Education by Stone Read online

  §A flag

  that would have teeth

  — for with its teeth and its soap

  the sea is always

  gnawing its beaches.

  §A flag

  that would have teeth

  — for like a pure poet

  polishing skeletons,

  like a pure rodent,

  a pure policeman

  arranging skeletons,

  the diligent sea

  never stops

  washing and rewashing

  its pure skeleton of sand.

  §The sea and its incense,

  the sea and its acids,

  the sea and the mouth of its acids,

  the sea and its stomach

  that eats, and eats itself,

  the sea and its flesh

  glazed like a statue’s,

  its silence, achieved

  at the price of always

  saying the same thing,

  the sea and its pure

  teacher of geometry.

  §The river fears the sea

  as a dog fears

  a door that’s cracked open,

  as a beggar fears

  an apparently open church.

  §First

  the sea pushes back the river.

  The sea shuts the river out

  of its white sheets.

  The sea shuts its doors to all

  the river’s flowers

  of earth, to all its images

  of dogs or beggars.

  §Then

  the sea invades the river.

  The sea

  wants

  to destroy in that river

  its flowers of swollen earth,

  whatever in that earth

  can grow and burst,

  like an island,

  a fruit.

  §But before going to the sea

  the river lingers

  in stagnant mangrove swamps.

  The river unites

  with other rivers

  in a lagoon, in swamps

  where life coldly seethes.

  §The river unites

  with other rivers.

  United,

  all the rivers

  prepare their fight

  of stagnant water,

  their fight

  of stagnant fruit.

  §(As the river was a dog,

  as the sea was a flag,

  those mangrove swamps

  are an enormous fruit:

  §The same patient

  and useful machine

  of a fruit,

  the same anonymous,

  invincible force

  of a fruit

  — still forging its sugar

  when already cut.

  §As drop by drop

  until sugar,

  so drop by drop

  until the crowns of earth;

  as drop by drop

  until a new plant,

  so drop by drop

  until the sudden islands

  joyously emerging.)

  IV

  (Discourse of the Capibaribe)

  §The river

  exists in memory

  like a living dog

  inside a room.

  Like a living dog

  inside one’s pocket.

  Like a living dog

  under the sheets,

  under one’s shirt,

  one’s skin.

  §A dog, because it lives,

  is sharp.

  Whatever lives

  doesn’t numb.

  Whatever lives wounds.

  Man,

  because he lives,

  clashes with the living.

  To live

  is to wend among the living.

  §Whatever lives

  inflicts life

  on silence, on sleep, on the body

  that dreamed of cutting itself

  clothes out of clouds.

  Whatever lives clashes,

  has teeth, edges, is heavy.

  Whatever lives is heavy

  like a dog, a man,

  like the river.

  §Heavy

  like everything real.

  The river

  is heavy and real.

  As an apple

  is heavy.

  As a dog

  is heavier than an apple.

  As the blood of a dog

  is heavier

  than the dog itself.

  As a man

  is heavier

  than the blood of a dog.

  As the blood of a man

  is much heavier

  than the dream of a man.

  §Heavy

  as an apple is heavy.

  As an apple

  is much heavier

  if a man eats it

  than if a man sees it.

  As it is even heavier

  if hunger eats it.

  As it is yet heavier still

  if hunger sees

  but cannot eat it.

  §The river

  is heavy

  like the heaviest reality.

  Heavy

  because of its heavy landscape,

  where hunger

  deploys its secret battalions

  of visceral ants.

  §And heavy

  because of its fable’s heavy plot,

  because of the flowing

  of its earthen jellies,

  heavy when it gives birth

  to its islands of black earth.

  §Because life that multiplies

  itself in more life

  is much heavier,

  as a fruit

  is heavier

  than its flower,

  as the tree

  is heavier

  than its seed,

  as the flower

  is heavier

  than its tree,

  etc. etc.

  §Heavy,

  because life is heavier

  when it is fought for

  each day,

  because the day is heavier

  when it is won

  each day

  (like a bird

  conquering each second

  its flight).

  from

  Paisagens com figuras / Landscapes with Figures

  1956

  Pregão turístico do Recife

  Aqui o mar é uma montanha

  regular redonda e azul,

  mais alta que os arrecifes

  e os mangues rasos ao sul.

  Do mar podeis extrair,

  do mar deste litoral,

  um fio de luz precisa,

  matemática ou metal.

