Education by Stone: Selected Poems by João Cabral de Melo Neto
The late
Brazilian poet and diplomat, João Cabral de Melo Neto, was the
leading voice of the post WWII Brazilian poets called the “Generation of ‘45”, a
group whose work was best know for its austere and rigorous style. Known as “a
poet of thingness”, João Cabral strove, in his poetry, for what has often been described as
“a staunch formal righteousness” characterized by a rigid adherence to the
description of images, actions, and things.
Here is a
brief sampling of his work:
The Table
The
folded newspaper
on the
simple table;
the
tablecloth clean,
the
dishes white
and fresh
like bread.
The
green-skinned orange:
your
unfailing landscape,
your open
air, the sun
of your
beaches: bright
and fresh
like bread.
The knife
that sharpened
your
spent pencil;
your
first book
whose
cover is white
and fresh
like bread.
And the
verse born
of your
living morning,
of your
finished dream:
still
warm, light
and fresh
like bread.
Windows
There’s a
man dreaming
on a beach,
another
who
remembers dates.
There’s a
man running away
from a
tree, another missing
his boat
or his hat.
There’s a
man who’s a soldier,
another
who acts like an airplane,
another
who keeps forgetting
his time
his mystery
his fear
of the word veil.
And
there’s yet another who,
stretched
out like a ship, fell asleep.
The Insomnia of Monsieur Teste
A
lucidity which sees everything,
as if by
lamp- or daylight,
and
which, at nightfall, turns on
behind he
eyelids of the tooth
of a
sharp and skinless light,
extreme
and serving for nothing:
a light
so lucid it fools you
into
thinking you can do everything.
The Nothing That Is
A
sugarcane field is so vast
that all
measures of it are vain.
It has
the sea’s unending
wide-openness,
defying
numbers
and their ilk
to trap
it in their assertions.
In the
cane field one forgets
to
measure anything at all,
for
although it is populous,
its
population is anonymous,
making it
resemble a pregnancy
of
nothingness, like the sea’s.
Peter Adam
Nash
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