Education by Stone Read online

  that poetry is not on the inside

  but is, like a house, something outside,

  and before one lives inside it

  it must be built — this something

  one makes to make oneself able,

  this crutch for the one who is lame.

  A água da areia

  Podem a ablução, os muçulmanos,

  com areia, se não têm água;

  fazem da areia um outro líquido,

  eficaz igual no que lava.

  A areia pode lavar neles

  qualquer espécie de pecado;

  na ablução ela flui como a água,

  dissolve o mal mais empedrado.

  Sandwater

  Muslims may perform their ablutions

  with sand when there is no water;

  they treat the sand as another liquid

  just as effective for their washings.

  The sand is able to wash

  any kind of sin from their souls;

  for ablutions it flows like water,

  dissolving evils as hard as stone.

  No Páramo

  No Páramo, passada Riobamba,

  a quatro mil metros de altura,

  a geografia do Chimborazo

  entra em coma: está surda e muda.

  A grama não é grama, é musgo;

  e a luz é de lã, não de agulha:

  é a luz pálida, sonolenta,

  de um sol roncolho, quase lua.

  In the Páramo

  In the Páramo, past Riobamba,

  some fourteen thousand feet high,

  the geography of Chimborazo

  goes into coma, deaf and mute.

  The grass isn’t grass, it’s moss,

  and the light has no needles, it’s woolen:

  it is the pallid, somnolent light

  of a castrated sun, almost moon.

  A cama e um automóvel

  Morrer é andar de automóvel:

  tem todas as marchas, tem breques,

  e o motor que vai mansamente

  pode que sem mais se acelere

  para cumprir o diagnóstico

  de algum doutor acelerado

  que previu a morte a tal hora,

  ela, que se é certa é sem prazo.

  Se demora, a morte é a viagem

  de automóvel liso na estrada:

  a cama do doente é o automóvel:

  viaja sem chegar, sem mapas.

  The Bed and the Car

  Death is like riding in a car:

  it has various gears, and brakes,

  and the softly running motor

  can unexpectedly accelerate

  the fatal diagnosis of a doctor

  who spoke too quickly when he set

  a day for death, which, even if

  imminent, obeys no schedule.

  When it delays, death is an outing

  on the highway in a smooth-riding car,

  the sickbed is the car, traveling

  without maps, and without ever arriving.

  Direito à morte

  Viver é poder ter consigo

  certo passaporte no bolso

  que dá direito a sair dela,

  com bala ou veneno moroso.

  Ele faz legal o que quer

  sem policiais e sem lamentos:

  fechar a vida como porta

  contra um fulano ou contra o vento;

  fazer, num dia que foi posto

  na mesa em toalha de linho,

  fazer de seu vivo esse morto,

  de um golpe, ou gole, do mais limpo.

  Right to Death

  To live is to be able to carry

  a passport in one’s pocket

  that confers the right to get out,

  with a bullet or a slow poison.

  It makes it legal to act

  without policemen or laments:

  to shut life as one shuts a door

  to the wind or an unwanted visitor;

  to make of one’s life (on the day

  this passport is placed

  on the linen-covered table) a corpse,

  with a clean sharp bang, or swallow.

  Questão de pontuação

  Todo mundo aceita que ao homem

  cabe pontuar a própria vida:

  que viva em ponto de exclamação

  (dizem: tem alma dionisíaca);

  viva em ponto de interrogação

  (foi filosofia, ora é poesia);

  viva equilibrando-se entre vírgulas

  e sem pontuação (na política):

  o homem só não aceita do homem

  que use a só pontuação fatal:

  que use, na frase que ele vive

  o inevitável ponto final.

  A Question of Punctuation

  No one rejects man’s right

  to punctuate his own life —

  to live as an exclamation mark

  (they say he has a Dionysian heart),

  or to live as a question mark

  (formerly philosophy, now poetry),

  or to balance oneself between commas

  without final punctuation (politics);

  man only rejects that a man

  himself write the fatal mark —

  affixing to the sentence of his person

  the inevitable period, period.

  from

  Crime na Calle Relator / Crime on the Calle Relator

  1987

  O ferrageiro de Carmona

  Um ferrageiro de Carmona

  que me informava de um balcão:

  “Aquilo? É de ferro fundido,

  foi a fôrma que fez, não a mão.

  Só trabalho em ferro forjado

  que é quando se trabalha ferro;

  então, corpo a corpo com ele,

  domo-o, dobro-o, até o onde quero.

  O ferro fundido é sem luta,

  é só derramá-lo na fôrma.

  Não há nele a queda-de-braço

  e o cara-a-cara de uma forja.

  Existe grande diferença

  do ferro forjado ao fundido;

  é uma distância tão enorme

  que não pode medir-se a gritos.

  Conhece a Giralda em Sevilha?

  Decerto subiu lá em cima.

  Reparou nas flores de ferro

  dos quatro jarros das esquinas?

  Pois aquilo é ferro forjado.

  Flores criadas numa outra língua.

  Nada têm das flores de fôrma

  moldadas pelas das campinas.

