Daddy, buy me the International Library of Famous Literature
Death of the Milkman
Declaration in Court
Destruction
Disappearance of Luisa Porto
Domicile
Don’t Kill Yourself
Don’t open
Don’t write poems about what happened
Elegy
Elegy 1938
Empathetic Poem
Eternal
Family Portrait
Feeling of the World
Field of Flowers
Flight from reality
For the time being we won’t sing of love
Garden
God gave me a love when, late in the season
Green Library
Hand in Hand
How to Make a Landscape
I beg pardon for being
I feel time’s heavy hand weigh down
I have just two hands
I kiss the hand of the priest
I knocked on the doors of lost time. No one answered
I lived for some years in Itabira
I missed the streetcar and am missing
I’m Making a Song
I’m making a song
I never saw the sea
In Search of Poetry
International Symposium on Fear
In that small town
In the desert of Itabira
In the half-empty café
In the Middle of the Road
In the middle of the road there was a stone
In this city of Rio
I saw girls shouting
It happened in Rio
It’s always in the past, that orgasm
I used to consider absence a lack
I’ve earned (I’ve lost) my day
I want to know the whore
I wish I could write this
I won’t be the poet of a decrepit world
I won’t sing of loves that I don’t have
João loved Teresa who loved Raimundo
Journey Through the Family
Lake
Lesser Life
Letter
Like primitive men who devoutly hold on to the lower jawbone of their dead
Looking for What
Love
Love is a privilege of maturity
Lovers love each other cruelly
Make-believe Lullaby
Maturity, that terrible gift
May Afternoon
Meditations on the Word Man
Middle Age
Middle age unlearns
Mother, whose dress is that
Multitudinous Heart
My body’s not my body
My father rode off on his horse to the fields
My love flickers inside the marrow
Nakedness
Nausea and the Flower
One cold, uncertain hour
On the road where a god walked
O solitude of the ox in the field
Plants also suffer
Poetry can’t be communicated
Porcelain
Purification Poem
Questions
Reaching the dangerous curve of my fifties
Residue
Roll, World, Roll
Sadness in Heaven
Science Fiction
Secret
Seven-sided Poem
Social Notes
Sonnet of Missing Hope
Sponge Song
Square Dance
Story of the Dress
Swipe of the Sword
… The apartment opened
The Body’s Contradictions
The country’s short on milk
The door of truth was open
The Elephant
The House of Lost Time
The Infernal Powers
The Last Days
The Machine of the World
The Minute After
The Misinformed God
The more I live, the more I embody this truth: they don’t live except in us
The Moth
The Ox
The poet arrives at the station
The Priest Walks Down the Street
There’s also a melancholy hour in heaven
The shards of life, glued together, form a strange teacup
The Table
The Time of Love
The Ungay Science
The Voice
The Whore
The world’s not worth the world
They say that Márgara goes out at night
This family portrait is looking
This landscape? It doesn’t exist. What exists
Threesome in a Café
Truth
Unity
Verses on the Brink of Evening
We’re even, brother, you got your revenge
What can one creature among other creatures
What I’m always and anxiously looking for isn’t this or that. It’s
What noise is that on the stairs
When I was born, one of those twisted
With my scant resources
With only nakedness, its final
Woman Dressed as a Man
You Carry the World on Your Shoulders
You work without joy for a worn-out world
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) was born in a small town in Minas Gerais. While he spent most of his life working as a government bureaucrat, he regarded poetry as his true vocation, and his first book was published in 1930. During six decades of writing, his work went through many phases, transcending styles and schools while being strongly influenced by modernism. Few critics or serious readers would dispute his status as Brazil’s greatest poet. You can sign up for email updates here.
Richard Zenith lived in Brazil and France before immigrating to Portugal in 1987. He has translated the poetry of Luís de Camões, Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, and João Cabral de Melo Neto. You can sign up for email updates here.
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