by Adélia Prado
This is not to say that Prado ducks and feints like a politician or that she cultivates obliqueness. She is as far from being middle-of-the-road as she is from striking poses. Unconcerned about opinion polls or academic reviewers, she gives us her unsorted-out self and she talks straight, which is why these poems are shocking.
The construction of the poems themselves reflects Prado’s trust in the heart as the route to both mind and spirit. Form is not played with or labored over but allowed to happen. Her sense of line depends almost entirely on the breath of a phrase. Long and short lines stand side by side breathing to the rhythm of thought and association. Similarly, stanza breaks are rare. The poet feels no need to cue us when she is making a leap, no need to underline or italicise or aggrandise the shifting ground within the poem.
This way of writing entails a very different sense of completion. It is impossible to tell from where these poems begin where they will go, or from where they goes where they will end. Why, then, do they not seem arbitrary? Because for Prado neither life nor poetry is a free-for-all. If the poems seem to have no readily identifiable organising principles, they most definitely possess a recurring modus operandi, which might be described simply as a belief in the supremacy of extreme feeling. Each poem starts with a specific image or moment or question or declaration and proceeds by association or obsession, letting in everything that insists on being let in until something tips the balance and the strongest emotion wins.
Emotion is treated as an undeniable fact, in and of itself, rather than as a cause for self-evaluation or soul-searching. Feelings enter the poem with or without events to explain them; love, fear, wonder – these visit all of us. The poems grant them oxygen, allow them to wash over each other, sometimes yielding surprising results. In ‘The Mystical Rose’, for example, the childhood memory of discovering form combines with early attempts to write about her father’s death to provoke a consoling revelation: ‘I saw that words grouped a certain way / made it possible to live without / the things they described.’ What the poems present, and what determines how they are presented, is the process of how one emotional event takes precedence over another, how life is made of interruptions and reversals, how healing occurs as unexpectedly as pain.
‘Who am I to organise the flight of the poem?’ was Prado’s response to my question about her way of writing. She sees poetry as open territory, open arms that refuse nothing. Each poem, then, is allowed to live its individual and multiple life without setting out to prove a point, provide a final solution, or better the previous one. A poem about sex is likely to touch at least fleetingly on faith and loss and aging. The poem merely (merely!) tumbles out as a newborn baby does, twisting and turning, perhaps, along the way, but spilling out whole.
Prado uses this image of the newborn to describe what she does with the poem once it has landed. Revision, she says, takes the form of cleaning away the placenta and the ‘cheese’, the bloody evidence of the process of birth, until all that is left is the infant itself, to stun us with its separate self as well as its inborn relation to all who tumbled out before.
Choosing the Children
This edition includes all the poems included in The Alphabet in the Park (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), drawn from Prado’s first three collections, and those in Ex-Voto (Tupelo Press, 2013), taken from the subsequent three. Selecting which poems to include was at times as difficult and heartrending as I imagine it would be to decide which of many perhaps not equally lovable but equally deserving children to adopt. For the most part, I tried to follow Prado’s example, letting instinct be the guide, though there were instances where poems close to my heart had to be left out because they presented unusual obstacles in the precarious journey from Portuguese to English.
My aim in these translations has been to re-create the energy and accessibility of Prado’s voice, to make inviting, disconcerting poems in English that express the urgent rage and delight of the originals. Occasionally this has entailed bending or even changing an image; at times it has meant accepting the impossibility of finding a word or phrase in English that carries with it all the connotations of the corresponding phrase in Brazilian Portuguese, and, instead, trying to add those layers of meaning elsewhere in the poem.
During the time we spent together in 1985, Prado not only patiently answered my innumerable questions (as she has continued to over the decades since), but was also interested in understanding what this business of bringing her poems to another language involved. A few days after I first arrived, she brought out the recent issue of American Poetry Review that contained thirteen of my translations – her first publication in English. As irrepressibly dead serious and mischievous as she is in her poems, she smiled and confessed that she understood not a word, and wondered if I would be willing to paraphrase them back into Portuguese without reference to the originals. In addition to some gasps of delight at what I had done, there was anger, or at least consternation, at places where I had opted to stray from the literal, from the image as she had conceived it.
Several days later, in the middle of reading a poem of mine in Portuguese translation alongside my paraphrase of the original, she burst out: ‘But this isn’t what you intended at all here! He translated the metaphor literally, and it just doesn’t work the same way in Portuguese!’ At that point, our collaboration reached a new level.