  Dou-lhe aqui humilde receita,

  ao senhor que dizem ser poeta:

  o ferro não deve fundir-se

  nem deve a voz ter diarréia.

  Forjar: domar o ferro à força,

  não até uma flor já sabida,

  mas ao que pode até ser flor

  se flor parece a quem o diga.”

  The Ironware Shop in Carmona

  In an ironware shop in Carmona

  the man at the counter answered me:

  “That thing there? It’s cast iron,

  made by a mold, not the hand.

  “I only work in forged iron,

  the kind of iron that’s wrought;

  body against body I subdue it,

  bending it into what I want.

  “Cast iron requires no struggle:

  you just pour it in the mold,

  without any of the face-to-face

  or arm-wrestle of a forge.

  “There’s a vast difference

  between cast iron and forged;

  the distance is so great

  that no shouting can bridge it.

  “Do you know the Giralda in Seville?

  No doubt you climbed to the top.

  And did you notice the iron flowers

  in the vases on all four corners?

  “Well, they are made of forged iron.

  Flowers created in another language.

  Not at all like cast-iron flowers

/>   molded after those of the fields.

  “Let me give a bit of advice

  to you whom they call a poet:

  iron should never be cast,

  nor your voice be diarrhea.

  “Forge your iron; shape it by force,

  not into a flower you already know

  but into what can also be a flower

  if you think it is and say it is so.”

  Notes

  A Few Matadors

  Manuel Rodríguez, “Manolete,” perhaps the most legendary matador of the twentieth century, was born in Córdoba in 1917 and died, gored, in 1947.

  The Word Silk

  Although the Portuguese word for silk, seda, seems like it could be related to sedante, “sedative” (third stanza), in fact there is no etymological connection.

  Yes Against Yes

  Only the first half the poem is included here. Two more poets — Portugal’s Cesário Verde and Brazil’s Augusto dos Anjos — and two more painters — Juan Gris and Jean Dubuffet — are considered in the second half.

  Rivers for a Day

  The Sertão is the arid and impoverished hinterland of Northeast Brazil.

  Psychoanalysis of Sugar

  In primitive, unmechanized sugar mills, clay was added to the sugar as part of the bleaching process.

  The Kingdoms of Yellow

  The Mata is the fertile coastal region of Pernambuco where sugarcane is grown. In the fourth line of the second stanza, the word sarro does not mean “pus” but refers to the white coating (or “fur”) on the tongue resulting from hunger or sickness.

  Fort Orange, Itamaracá

  Itamaracá is an island off the coast of Pernambuco.

  The Sandbank at Sirinhaém

  The Sirinhaém is a river that empties into the Atlantic in southern Pernambuco.

  In the Páramo

  Chimborazo is the highest mountain (20,561 feet) in Ecuador, where the poet served as the Ambassador of Brazil from 1979 to 1982.

  Afterword

  “A stone is a stone is a stone” could not be a poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto, but it could be an epigraph to his poetry, a notice at the gates that the language within is plain and direct and that the subject matter is mineral, touchable, weighable, thingish. A stone is preferable to a rose for the simple reason that it is harder. This poet never liked what was easy. In “The Unconfessing Artist” he recognized that doing something is as useless as not doing anything, yet he insisted that it’s better to do. Why? Because it’s harder than not doing. It was only hard things like stones that held any poetic attraction for João Cabral. He considered poems made out of flowers to be, at best, a redundancy. Whereas poems made out of what’s harsh, rugged and lifeless might add a new sliver of something — perhaps beauty — to the world and might even, in a slight way, change how we see.

  Stones have no fragrance, but they are heavy with substance and endure. João Cabral, whose second book was titled The Engineer, wanted each of his poem-building words to “weigh as much as the thing it tells.” By fusing “the loose word” to “the body of its referent,” it would become, according to the “Catechism” he attributed to Berceo (p. 201), the first poet known by name to have written in Spanish, “a solid, dense thing, / able to clash with the one next to it.”

  Yet another quality of stone, besides its hardness and resilience, is its sheer and utter stoniness. What you see is what it is, the same material throughout. There is no “inner stone” to probe, ponder, or dress with theories. João Cabral was suspicious of whatever was invisible. He was not a strict materialist, but he preferred solid matter, because it is surer, clearer, and common to all. When he was 32 years old he published an essay criticizing the Brazilian poetry of his own generation for being “made of super-realities, made with exclusive parts of man,” with no greater ambition than “to communicate extremely subtle details, for which the only useful writer’s tool is the lightest and most abstract part of the dictionary.” Cabral preferred “the prosaic word” that is “heavy with reality, dirty with the coarse realities of the outside world.”

