Tranlations from
UNENCONTRARIES 6 brazilian poets
Curitiba, Brazil, 1995
Unencontraries
I told the word to rhyme,
but it did not obey.
It spoke of skies, a bay, a rose
in Greek, in silence, in prose.
Seemed out of its wits,
the silent syllable.
I told the phrase to dream,
and into a labyrtnth it went.
Making poetry, I feel, only this.
Having an army sent
to conquer an extinct empire.
Translated by Charles A. Perrone
Full pause
A place where's done
what's already be done,
the blank of the page,
sum of all texts,
time departed
when, in writing,
an exempt leaf
was needed.
No page
was ever clean.
Even the most Saharian,
Arctic one, signifies.
That there never was,
a blankpage.
In the depths, they all shout,
pallid from so much.
Translated by Charles A. Perrone
silk curtains
the wind blows in
without permission
Translated by Regina Alfarano
probe the mire
everything that can respire
can conspire
Translated by Regina Alfarano
spacetimeship for alice
frag
ments
from the shipwreck
of a lifetime
washed
onto the beach
of an unknown landline
the reason for
holding us
so
closing us
so
together facing
the night
of interstellar spaces
Translated by Regina Alfarano
(revised by Dana Stevens)
Iceberg
An Arctic ballad,
I'd, of course, like to entice.
A practice so pallid,
three verse-lines of ice.
A phrase of the surface
where a life-phrase never
could be possible.
Phrase, no. None whatsoever.
Null and lyrical
reduced to purely minimal,
a blinking of the spiritual,
a lone unique unit.
Yet I speak. And my speaking is
provoking equivocating clouds
(or hives of monologues?).
Yes, winter, we are alive.
Translated by Charles A. Perrone
Notice to the shipwrecked
This page, for example,
wasn't born to be read.
It was born to be pallid,
merely to plagiarise the Iliad,
something keeping quiet
a leaf that returns to the branch,
long after it was felled.
It was born to be sand,
who knows Andromeda, Antarctica,
Himalaya, a syllable felt
it was born to be the last one
the one not yet born.
Words brought from afar
by the waters of the Nile,
one day, this page, papyrus,
will have to be transcribed,
into symbols, into Sanskrit,
into all the dialects of India,
it will have to say good day,
to what is only whispered in my ear,
it will have to be the harsh stone
where someone dropped the glass.
Isn't that the way life is?
Translated by Charles A. Perrone
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