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

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)