  Na cidade propriamente

  velhos sobrados esguios

  apertam ombros calcários

  de cada lado de um rio.

  Com os sobrados podeis

  aprender lição madura:

  um certo equilíbrio leve,

  na escrita, da arquitetura.

  E neste rio indigente,

  sangue-lama que circula

  entre cimento e esclerose

  com sua marcha quase nula,

  e na gente que se estagna

  nas mucosas deste rio,

  morrendo de apodrecer

  vidas inteiras a fio,

  podeis aprender que o homem

  é sempre a melhor medida.

  Mais: que a medida do homem

  não é a morte mas a vida.

  Tourist Pitch for Recife

  Here the sea is a mountain

  smooth and blue and round,

  taller than the coral reefs

  and shallow swamps to the south.

  From the sea you can extract

  (from the sea that laps our coast)

  a thread of precise light,

  mathematical or metallic.

  In the city itself

  old lanky row houses

  rub their limestone shoulders

>   on both sides of a river.

  From these houses you can learn

  a lesson of long experience:

  a delicate equilibrium

  in writing, as in architecture.

  And from this indigent river,

  this blood-mud that meanders

  with its almost static march

  through sclerosis and cement,

  and from the people who stagnate

  in the river’s mucous membranes,

  entire lives rotting

  one by one to death,

  you can learn that man

  is always the best measure,

  and that the measure of man

  is not death but life.

  O vento no canavial

  Não se vê no canavial

  nenhuma planta com nome,

  nenhuma planta maria,

  planta com nome de homem.

  É anônimo o canavial,

  sem feições, como a campina;

  é como um mar sem navios,

  papel em branco de escrita.

  É como um grande lençol

  sem dobras e sem bainha;

  penugem de moça ao sol,

  roupa lavada estendida.

  Contudo há no canavial

  oculta fisionomia:

  como em pulso de relógio

  há possível melodia,

  ou como de um avião

  a paisagem se organiza,

  ou há finos desenhos nas

  pedras da praça vazia.

  Se venta no canavial

  estendido sob o sol

  seu tecido inanimado

  faz-se sensível lençol,

  se muda em bandeira viva,

  de cor verde sobre verde,

  com estrelas verdes que

  no verde nascem, se perdem.

  Não lembra o canavial

  então, as praças vazias:

  não tem, como têm as pedras,

  disciplina de milícias.

  É solta sua simetria:

  como a das ondas na areia

  ou as ondas da multidão

  lutando na praça cheia.

  Então, é da praça cheia

  que o canavial é a imagem:

  vêem-se as mesmas correntes

  que se fazem e desfazem,

  voragens que se desatam,

  redemoinhos iguais,

  estrelas iguais àquelas

  que o povo na praça faz.

  The Wind in the Canefield

  There is in the canefield

  no plant with a name,

  no plant called Maria,

  no plant with a man’s name.

  The canefield is anonymous,

  plain-faced like the prairie,

  like an ocean without ships,

  a blank sheet of paper.

  It is like a large bedsheet

  without folds or hems,

  a girl’s downy skin in the sun,

  clothes spread out to dry.

  Yet hidden in the canefield

  there is a physiognomy,

  as in a watch’s ticking

  there is a potential melody,

  as from a plane the landscape

  reveals an organization,

  as the stones of an empty square

  delineate graceful patterns.

  When wind blows in the canefield

  spread out under the sun,

  its inanimate fabric

  becomes a sensitive bedsheet:

  it changes into a living

  flag of green on green,

  with green stars born

  and lost in the greenness.

  Then the canefield no longer

  resembles an empty square:

  it does not have, like the stones,

  the discipline of armies.

  Its symmetry is jagged,

  like that of waves on sand

  or of the waves of people

  vying in the crowded square.

  Yes, the crowded square

  is what the canefield mirrors,

  with the same kinds of currents

  arising and subsiding,

  the same eddies and whirlpools

  that can break out anywhere,

  the same stars as those formed

  by the people in the square.

  Cemitério pernambucano

  (Toritama)

  Para que todo este muro?

  Por que isolar estas tumbas

  do outro ossário mais geral

  que é a paisagem defunta?

  A morte nesta região

  gera dos mesmos cadáveres?

  Já não os gera de caliça?

  Terão alguma umidade?

  Para que a alta defesa,

  alta quase para os pássaros,

  e as grades de tanto ferro,

  tanto ferro nos cadeados?