  One possible explanation for João Cabral’s poetic preference is simple: he was writing out of what he knew. His education by stone was the one he received growing up in Northeast Brazil, the country’s poorest region, largely taken up by the dry and desolate hinterland known as the Sertão. João Cabral was not from the interior but from Recife, on the coast, where thousands of Sertanejos (people from the Sertão) poured in during the drought years. To get there, many of the migrants would follow the path of the Capibaribe River, settling along its shores when at last they reached the city outskirts. The Capibaribe and the poor who inhabit its banks became recurring and indissociable topics in Cabral’s poetry. So destitute were these people — destitute of material means and of any real hope — that their existence was almost wholly defined by the muddy river, making it hard to know “where man (...) begins from the mud” or even “where man begins / in that man” (The Dog without Feathers). If there was any lingering consciousness in this dehumanizing environment, it belonged not to man but to the river, credited with knowing how the river dwellers “wither / even beyond / their deepest rubble.” Rubble — crushed stone — in place of a soul.

  Another long poem, O Rio (1954; The River), was narrated by the Capibaribe itself, being a chronicle of the journey it makes from its source to Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, passing first through barren country where the inhabitants “arm themselves / with the qualities of stone” in order to fight against it, and continuing through the coastal region known as the Mata, where sugarcane is grown.

  It was on the family’s sugar plantations that João Cabral spent his early childhood and received much of his tough “education.” However green and lush the Mata may be, life for those who cut and milled the sugarcane was as gray and meager as in the arid Sertão. A son of privilege, João Cabral never suffered any privation, but he saw it close up, every day, and he remembered what he saw. In the evening the sugar mill workers would gather around and hear the little boy recite popular verse narratives, published in pamphlet form and sold in the marketplace. This kind of versified storytelling — traceable to the narrative poetry traditions of medieval Iberia — became the major vehicle for what could be called Cabral’s “socially engaged” poetry. If this term is used here with reservations, it is because the poet himself never employed any such epithet. The great originality of his poetry in this vein is its absolute objectivity, not only in its dispassion but also in the way it objectifies the poem’s subject.

  In “Party at the Manor House,” the plantation owners and their politician friends talk about the sugar mill workers as subhuman creatures, hardly distinguishable from the sugar which is the beginning, middle and end of their exploited lives. Like the poor of Recife who stagnate along the banks of the Capibaribe River, the sugar mill workers have no inner “spiritual man” that can remain untouched by the condition that defines them. The twenty stanzas of this poem amount to a biology of their species, matter-of-factly described “in child form,” “in female form,” “in the form of an old man,” and so forth. In fact there is no “engagement” with the mill worker’s condition. The poet merely reports; let the reader react. Cabral’s childhood contact with those workers, acting as a vaccine (see “Plantation Boy”), gave him a permanent immunity to facile emotional responses. His poetry displays no pity, and hence no condescension.

  João Cabral moved with his family to Recife when he was ten years old, and in his late teens he began to frequent the Café Lafayette, where the city’s intellectuals met. A voracious reader, he was especially fond of certain French authors, including Mallarmé and Valéry. He was twenty years old when he met Murilo Mendes and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, probably the two Brazilian poets who most influenced his work, and they helped him publish his first book, Stone of Sleep, in 1942. The poetic images in these early poems were taken from the world of sleep and dreams or else were wrapped in a dreamy,
surrealist aura, but the young poet treated them as hard objects, organizing them with careful deliberation, like a cubist his ensemble of fragmented shapes. One of the poems pays homage to Picasso in his cubist period, and another to the surrealist André Masson. Painting was a lifelong passion of Cabral, who published a book-length essay on Joan Miró in 1950. Mondrian was another painter he held in special regard.

  Shortly after his first book was published, João Cabral moved to Rio de Janeiro, and in 1945 he was admitted into the Brazilian foreign service. In that same year he published The Engineer, which set in place his definitive program of poetry as lucid construction. The engineer of the title poem has a dream, but it is of “clear things: / surfaces, tennis, a glass of water” and is surrounded by “light, sun, and the open air.” If poetry in his first book still depended on inspiration from dreams, now it is the fruit of sleepless nights during which the poet agonizes before a blank sheet of paper to generate a mere twenty words to be used

  in his efficient machine.

  Always the same twenty words

  he knows so well: how they work,

  their evaporation, their density

  less than the air’s.

  (“The Lesson of Poetry”)

  Those twenty words mark the limits of inspiration; even if the poet produces more words, they still weigh less than air. But Cabral will put them into his poem-machine, where they will become the indispensable components of taut, interlocking verse structures. Eschewing verbal effusion and the piling on of images, he exploited to exhaustion the single word, the single image: water, wind, knife, stone. From their being used so insistently and in such varying formulations, these words acquired functional weight and substance, independent of whatever weight their literal meaning carried.

  In “Antiode,” published in 1947, the poet tells how he rejected the word “flower” in favor of the unpoetical “feces.” To rehabilitate the flower for use in poetry, he had to strip away all its lyrical overlay, reducing it to a “verse / inscribed in verse,” an “explosion / made to work / like a machine, / a vase of flowers.” In a process analogous to the Freudian sublimation of sexual energy into the creative forces of civilization, Cabral reined in direct emotion as well as aesthetic or intellectual exaltation, harnessing their energy to generate his smooth-running poetry, which depended not so much on the words — or flowers, emotions, images, ideas — themselves, but on their dynamic arrangement. The machine functioned on its own, with no need for the reader to relate to the man who created it.