Education by Stone Read online

  which is always Pernambuco.

  — Even against the yellow

  of the canefield straw,

  his yellow is still yellower,

  for it reaches his morale.

  — The sugar mill worker

  is the quintessential yellow:

  — Yellow in his body

  and in his state of mind.

  — This explains his calm,

  which can appear as wisdom:

  — But it’s not calmness at all,

  it’s nothingness, inertia.

  14

  — The sugar mill worker

  yellowishly exists

  even in the colored world

  he enters with cane liquor.

  — In the beginning the liquor

  makes him somewhat rosy

  and, forgetting his yellow,

  he thinks of heading south.

  — In the sugar mill worker

  the rose turns to purple:

  — Instead of heading south,

  he wants to pass away.

  — Finally, inevitably,

  his yellow life returns

  — In the yellow bitterness

  of the next day’s hangover.

  19

  — The sugar mill worker

  yellowishly sees

  the rose-colored Brazil

  he lives in but doesn’t feel.

  — For him the river water

  is not blue but muddy,

  and clouds are burlap-colored,

  the grayish brown of sackcloth.

  — To the sugar mill worker

  the land is never a meadow:

  — And each day shows him

  the same faded foliage.

  — And different is the death

  that comes to paint his end:

  — Instead of using black,

  it dresses up in khaki.

  5

  — The sugar mill worker

  when sick with fever:

  — It isn’t yellow fever

  but malaria, green.

  — If you touch the outside

  of his human-looking body:

  — It feels as if his furnace

  has finally fired up.

  — If, however, you touch

  this body on the inside:

  — You see that, if a furnace,

  it has no foundation.

  — And if it is a sugar mill,

  its fire is cold or dead:

  — A mill that doesn’t refine,

  that only supplies to others.

  10

  — The sugar mill worker

  when he is dying:

  — His yellow begins

  to glow from inside.

  — He gains a transparency

  that suggests anemic crystal:

  — Of which candle wax

  is the best example.

  — He gains the transparency

  of a common candle:

  — Of the candle they’ve lit

  to watch over his last hour.

  — The flesh of this candle

  is just like his own:

  — And the flame wonders why

  they don’t light his too.

  15

  — The sugar mill worker

  when carried away, dead:

  — He’s one empty coffin

  inside another.

  — A death of emptiness

  is what’s carried inside:

  — And since the death is empty,

  it has no insides.

  — He can’t even be the contents

  of the rented coffin:

  — Since he is empty,

  at most he’ll be the lining.

  — The burial of a mill worker

  is the burial of a coconut:

  — A handful of wrappings

  around a hollow core.

  20

  — The sugar mill worker

  dead and in the ground:

  — Everything pitches in

  to finish him off quickly.

  — Black earth becomes gravel,

  the woods become dry plains:

  — And the sun gives a hand

  by making winter summer.

  — To better gnaw the bones,

  the worms turn into dogs:

  — Then back again into worms,

  when they see the bones are chalk.

  — And the wind of the canefield

  also helps to make him final:

  — By sweeping away the gases

  (his soul) to purify him.

  from

  Serial / Serial

  1961

  O sim contra o sim

  Marianne Moore, em vez de lápis,

  emprega quando escreve

  instrumento cortante:

  bisturi, simples canivete.

  Ela aprendeu que o lado claro

  das coisas é o anverso

  e por isso as disseca:

  para ler textos mais corretos.

  Com mão direta ela as penetra,

  com lápis bisturi,

  e com eles compõe,

  de volta, o verso cicatriz.

  E porque é limpa a cicatriz,

  econômica, reta,

  mais que o cirurgião

  se admira a lâmina que opera.

  Francis Ponge, outro cirurgião,

  adota uma outra técnica:

  gira-as nos dedos, gira

  ao redor das coisas que opera.

  Apalpa-as com todos os dez

  mil dedos da linguagem:

  não tem bisturi reto

  mas um que se ramificasse.

  Com ele envolve tanto a coisa

  que quase a enovela

  e quase a enovelando,

  se perde, enovelado nela.

  E no instante em que até parece

  que já não a penetra,

  ela entra sem cortar:

  saltou por descuidada fresta.

  Miró sentia a mão direita

  demasiado sábia

  e que de saber tanto

  já não podia inventar nada.

  Quis então que desaprendesse

  o muito que aprendera,

  a fim de reencontrar

  a linha ainda fresca da esquerda.

  Pois que ela não pôde, ele pôs-se

  a desenhar com esta

  até que, se operando,

  no braço direito ele a enxerta.