  — Deve ser a sementeira

  o defendido hectare,

  onde se guardam as cinzas

  para o tempo de semear.

  Cemetery in Pernambuco

  (Toritama)

  Why this great wall?

  Why shut off these graves

  from the other, larger

  charnel, the dead landscape?

  In this region do the corpses

  themselves breed death? Does death

  no longer breed them, dry as rubble?

  Do they contain some moisture?

  Why this high defense,

  almost too high for the birds,

  and the gates with so much iron,

  so much iron in the locks?

  This must be the seedbed,

  the well-defended acre,

  where the ashes are preserved

  until the time for sowing.

  Encontro com um poeta

  Em certo lugar da Mancha,

  onde mais dura é Castela,

  sob as espécies de um vento

  soprando armado de areia,

  vim surpreender a presença,

  mais do que pensei, severa,

  de certo Miguel Hernández,

  hortelão de Orihuela.

  A voz desse tal Miguel,

  entre palavras e terra

  indecisa, como em Fraga

  as casas o estão da terra,

  foi um dia arquitetura,

  foi voz métrica de pedra,

  tal como, cristalizada,

  surge Madrid a quem chega.

  Mas a voz que percebi

  no vento da parameira

  era de terra sofrida

  e batida, terra de eira.

  Não era a voz expurgada

  de suas obras seletas:

  era uma edição do vento,

  que não vai às bibliotecas,

  era uma edição incômoda,

  a que se fecha a janela,

  incômoda porque o vento

  não censura mas libera.

  A voz que então percebi

  no vento da parameira

  era aquela voz final

  de Miguel, rouca de guerra

  (talvez ainda mais aguda

  no sotaque da poeira;

  talvez mais dilacerada

  quando o vento a interpreta).

  Vi então que a terra batida

  do fim da vida do poeta,

  terra que de tão sofrida

  acabou virando pedra,

  se havia multiplicado

  naquelas facas de areia

  e que, se multiplicando,

  multiplicara as arestas.

  Naquela edição do vento

  senti a voz mais direta:

  igual que árvore amputada,

  ganhara gumes de pedra.

  Encounter with a Poet

  In a certain place in La Mancha

  where the Castilian plain is hardest,

  in the midst of a stiff blowing

  wind armed with sand,

  I happened upon the presence,

  severer than I had imagined,

  of one Migu
el Hernández,

  a farmer of Orihuela.

  The voice of this Miguel,

  hanging between word and earth,

  the same uncertain earth

  houses in Fraga are made of,

  was once an architecture,

  a metric voice of stone,

  crystallized the way Madrid

  appears when you first arrive.

  But the voice I discerned

  in the highland wind

  was of tortured, beaten earth,

  the earth of a threshing floor —

  not the expurgated voice

  of the poet’s selected works

  but an edition of the wind

  not found in libraries.

  It was a disturbing edition,

  to which many shut the window

  (disturbing because the wind

  frees rather than censures).

  The voice which I heard

  in the wind of the highland

  was Miguel’s final voice

  gone hoarse from war

  (perhaps even harsher

  in the dialect of dust;

  perhaps more mutilated

  in the wind’s interpretation).

  I saw that the beaten land

  of the end of the poet’s life,

  land turned to stone

  from so much suffering,

  had multiplied itself

  in those knives of sand

  and in that multiplication

  had multiplied its edges.

  In that edition of the wind

  the voice directly touched me —

  it had gained blades of stone,

  like an amputated tree.

  Cemitério pernambucano

  (São Lourenço da Mata)

  É cemitério marinho

  mas marinho de outro mar.

  Foi aberto para os mortos

  que afoga o canavial.

  As covas no chão parecem

  as ondas de qualquer mar,

  mesmo as de cana, lá fora,

  lambendo os muros de cal.

  Pois que os carneiros de terra

  parecem ondas de mar,

  não levam nomes: uma onda

  onde se viu batizar?

  Também marinho: porque

  as caídas cruzes que há

  são menos cruzes que mastros

  quando a meio naufragar.

  Cemetery in Pernambuco

  (São Lourenço da Mata)

  This is a marine cemetery,

  but marine of a different sea.

  It was opened for the dead

  who drown in the canefield.

  The mounds of dirt resemble

  the waves of any sea,

  even the waves of cane, outside,

  lapping these whitewashed walls.

  Since these graves of earth

  look like waves of sea,

  they have no names; where

  was a wave ever christened?

  A marine cemetery because

  its fallen crosses serve