The various thematic threads of “Death of the Milkman”—class conflicts, family relationships, the poet’s relationship to the world and to his poetic art — recur elsewhere in Rose of the People, which also includes profound reflections on love, on aging, and on dying. If Drummond has a magnum opus, it is this book, in which he sometimes seems to leave poetry behind, as if his words were a direct transcription of life itself. In “The Last Days,” his greatest testament and hymn to living, the poet courageously leaves himself behind, knowing that life should and will continue without him. The beauty of Drummond’s autobiographical poems is that the personal life they describe, interrogate, and memorialize is unessential. It is a specimen, a concrete instance — a naked model for the work of art.
* * *
Drummond’s poetry entered new territory with the publication of Clear Enigma (1951), whose epigraph, “Les évènements m’ennuient” (Paul Valéry), was a tip-off that something had changed. It was mainly political events that bored the poet, disillusioned by his brief incursion into party politics several years earlier. Other kinds of events — dealing with affections, the family, and the inexorable passage of time — continued to serve as thematic material. His poems, after all, had to be about something. What was most obviously different about Clear Enigma was the presence of traditional poetic forms. The modernist poet who had rarely before used fixed meters, let alone rhyme, now availed himself of both devices. While many of the poems in the collection still relied on the free-verse style Drummond had been cultivating for over twenty years, others resorted to a rhyme scheme, and there are a number of sonnets. “The Table,” definable as a personal family epic, forgoes rhyme but employs seven metrical syllables* in every one of its 340 lines. (My translations of this and other poems attend to rhythm without counting syllables.) And “The Machine of the World,” likewise unrhymed, maintains a strict decasyllabic line and looks at first glance as if it were written in terza rima, that marvelous form invented by Dante Alighieri. The first stanza, in fact, evokes Dante at the start of his journey in the Inferno but with the scene transposed to a road in Minas Gerais. The rest of the poem, with its classical diction and dense syntax, is reminiscent of Luís de Camões. The “machine of the world” is a conceit borrowed directly from the great Portuguese Renaissance poet who used it in a lyric poem and in his epic The Lusiads.
A semiclassical style continues to weave through subsequent collections, even if free verse was and would always remain Drummond’s dominant style. Sometimes he combined the two. “Elegy,” published in 1954, is another poem whose language and tone are strongly reminiscent of Camões (in his canções, or canzoni), although it does not rhyme or observe any metrical pattern. Drummond’s late-blooming interest in classical forms and registers coincided with an increased attention to metaphysics. Ever since “In the Middle of the Road,” with its obsessive focus on a single stone lying in the road, he was fond of taking up ontological and metaphysical issues, but now they loomed larger and were more likely to be addressed head-on. The modernist cause had been won, while age-old questions of philosophy and theology still begged for answers.
The opening salvo of “Eternal,” published in the same collection as “Elegy,” seems to accurately speak for the poet himself: “And how boring, after all, it is to be modern. / Now I’ll be eternal.” As it happens, this poem’s language and versification are modern rather than classical, but they are not ideologically, dogmatically modern. What Drummond wanted, at this point in his journey, was the freedom to write in all styles, without having to push a program. He also insisted on the right to be eternal, or to pretend he was eternal, even if he did not believe in God. One of Drummond’s favorite authors, whom he read more closely as he grew older, was Søren Kierkegaard, Denmark’s great doubter who chose to believe. Brazil’s great poet — a confessed agnostic — chose life itself, life on earth, without forgetting how it ends. “It will be grim, yielding, bleak,” he wrote in “The Last Days.” But “Eternal” reads like a giddy, irreverent capriccio. Using Machado de Assis to make fun of Pascal, it is one of Drummond’s most playful poems. It ends, however, with this solemn prayer: “that the urgent need to be eternal bob like a sponge in the chaos, / creating a rhythm / between oceans of nothing.” The last two cited verses are a perfect description of what Carlos Drummond spent his poetic life doing. He practiced what he prayed.
* * *
Besides writing poetry, Drummond had always published occasional criticism, commentary, and short stories in newspapers, and in the 1950s he began a long career as a columnist, producing hundreds of often witty crônicas about all sorts of real and unreal people and events. The crônica is an open format that gives the columnist virtually free rein. The poet and journalist also translated some novels (by Laclos, Balzac, Proust, and others), plays (Molière and García Lorca), and a scattering of poems from various languages. Although his own poetry showed signs of fatigue, it remained his privileged vehicle for making sense of the world, it did not lapse into repetition, and the best of his new poems ranked with his vintage work. He reached the heights less often than he used to, but he still reached them.
The chronically out-of-place figure cut by Drummond’s stubbornly pensive, self-conscious I was a central motif for as long as he wrote, but his perspective on that figure kept changing. Like a shifting camera, his poetry captures the I out of sync with life’s random events (“Porcelain”), out of sync with his lovers (“Destruction”) and with love itself (“The Infernal Powers”), out of sync with his strangely godlike consciousness (“The Misinformed God”), out of sync with his age (“Declaration in Court”), with his physical body (“The Body’s Contradictions”), with the natural world (“Unity”), and out of sync with his own personal history (“The House of Lost Time”). Drummond’s poems are an ongoing series of musical protests, twisted hymns, celebrations of imperfection. In a harmonious world there would be no place for poetry as he knew it and made it.
Between 1968 and 1979, Drummond published three volumes of poems under the general title Oxtime. They form an unstructured memoir of his years growing up and going to school in Minas Gerais. Without pretending to be high poetry, these simple stories couched in verses succeed — like cinema — in transporting us to the places and times they portray. It would be hard to imagine a more effective autobiography. But the evoked experiences are at the same time exemplary. They are part of Drummond’s larger project of considering what makes a human human, and how one human fits in with other humans and with his or her surroundings. Acutely aware of how people and things very often don’t fit, as if incompatibility were the general rule, he was also attentive to life’s brief moments of perfect agreement, love, which his poetry made a point of recording and even of creating. A cross-dressing woman in the Itabira of his boyhood really existed, according to one of Drummond’s interviews, but it was only in the poem “Woman Dressed as a Man” that he, a small and frustrated “boy-man,” walked hand in hand with her, a frustrated “woman-man,” parading through the town, in the middle of the night, their mutual “discontent with the malformed world.”
In the world according to Drummond, everyone is ultimately a misfit, and this shared condition becomes a basis for communion — with family members, with friends or lovers, or with perfect strangers. On rare occasions they find each other; they always keep looking and hoping. It is not the will to live but the will to love that motivates the heroic I and the other characters who inhabit these poems.
ABOUT THIS SELECTION
In 1962 Carlos Drummond published Antologia poética, a personal anthology of poems from his first ten books, divided into nine thematic categories: (1) The Individual, (2) Minas Gerais, (3) Family, (4) Friends, (5) Social Confrontation, (6) Experience of Love, (7) Poetry Itself, (8) Playful Exercises, and (9) An Attempt to Understand Existence. Even if it is true, as Drummond claimed, that he was more concerned to present a balanced, overall view of his work than to single out the best poems, the anthology ha
s a high concentration of his finest work and was the natural starting point for my selection. Fifty-four of the eighty poems in Multitudinous Heart can be found in the Antologia poética.
The rural interior where Drummond grew up features in a number of my translations, but I have given short shrift to poems specifically about Minas Gerais, nor have I included poems addressed to other writers or to friends. Likewise missing are the poet’s “playful exercises,” which usually turn on some particularity of Portuguese that cannot be adequately translated. Drummond used graphic and word games inspired by the concrete poetry movement for a few poems included in his Lesson of Things (1962), but it was a lesson he soon abandoned. Erotic poetry is yet another facet of Drummond not represented here. During his last ten years he wrote a series of mostly rhyming, mildly erotic poems, which he only allowed to be published posthumously (Amor natural, 1992). I mention these exclusions not by way of apology but to make the point that Drummond’s poetic oeuvre is even wider in scope than the considerable diversity in my selection indicates.
Carlos Drummond’s first translator into English was John Nist, but the first translations to make his work noticed and admired in English were done by Elizabeth Bishop (seven poems) and Mark Strand (many more). The generally excellent volume of Drummond’s work titled Travelling in the Family: Selected Poems (Random House, 1986) included all of Bishop’s and most of Strand’s translations, many others by Thomas Colchie (who also wrote the Introduction), and one by Gregory Rabassa. The result was a choice offering of forty-one poems. To avoid redundancy and to make more of Drummond available in English, I varied my selection, doing new translations only for fifteen of the poems in Travelling that seemed to me essential.
The Portuguese source text is based on the (partial) critical edition published in 2012 and on the carefully prepared readers’ editions that Companhia das Letras began publishing that same year. Companhia kindly provided me with digital copies in Portuguese for most of the poems included in this selection.
*All syllables up to and including the last accented syllable in a line, with the additional proviso that contiguous vowels, whether in the same word or adjoining words, can merge and be counted as one vowel.
ALGUMA POESIA / SOME POETRY (1930)
POEMA DE SETE FACES
Quando nasci, um anjo torto
desses que vivem na sombra
disse: Vai, Carlos! ser gauche na vida.
As casas espiam os homens
que correm atrás de mulheres.
A tarde talvez fosse azul,
não houvesse tantos desejos.
O bonde passa cheio de pernas:
pernas brancas pretas amarelas.
Para que tanta perna, meu Deus, pergunta meu coração.
Porém meus olhos
não perguntam nada.
O homem atrás do bigode
é sério, simples e forte.
Quase não conversa.
Tem poucos, raros amigos
o homem atrás dos óculos e do bigode.
Meu Deus, por que me abandonaste
se sabias que eu não era Deus
se sabias que eu era fraco.
Mundo mundo vasto mundo,
se eu me chamasse Raimundo
seria uma rima, não seria uma solução.
Mundo mundo vasto mundo,
mais vasto é meu coração.
Eu não devia te dizer
mas essa lua
mas esse conhaque
botam a gente comovido como o diabo.
SEVEN-SIDED POEM
When I was born, one of those twisted
angels who live in the shadows said:
“Carlos, get ready to be a misfit in life!”
The houses watch the men
who chase after women.
If desire weren’t so rampant,
the afternoon might be blue.
The passing streetcar’s full of legs:
white and black and yellow legs.
My heart asks why, my God, so many legs?
My eyes, however,
ask no questions.
The man behind the mustache
is serious, simple, and strong.
He hardly ever talks.
Only a very few are friends
with the man behind the glasses and mustache.
My God, why have you forsaken me
if you knew that I wasn’t God,
if you knew that I was weak.
World so large, world so wide,
if my name were Clyde,
it would be a rhyme but not an answer.
World so wide, world so large,
my heart’s even larger.
I shouldn’t tell you,
but this moon
but this brandy
make me sentimental as hell.
INFNCIA
Meu pai montava a cavalo, ia para o campo.
Minha mãe ficava sentada cosendo.
Meu irmão pequeno dormia.
Eu sozinho menino entre mangueiras
lia a história de Robinson Crusoé,
comprida história que não acaba mais.
No meio-dia branco de luz uma voz que aprendeu
a ninar nos longes da senzala — e nunca se esqueceu
chamava para o café.
Café preto que nem a preta velha
café gostoso
café bom.
Minha mãe ficava sentada cosendo
olhando para mim:
— Psiu … Não acorde o menino.
Para o berço onde pousou um mosquito.
E dava um suspiro … que fundo!
Lá longe meu pai campeava
no mato sem fim da fazenda.
E eu não sabia que minha história
era mais bonita que a de Robinson Crusoé.
CHILDHOOD
My father rode off on his horse to the fields.
My mother sat in a chair and sewed.
My little brother slept.
And I, on my own among the mango trees,
read the story of Robinson Crusoe.
A long story that never ends.
In the white light of noon, a voice that learned lullabies
in shanties from the slave days and never forgot them
called us for coffee.
Coffee as black as the old black maid,
pungent coffee,
good coffee.
My mother, still sitting there sewing,
looked at me:
“Shhh … Don’t wake the baby.”
Then at the crib where a mosquito had landed.
She uttered a sigh … how deep!
Far away my father was riding
in the ranch’s endless pasture.
And I didn’t know that my story
was more beautiful than Robinson Crusoe’s.
LAGOA
Eu não vi o mar.
Não sei se o mar é bonito,
não sei se ele é bravo.
O mar não me importa.
Eu vi a lagoa.
A lagoa, sim.
A lagoa é grande
e calma também.
Na chuva de cores
da tarde que explode
a lagoa brilha
a lagoa se pinta
de todas as cores.
Eu não vi o mar.
Eu vi a lagoa …
LAKE
I never saw the sea.
I don’t know if it’s pretty,
I don’t know if it’s rough.
The sea doesn’t matter to me.
I saw the lake.
Yes, the lake.
The lake is large
and also calm.
The rain of colors
from the exploding afternoon
makes the lake shimmer
makes it a lake painted
by every color.
I never saw the sea.
I saw the lake …
NO MEIO DO CAMINHO
No meio do caminho
tinha uma pedra
tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho
tinha uma pedra
no meio do caminho tinha uma pedra.
Nunca me esquecerei desse acontecimento
na vida de minhas retinas tão fatigadas.
Nunca me esquecerei que no meio do caminho
tinha uma pedra
tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho
no meio do caminho tinha uma pedra.
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD
In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
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