  A esquerda (se não se é canhoto)

  é mão sem habilidade:

  reaprende a cada linha,

  cada instante, a recomeçar-se.

  Mondrian, também da mão direita

  andava desgostado;

  não por ser ela sábia:

  porque, sendo sábia, era fácil.

  Assim, não a trocou de braço:

  queria-a mais honesta

  e por isso enxertou

  outras mais sábias dentro dela.

  Fez-se enxertar réguas, esquadros

  e outros utensílios

  para obrigar a mão

  a abandonar todo improviso.

  Assim foi que ele, à mão direita,

  impôs tal disciplina:

  fazer o que sabia

  como se o aprendesse ainda.

  Yes Against Yes

  Marianne Moore, refusing a pen,

  writes her stanzas

  with a cutting edge,

  a common jackknife or scalpel.

  She discovered that the clear side

  of things is the obverse,

  and therefore dissects them

  to read texts more accurately.

  She enters with unswerving hand

  and a scalpel pen

  to produce, on leaving,

  a neatly stitched poem.

  And since the scar is clean,

  sparse and straight,

  more than the surgeon

  one admires the surgical blade.

  Francis Ponge, also a surgeon,r />
  uses a different technique, turning

  the things he operates on

  in his fingers, and himself around them.

  He handles them with all ten

  thousand fingers of language;

  his is not a straight scalpel

  but one that’s always branching.

  With it he so wraps and wraps

  the thing that he almost winds it

  into a ball and loses

  himself, wound up inside it.

  And just when it would seem

  he can no longer penetrate,

  he enters without cutting,

  through a crack that went unseen.

  Miró felt that his right hand

  was too intelligent

  and that knowing so much

  it could no longer invent.

  He wanted it to unlearn

  all it had learned

  to recover the fresh line

  of his left hand, still pure.

  This being impossible, he began

  to draw with the left hand,

  attaching it at last

  to his right arm by a graft.

  Unless one is left-handed,

  the left hand lacks ability:

  every line is a relearning,

  every moment a new beginning.

  Mondrian regarded his right hand

  with just as much distrust,

  not for being intelligent,

  but because it was easy as such.

  He did not give it a new arm;

  he wanted it to be truer.

  So he grafted other

  more intelligent hands on to it.

  He grafted rulers, T-squares

  and other instruments

  that forced his hand

  to quit all improvisation.

  He imposed on his right hand

  this discipline:

  to do what it already knew

  as if it were still learning.

  O ovo de galinha

  1

  Ao olho mostra a integridade

  de uma coisa num bloco, um ovo.

  Numa só matéria, unitária,

  maciçamente ovo, num todo.

  Sem posssuir um dentro e um fora,

  tal como as pedras, sem miolo:

  e só miolo: o dentro e o fora

  integralmente no contorno.

  No entanto, se ao olho se mostra

  unânime em si mesmo, um ovo,

  a mão que o sopesa descobre

  que nele há algo suspeitoso:

  que seu peso não é o das pedras,

  inanimado, frio, goro;

  que o seu é um peso morno, túmido,

  um peso que é vivo e não morto.

  II

  O ovo revela o acabamento

  a toda mão que o acaricia,

  daquelas coisas torneadas

  num trabalho de toda a vida.

  E que se encontra também noutras

  que entretanto mão não fabrica:

  nos corais, nos seixos rolados

  e em tantas coisas esculpidas

  cujas formas simples são obra

  de mil inacabáveis lixas

  usadas por mãos escultoras

  escondidas na água, na brisa.

  No entretanto, o ovo, e apesar

  da pura forma concluída,

  não se situa no final:

  está no ponto de partida.

  III

  A presença de qualquer ovo,

  até se a mão não lhe faz nada,

  possui o dom de provocar

  certa reserva em qualquer sala.

  O que é difícil de entender

  se se pensa na forma clara

  que tem um ovo, e na franqueza

  de sua parede caiada.

  A reserva que um ovo inspira

  é de espécie bastante rara:

  é a que se sente ante um revólver

  e não se sente ante uma bala.

  É a que se sente ante essas coisas

  que conservando outras guardadas

  ameaçam mais com disparar

  do que com a coisa que disparam.

  IV

  Na manipulação de um ovo

  um ritual sempre se observa:

  há um jeito recolhido e meio

  religioso em quem o leva.

  Se pode pretender que o jeito

  de quem qualquer ovo carrega

  vem da atenção normal de quem

  conduz uma coisa repleta.

  O ovo porém está fechado

  em sua arquitetura hermética

  e quem o carrega, sabendo-o,

  prossegue na atitude regra:

  procede ainda da maneira

  entre medrosa e circunspecta,

  quase beata, de quem tem

  nas mãos a chama de uma vela.

