Thursday, February 7, 2019

The Lucid Objects of Language


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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