Our thirty-year-long conversation about poetry has skipped and wandered and catapulted all over – just as Prado’s poems do – but we keep circling back to her belief that metaphor is the guardian of reality, that faith, dream, and emotion are as real, if not more real, than the water glass on the table between us. We talk about the translator as an actor ‘interpreting’ a text for a larger audience than those who speak the author’s idiom. Her answer to the question of what is the most important thing to keep in mind as I ‘act out’ her poems is steadfast: ‘Be faithful to the emotion that generated the original. Let yourself get carried away, but don’t be clever; re-create feelings, not words.’
I share with Adélia Prado the belief that truth resides in the body. The mind must have its say, but, first and last, follow the heart. I have tried in these translations to be true to the insatiable size of the author’s desire.
ELLEN DORÉ WATSON
1990 /2014
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This edition reprints Ellen Doré Watson’s translations of Adélia Prado’s poems from The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1990) and Ex-Voto (Tupelo Press, 2013), with the kind permission of both publishers. The original poems were published in these editions in Brazil: Bagagem (Baggage, 1976), O coração disparado (The Headlong Heart, 1978), Terra de Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross, 1981), O Pelicano (The Pelican, 1987), A Faca no Peito (Knife in the Chest, 1988), and Oráculos do Maio (Oracles of May, 1999).
*
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Adélia Prado (and to her husband José de Freitas) for unstinting hospitality and patience over the years as they helped me to get inside her poems; for welcoming me into their extended family; and for becoming a part of mine, as the god-parents of my daughter Adelia Doré Jenkins.
Fervent thanks are also due to the many poet friends who have encouraged and advised me in this work, chief among them my poet sister Barbara Ras. The time and space afforded by fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo were also crucial to the completion of these translations. [EDW]
FROM
Baggage
(1976)
Dysrhythmia
Old people spit with absolutely no finesse
and bicycles bully traffic on the sidewalk.
The unknown poet waits for criticism
and reads his verses three times a day
like a monk with his book of hours.
The brush got old and no longer brushes.
Right now what’s important
is to untangle the hair.
/> We give birth to life between our legs
and go on talking about it till the end,
few of us understanding:
it’s the soul that’s erotic.
If I want, I put on a Bach aria
so I can feel forgiving and calm.
What I understand of God is His wrath;
there’s no other way to say it.
The ball thumping against the wall annoys me,
but the kids laugh, contented.
I’ve seen hundreds of afternoons like today.
No agony, just an anxious impatience:
something is going to happen.
Destiny doesn’t exist.
It’s God we need, and fast.
Successive Deaths
When my sister died, I cried a great deal
and was quickly consoled. There was a new dress
and a thicket in the back yard where I could exist.
When my mother died, I was consoled more slowly.
There was a newfound uneasiness:
my breasts were shaped like two hillocks
and I was quite naked.
I crossed my arms over them when I cried.
When my father died, I was never again consoled.
I hunted up old pictures, visited acquaintances,
relatives, who would remind me of how he talked,
his way of pursing his lips and of being certain.
I imitated the way his body curled
in his last sleep and repeated the words
he said when I touched his feet:
‘Never mind, they’re all right.’
Who will console me?
My breasts fulfilled their promise
and the thicket where I exist
is the genuine burning bush of memory.
Vigil
Nocturnal terror lopped off my hand
just as I reached for my nightclothes.
I stopped in the middle of the room, a pool
of clearheadedness so vast,
all at once everything turned incomprehensible.
The shape of the bed, so square and expectant,
the saw handle sticking out of nowhere, my nakedness
in transit between door and chair.
Utterly legible and inscrutable: a cloudless meadow
of sun and air, the children’s laughter in a field
shredded by a tractor, the silver wedding anniversary
of the man who is always saying: ‘What did I do wrong
that I feel like being dead?’
A family built its house upon the hill;
if I so much as move my foot it will coming tumbling down.
The Spirit of God, setting in motion what pleases Him,
moves the young lady (I swear she’s not a poet)
to say, full of grace: ‘Wouldn’t it be just too funny
to see the President suck an orange!’
The Spirit of God is merciful,
He’s going to abandon me so I can rest,
He’s going to let me sleep.
With Poetic Licence
When I was born, one of those svelte angels
who plays a trumpet proclaimed:
this one will carry a flag.
A heavy load for a woman,
even nowadays such a bashful species.
I accept the subterfuges that fit;
no need to lie.
I’m not so ugly that I can’t get married,
I think Rio’s a real knockout, and –
well, yes and no, I believe in childbirth without pain.
But what I feel, I write. I make good on the prophecies.
I establish lineages, whole kingdoms
(pain is not bitterness).
My sadness has no pedigree
but my longing for joy –
its root goes back a thousand generations.
It’s man’s curse to be lame in life,
woman’s to unfold. I do.
Before Names
I don’t care about the word, that commonplace.
What I want is the grand chaos that spins out syntax,
the obscure birthplace of ‘of’, ‘otherwise’,
‘nevertheless’, and ‘how’, all those inscrutable
crutches I walk on.
Who understands language understands God,
Whose Son is the Word. It kills you to understand.
Words only hide something deeper, deaf and dumb,
something invented to be silenced.
In moments of grace, rare as they are,
you’ll be able to snatch it out: a live fish
in your bare hand.
Pure terror.
Lesson
It was a shadowy yard, walled high with stones.
The trees held early apples, dark
wine-coloured skin, the perfected flavor of things
ripe before their time.
Clay jugs sat alongside the wall.
I ate apples and sipped the purest water,
knowing the outside world had stopped dead from heat.
Then my father appeared and tweaked my nose,
and he wasn’t sick and hadn’t died, either;
that’s why he was laughing, blood
stirring in his face again,
he was hunting for ways to spend this happiness:
where’s my chisel, my fishing pole,
what happened to my snuffbox, my coffee cup?
I always dream something’s taking shape,
nothing is ever dead.
What seems to have died fertilises.
What seems motionless waits.
Guide
Poetry will save me.
I feel uneasy saying this, since only Jesus
is Saviour, as a man inscribed
(of his own free will)
on the back of the souvenir crucifix he brought home
from a pilgrimage to Congonhas.
Nevertheless, I repeat: Poetry will save me.
It’s through poetry that I understand the passion
He had for us, dying on the cross.
Poetry will save me, as the purple of flowers
spilling over the fence
absolves the girl her ugly body.
In poetry the Virgin and the saints approve
my apocryphal way of understanding words
by their reverse, my decoding the town crier’s message
by means of his hands and eyes.
Poetry will save me. I won’t tell this to the four winds,
because I’m frightened of experts, excommunication,
afraid of shocking the fainthearted. But not of God.
What is poetry, if not His face touched
by the brutality of things?
Head
Whenever I had an attack of nerves
I would refuse to walk under electric wires,
I was afraid of rain, of lightning,
and I got nauseous just thinking about certain animals
which I won’t mention (or I’d have to wash out my mouth with ashes).
I would pick up every fruit peel in sight.
Now that I’m cured, I have a life and so much more:
already I can touch the wires when the switch is off,
and I got myself this plastic rain cape
which I wear day and night, even when I’m sleeping.
If it happens to rain, no problem.
I don’t bother any more about fruit peels, even banana or mango;
let somebody else take care of them;
the signs I put up all over – ‘BEWARE’ –
work just fine. It’s really quite charming
for a bishop to have apostolic zeal.
I never tire of explaining this to the pastor
of my diocese, but he doesn’t understand,
he merely says: ‘Oh, dear. Dear, dear’;
he thinks it’s women’s lib, he thinks
faith is way up the
re and here below
there’s only bad taste. It’s awful, just awful –
no one understands. I used to scream continuously
when I had an attack of nerves.
Two Ways
From inside geometry
God looks at me and I am terrified.
He makes the incubus descend on me.
I yell for Mama,
I hide behind the door
where Papa hangs his dirty shirt;
they give me sugar water to calm me,
I speak the words of prayers.
But there’s another way:
if I sense He’s peeking at me,
I think about brands of cigarettes,
I think about a man in a red cape going out
in the middle of the night to worship the Blessed Sacrament,
I think about hand-rolled tobacco, train whistles, a farm woman
with a basket of pequi fruit all aroma and yellow.
Before He knows it, there I am in His lap.
I pull on His white beard.
He throws me the ball of the world,
I throw it back.
Praise for a Colour
Yellow infers from itself papayas and their pulp,
penetrable yellow.
At noon: bees, sweet stinger and honey.
Whole eggs and their nucleus, the ovum.
That interior thing, minuscule.
From the blackness of the blind viscera,
hot and yellow, the minuscule speck,
the luminous grain.
Yellow spreads and smooths, a downpour
of the pure light of its name,
tropicordial.
Yellow turns on, turns up the heat,