  The Egg

  1

  To the eye an egg suggests

  the integrity of a block.

  A single, uniform substance,

  wholly and compactly eggish.

  Without an inside and outside,

  pulpless as a stone, or pulp

  all in all: inside and outside

  one and the same throughout.

  But if to the eye an egg

  appears to be unanimous,

  the hand which holds it

  discovers something suspicious:

  that its weight is not the cold,

  inanimate, addled weight of stones

  — not a dead weight — but the tumid,

  warm weight of something living.

  II

  To any hand that caresses it

  an egg reveals the smooth

  finish of things whose shaping

  required a lifetime of labor,

  a finish found in other things

  not made by human hands:

  in corals, rounded pebbles,

  and all sorts of sculpted objects

  whose simple forms are the work

  of inexhaustible sandpapers held

  by a thousand sculpting hands

  hidden in water and wind.

  And yet the egg, despite

  its pure, finished form,

  hasn’t reached an end;

  it is only now beginning.

  III

  The mere presence of an egg,

  even if no hand comes near,

  can provoke a certain reserve

  in whoever is in the room,

  which is hard to understand

  in light of the clear, clean

  shape of an egg and the candor

  of its whitewashed wall.

  The reserve an egg inspires

  is of a peculiar kind,

  like that which a revolver

  but not a bullet causes.

  It’s the reserve felt before objects

  which, concealing another inside,

  threaten with the act of discharging

  more than with what they discharge.

  IV

  Whenever an egg is handled,

  a ritual is observed:

  it is treated in a diffident,

  quasi-religious manner.

  One might argue that the care

  of the person carrying an egg

  is the usual care one takes

  with anything that’s full.

  The egg, however, is closed

  in its hermetic architecture,

  and whoever carries it, knowing this,

  persists in the usual way,

  still proceeding with caution,

  a bit fearful, wary, and almost

  pious, as one whose hands

  bear the flame of a candle.

  from

  A educação pela pedra / Education by Stone

  1966

  O mar e o canavial

  O que o mar sim aprende do canavial:

  a elocução horizontal de seu verso;

  a geórgica de cordel, ininterrupta,

  narrada em voz e
silêncio paralelos.

  O que o mar não aprende do canavial:

  a veemência passional da preamar;

  a mão-de-pilão das ondas na areia,

  moída e miúda, pilada do que pilar.

  *

  O que o canavial sim aprende do mar:

  o avançar em linha rasteira da onda;

  o espraiar-se minucioso, de líquido,

  alagando cova a cova onde se alonga.

  O que o canavial não aprende do mar:

  o desmedido do derramar-se da cana;

  o comedimento do latifúndio do mar,

  que menos lastradamente se derrama.

  The Sea and the Canefield

  What the sea learns from the canefield:

  the horizontal style of its verse;

  the georgics of street poets, uninterrupted,

  chanted out loud and in parallel silence.

  What the sea doesn’t learn from the canefield:

  the passion of a rising tide;

  the pestle-pounding of waves on sand,

  ground ever finer, repesteled, repounded.

  *

  What the canefield learns from the sea:

  the quiet rhythm of advancing waves;

  its meticulous liquid spreading

  that fills every hollow where it passes.

  What the canefield doesn’t learn from the sea:

  the sugarcane’s unbridled flowing;

  the moderation of the plantation-sea,

  which flows less rampantly.

  A educação pela pedra

  Uma educação pela pedra: por lições;

  para aprender da pedra, freqüentá-la;

  captar sua voz inenfática, impessoal

  (pela de dicção ela começa as aulas).

  A lição de moral, sua resistência fria

  ao que flui e a fluir, a ser maleada;

  a de poética, sua carnadura concreta;

  a de economia, seu adensar-se compacta:

  lições da pedra (de fora para dentro,

  cartilha muda), para quem soletrá-la.

  *

  Outra educação pela pedra: no Sertão

  (de dentro para fora, e pré-didática).

  No Sertão a pedra não sabe lecionar,

  e se lecionasse não ensinaria nada;

  lá não se aprende a pedra: lá a pedra,

  uma pedra de nascença, entranha a alma.

  Education by Stone

  An education by stone: lesson by lesson;

  learning from the stone by going to its school,

  grasping its impersonal, unstressed voice

  (it begins its classes with one in diction).

  The lesson in morals — its cold resistance

  to what flows and to flowing, to being molded;

  a lesson in poetics — its concrete flesh;

  another in economics — its compact weight: