met you again.
But when I saw you fall
naked in the Colosseum
and the lion coming toward you,
I made a desperate leap
and the lion ate us both.

Next I was a Moorish pirate,
the scourge of Tripoli.
I set fire to the frigate
where you were hiding from
the fury of my brigantine.
But when I went to grab you
and take you as my slave,
you crossed yourself and drove
a dagger through your heart.
I killed myself as well.

Later on, in happier days,
I was a courtier at Versailles,
clever and debauched.
You dreamed of being a nun…
I vaulted over the convent wall
but difficult politics
led us to the guillotine.

These days I’m totally modern:
dancing, jogging, working out.
And I have money in the bank.
And you’re a fabulous blonde:
dancing, jogging, working out.
None of it pleases your father.
But after a thousand reversals,
I, one of Paramount’s heroes,
give you a hug, a kiss, and we marry.
                                                                            Carlos Drummond de Andrade - Brazilian

Canto do Noivo (Song of the Bridegroom) - Murilo Mendes

 Another Brazilian poet.  (May be I am being influenced by having lunch Sunday at a slice of home: a "churrascaria" (grilled meats restaurant) in Northeast Philadelphia, where there is a small Brazilian community.  Murilo Mendes (1901-1975) was a part of the Modernist Movement in Brazilian literature during the 1920s-1930s.  He was also a diplomat, studied in France, taught in Italy, and died in Portugal.  He said that he had his first poetic revelation when he saw Halley's Comet in 1910.  I hope to have done justice to it with my translation.  To me, its "take" on marriage in the voice of a bridegroom is unexpected, making the title a bit ironic.
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Canto do Noivo (Song of the Bridegroom)
                                                                        transl. from Portuguese - Harrison Tao


I will see your shapes take form little by little,
will see them shift in color, in weight, in rhythm,
your breasts swell in the hot night,
the eyes be transformed at the budding idea of a first child.

I will assist in the unfolding of your ages,
watching over all your transformations.

Already in my memory is the girl mother-to-dolls,
and after that, the one by the window in the afternoon,
and the one who changed on knowing me,
and the one close-by the union of bodies and souls.
The others will come. Your hips that will spread out,
the fallen breasts, the blameless eyes, the hair without luster
will be and tether you closer to the meaning of love,
my darling martyr, shape that I destroyed, integrated into mine.
                                   
                                                                                                          Murilo Mendes - Brazilian

Sonnet on Fidelity - Vinicius de Moraes

Another by Vinicius de Moraes (see yesterday's post).  I wish that you could hear it in the original Portuguese.  And if you think French accents are sexy, you need to hear a Brazilian Portuguese speaker talk in English.... Alas, most of my Brazilian Portuguese accent is gone... but not the spirit!
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Sonnet on Fidelity

Above all, to my love I’ll be attentive
First, and always with such ardor, so much
That even when confronted by this great
Enchantment my thoughts ascend to more delight.

I want to live it through in each vain moment
And in its honor I must spread my song
And laugh with my delight and shed my tears
When she is sad or when she is contented.

And thus, when afterward comes looking for me
Who knows what death, anxiety of the living,
Who knows what loneliness, end of the loving

I could say to myself of the love (I had):
Let it not be immortal, since it is flame
But let it be infinite while it lasts.
                                                                                Vinicius de Moraes - Brazilian

Sonnet on Separation - Vinicius de Moraes

Ahhh.... Vinicius de Moraes (1913-1980)!  Probably the most beloved and popular Brazilian poet of the last fifty years.  Boulevadier of Rio's grand avenues, raconteur, bon vivant, diplomat (posted to France, UNESCO, and Los Angeles!), playwright, performer, acclaimed lyricist of the Bossa Nova period, especially in collaboration with Antonio Carlos Jobim, and later with Chico Buarque, Baden Powell, and others. 

Vinicius lived large, married eight times (tying Mickey Rooney and Larry King!), wrote beautiful, beautiful poems that celebrated and embodied everything Brazilian, especially the embracing equally of life's joys and tribulations.  One of his plays became the movie "Black Orpheus", which, in 1959, hit the trifecta, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture here and the equivalent awards in France and England.  (It's a MUST see, for the music and dancing alone!)  Perhaps his best known work worldwide are the lyrics to "The Girl From Ipanema".  Coincidentally, I was in Rio, on my first trip back to Brazil since leaving for America as a teenager, when he died in July 1980.  I remember seeing people in the hotel bar and club dancing to his songs while crying at the same.  I chose this poem because it encompasses that duality of living/loving fully while accepting how quickly it can change.  (If you click on his name at the end of the poem, it will take you to a site where you can both read more about him and hear some of the songs he wrote.)
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Sonnet on Separation
                                                              translated from Portuguese by Ashley Brown
Suddenly laughter became sobbing
Silent and white like the mist
And united mouths became foam
And upturned hands became astonished.

Suddenly the calm became the wind
That extinguished the last flame in the eyes
And passion became foreboding
And the still moment became drama.

Suddenly, no more than suddenly
He who’d become a lover became sad
And he who’d become content became lonely

The near became the distant friend
Life became a vagrant venture
Suddenly, no more than suddenly.
                                                                                Vinicius de Moraes  - Brazilian

Amar (To Love) - C. Drummond de Andrade

Portuguese is a language whose musicality is apparent to anyone who has heard the lyrics to The Girl From Ipanema.   

However strung together, words in Portuguese have a natural lilt and a cadence that makes the most ordinary speech song-like because Brazilians speak with passion, regardless of subject. Combine that expressive spirit with the tropical abundance of sensual possibilities, and everyone is a poet.  (I've read that, during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, there was an expectation that any self-respecting educated person would have penned a volume of poetry!)   Brazil is also a country, unlike the U.S., where poets are celebrated household names and where poetry is as present at a party as food, drink and music.  Of these poets, Carlos Drumond de Andrade (1902-1987) is generally considered to have been one of the greatest, not just for his poetry but for his influence on poets of his - and later - generations.  He has been translated into English, most notably by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (who lived in Brazil for many years) and others.  The translation below is mine.  (I spent my "Wonder Bread Years" - 4-14 - in Brazil.)

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Amar     (To Love)
                                          transl. from Brazilian Portuguese - Harrison Tao

What can one creature do,
Among his fellow creatures, if not love?
Love and forget,
Love and mis-love,
Love, unlove, love?
Always, even to eyes gone glassy, love?

What else, I ask, can a loving being do,
Alone in a rotating universe, if not
To turn too, and love?
Love what the sea brings ashore,
Love what it buries and what, in the sea-breezes,
Is salt, or love’s yearning, or plain anguish?

To love solemnly the desert palms,
Love what is surrendered or pregnant with demands,
Love the barren, the unpolished,
A flowerless vase, an iron floor,
The inert breast, the street seen in a dream, a bird of prey.

This is our destiny: to love without accounting,
Distributing it to the faithless and the hollow,
An unlimited donation to complete ingratitude,
And, still from the emptied shell, the nervous, patient
Scrounging out of more and more love.

To love even our own lack of love, and in our parched state
To love the implicit water, the implied kiss, the infinite thirst.
                                                                                                       
Carlos Drumond de Andrade (Brazilian)