Helder, Herberto

English

UMass Dartmouth Open Journals System

From FlashHerberto HelderTranslated byAlexis LevitinIVMouth.Briilure, blessure. Wherethe many channels disembogue, as the word has it.Pure consumption, or in a murmur,amidst venous blood, ora trace of flame. Gangrene,music,a bubble.The awful art of passion.A monstrous pore that breathes the world.In it the dark, the breath,burnt air are crowned.Gold, gold.Sonorous tube through which the body filters.All of it, flowing away.IXI wouldn’t want you broken by the four elements.Or caught by touch alone;or smell.Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies 7 (2008); 379-83.© University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.380 PORTUGUESE LITERARY & CULTURAL STUDIES 7or Hesh heard beneath the working of the moonsin the water’s deepest mesh.Or to watch the operation of a star between yoLir arms.Or that falconry alone darken me like a blow,the qLiivering noLirishment among linens piledhighupon the beds.Magnihcence.It raised you upin music, a naked wound—terrified by richness—that black jubilation. It raised you up in me, a crown.It made the world tremble.And you burned my mouth, purespoon of gold, swallowedalive. Our tongue glittered.I glittered.Or else that, nailed together into a single, on-going nexus,a marble stalk of canebe born from a unity of flesh.And someone passing cut the breathof braided death. Anonymous lips, in the gaspingof ardtioLis male and femaleintertwining, creating a new organ within order.That they might modulate.With flickering tips of flames, faces throbbed, bursting into plumage.Animals drank. Ailing themselves with the rushing of water.The planets closed themselves in thatforest of sound and unanimousstone. And it was lis, this violent splendor, transformerof the earth.Name of the world, diadem.UntitledI swallowedwater. Deeply—water dammed within the air.A REPERTOIRE OF CONTEMPORARY PORTUGUESE POETRY 381A maternal star.And I am here devoured by a sobbing,weightless from my face.d’be glass made of star, bbe water so powerfulin the glass. My nails are black.I grab hold of that glass, drink from that star.I am innocent, uncertain, quivering, potent,tumescent.d he illumination that the stationary water draws from mefrom my hands to my mouth.I enter spacious places.— The power of an unknown food to shinein me; my face,when a dark hand grazes it, abovethe shirt sodden with blood,below hair dried by moonlight. 1 swallowedwater. The mother and the demonic childwere seated on the red rock.I swallowed deepdeep water.UntitledI cannot listen to such icy singing. They are singingabout my life.They have brought forth the taciturn purity of the world’svast nights.From the ancient element of silence that devastatingsong arose. Oh, ferocious world of purity,oh, incomparable life. They are singing and singing.I open my eyes beneath silent waters,and I see that my memory is the furthest thingof all. They are singing icily.I cannot listen to their song.And if they were to say: your life is a rosebush. Seehow it drinks in the anonymity of the season.Blood drips from you when it’s the time for roses.TRANSLATIONS382 PORTUGUESE LITERARY & CULTURAL STUDIES 7Listen: aren’t you lost in wonderat the subtlety of the thorns and the tiny leaves?— If they were to say something, I would be gracedwith a boundless name.Do not sing, do not blossom.I cannot feel life filling up this waylike an icy song and a rosebushso spread out in me.It could be this season of the year remained untouched,and my existence suddenly was floodedby all that fervor.I see my ardent sharpness drain until it merges with maturityin a confluentsummer’s minute.—Would I now becomplete for death?No, do not sing that memory of everything.Neither the rosebush on blood-streaked fragileflesh, nor summer with itssymbols of ferocious plenitude.I would like to think my fingers, one by one,a zither dropped into my work.All of sadness like an admirable lifefilling up eternity.Songs like ice leave me a desert, and the rosebushsows discord among recoilingroses. Listen: in the sadness of enormous summerthe oneness of my blood collapses.I myself cold sing a masculine name,my entire lifeso strong and sullied, so filled with the heated silenceof what we do not know.It isn’t sung, it doesn’t blossom. No oneripens in the middle of their life.Slowly one touches a suspended part of one’s bodyA REPERTOIRE OF CONTEMPORARY PORTUGUESE POETRY 383and a high sadness purifies one’s fingers.For a man is not a song of ice ora rosebush. He is nota fruit as if among inspiring leaves.A man lives a deep eternity that closesover him, but there his bodyburns beyond all symbols, without a soul and pureas an ancient sacrifice.Upon icy songs and terrifying rosebushes,my connected fiesh nourishes the miraculous silenceof a vast life.It could be that all is well in the pluralnessof an intense world. Butlove is a different power, fleshlives from its absorbed permanence. The lifeof which I speakdoes not drain away or feed our dailysuperlatives. Unique,eternal, it hovers above the hidden fluidityof all motion.— A rosebush, even thoughincomparable, covers everything with its crimson distraction.Behind the night of droopingroses, the flesh is sad and perfectlike a book.Alexis Levitin's publications include contributions to APR, Chelsea, Grand Street, PartisanReview, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and Kenyon Review. He has publishedm^enty-three books, including Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugenio de Andrade(New Directions, 2003), and Guernica and Other Poems by Carlos de Oliveira (GuernicaEditions, 2004). Levitin also translated poetry by Herberto Helder and Sophia de MelloBreyner Andresen, a project begun under a 2003-2004 NEA Translation Eellowship.E-mail: levitia@plattsburgh.eduTRANSLATIONS

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