WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
Oh salt laden sea, how much of your salt
belongs to the tears of Portugal!
By crossing your waters, how many mothers wept,
how many sons and daughters prayed in vain!
How many would be brides denied
for you to be ours, oh sea!
Was it all worth it -- the price that was paid?
All is worth doing, if one is great of soul.
Beyond the Cape of Bojador, for those who dare to sail,
all pain must be renounced, all suffering cast off.
Perils and unfathomable depths to the sea gave God,
for the sky above is mirrored within.
Fernando Pessoa
My preceding Fortnightly concluded with a preview of Pessoa's work, and a promise of more Portuguese poetry to come. Once again dipping into the anthology, I have chosen a selection of poems from the three youngest poets, all of whom lived and wrote, intensely and somewhat sadly, in the early 20th Century: Pessoa (1888 – 1935), his friend and colleague Mario de Sa-Carneiro (1890 – 1916), and Florabela Espanca (1894 - 1930). As you can see from the dates, their lives were not long. Pessoa was plagued by ill health and alcoholism; Sa-Carneiro and Espanca died of suicide.
A little more blue -- and I would take flight.
But I lacked that impulse to get there . . . "
from the poem "Almost"
~ Mario de Sa-Carneiro ~
Florbela Espanca (mid / left),
Mario de Sa-Carneiro (above her, wearing hat)
The most optimistic of this group is Fernando Pessoa, whose ode to the machine is worthy of Dawn or Doom or Walt Whitman. He grants technology a role in the creation of his poetry and looks to the future as well as the past:
Ode Triumphant
Under the powerful light of the industrial lamps
I possess a fever and through gritted teeth I write.
I write, overcome, drunk with all this beauty,
A beauty entirely unknown to the ancients.
Oh wheels, oh gears, grrrrind eternally!
Mighty spasms constricted by machines enraged!
A thunderous rage both within and without,
pervading all my nerves detached,
all my taste buds, all I feel with!
My lips are dry, oh noise so loud and so modern,
as you I hear with such close intensity,
and my head burns from singing you with excess
in pronouncement of all that I feel,
with an exuberance to match yours, oh machines!
In "Lisbon Revisited (1926)" Pessoa writes of both sea and city, and existential angst:
Nothing connects me to nothing . . .The theme of nothingness appears throughout Pessoa's work, as he wonders about the elusive meaning of life. He wrongly foresees a negated fate for his poetry, though this strain of gloom did not prevent him from writing prolifically and with a great sense of affirmation, under a complicated system of pseudonyms. The following two examples come under the name of Ricardo Reis:
Once more I see you,
city of my youth so tragically lost . . .
And once more I see you,
my heart at a distance, my soul much less so.
Once more I see you -- Lisbon, my city . . .
Once more I see you,
but alas, myself, I do not!
The magical mirror in which my image reflected, cracked,
and in each fateful shard remains a fragment of me --
a fragment of you and me!
Nothing remains of nothing. We are nothing.The tragic poet, Florabela Espanca (8 December 1894 – 8 December 1930) predicts, again incorrectly, that her work may share a similar fate:
With a little sun and air, we hold back, delay
the stifling darkness that weighs heavy
on the moistened land.
We are all death deferred, and we multiply.
Laws created, statues viewed, odes concluded --
everything has its graves, and if we, who are given life
by an intimate sun,
too must rest, why not everything else?
We tell tales upon tales -- we are nothing.
**********************
Yes, I know that
I'll forever be a nobody.
I know very well that
a single work I shall not complete.
And more so that
I'll never know me.
Yes, but now,
whilst this time lasts,
this moonlight, these arms,
this peace that we feel,
permit me to believe
that which I may never be.
Vanity
I dream that I'm the Golden Girl of poets,
She who says it all and knows it all,
who finds pure and perfect inspiration,
who gathers the boundless into a single line!
I dream that in just one of my lines is a brightness
enough to fll the whole world! Delighting
even those whose hearts are sore and broken!
Even those with profound and yearning souls!
I dream that I am Somebody here in this world --
She of the vast and profound wisdom,
at whose feet the Earth bows!
And when I'm dreaming skyward at my highest,
and soaring at my loftiest up above,
I wake from my dream -- And I'm nothing!
It is typical of Espanca's sonnets to initially fill the reader with hope, until the introduction of despair in the last few lines. In "To A Young Girl," for example, we join in the poet's encouragement of the young girl to embrace life in every aspect -- yes, do this; yes do that! But "dig yourself a grave"? No, don't do that!
To A Young Girl
For Nice
Open your eyes and face your life! Your fate
has to come true! Fling your horizons wide!
Raise bridges up across the boggy mires
with your precious, young woman's hands.
Along the fascinating highway of your life
keep walking on ahead, on over the mountains!
Bite into fruits as you laugh! Drink from the springs!
Kiss everyone your good luck brings your way!
Wave a hello to the farthest-distant star,
use your own hands to dig yourself a grave,
and then, with a grin, lie down in it!
Then may the earth's hands lovingly
bring up into the light out of your body's grace,
slender and new, the stalk of a flower!
Struggling against both physical and mental illness, it was difficult for Espanca to choose the joyous life that she describes in the opening of nearly every poem. If only she had been able to see that she herself was the "Enchanted Princess of Dreamland," that she, like her contemporary Pessoa, had been "given life by an intimate sun." Well, maybe she did.
What You Are
You're the One every little thing gets down,
rubs wrong and embitters, everything humiliates you;
you're the One Heartache called her daughter,
the One deserving nothing from man or God.
You're the One whom the bright sun darkens,
who doesn't even know what road she's traveling on,
the one without a single gleaming, wondrous love
to dazzle you, and give you light and warmth!
A Dead Sea with no tides or wide waves,
made up entirely of bitter tears,
groveling on the ground like beggar-women do!
You're a year when spring never came --
Ah! If only you could be like other girls,
O Enchanted Princess of Dreamland!
for their photos of Portugal and for the book of poetry!
hSEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, August 28th
Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com
Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment