Selected Poems


from Poemas
1925-1929, published 1930


The Boy Without a Past

Intricate monsters never
peopled my childhood dreams
for saci-pereré never hurt a fly
the little rascal kept to wild maxixes
in the world of wooden dolls
carved by my uncle who could do anything.

All mãe-d’água worried about
was bathing tidily in the swimming pool
on the ranch without a shower.

At night I went all the way to the back of the yard
to see if a giant with three hundred arms would appear
and take me away in a sack,
but I didn’t believe a bit of it.

I stayed without tradition customs legends
before the world
I laze in the hammock
rocked by every nation.





The Bank Employee’s Modinha

I’m as sad as a pharmacist’s apprentice.
I’m almost as sad as a man with sideburns.
I spend all day dreaming of female attention,
but all I hear is clacking typewriters.

It’s raining outside; Floriano’s statue gets more lovely all the time.
So many girls my whole life long!
And me lining up other people’s fortunes on paper.
If I had all those thousands I’d set imagination’s
wheel rolling down the world’s ways.
And those clients doing
nothing with their thousands!
Hatching other thousands — and they’ll do nothing with them, too.

If the Manager had my imagination
the Bank would disappear
and I’d be somewhere else.





Man at Work

The inventor of machines that change life on earth
Works in his raw room of reinforced concrete.
So many dynamos, pistons and cylinders pump in that head
That the inventor can’t hear the soft sounds
Of tormented souls
Bumping into his equipment





Dead Man

Man laid out on the table.
The black suit makes him seem bigger,
Four candlesticks symmetrically arranged
Erect an imaginary tomb in the poor room.

The family portraits in plastic frames
Rub their hands in glee.

The polished brogan
Displays its new price tag.
The poor neighbor kids
Take a picture of the brogan.





Cantiga de Malazarte

I’m the eyes penetrating the layers of the world,
walking under skin and disrupting all dreams.
I scorn nothing I’ve ever seen,
everything’s etched on my skull forever.
I touch flowers, souls, sounds, movements,
rip tiles off houses clutching the earth,
suck the smell out of sleeping girls’ bodies.
I uproot every consciousness,
crack pavements with my steps,
walk the four corners of life.
I soothe the vagabond hero and glorify the defeated soldier.
I can’t love anybody because I’m love itself,
but I’ve caught myself bowing to cats
and begging a beggar’s pardon.
I’m Creation’s attendant spirit;
I’m possessed by every soul I meet.
Multiple, awry, distant as hell,
nothing keeps me on the ways of the world.





The Two Sides

On this side is my body
is dream
is my girlfriend in the window
is the street shouting light and movement
is my love so slow
is the world knocking at my memory
is the way to work.

On the other side is my life’s other lives living
is deep thought waiting for me in the parlor
is my true love waiting with flowers in her hand
and death, the columns of order and disorder.





Map

I get glued into time, my living soul’s
crammed into this clunky body. I’m
limited to the north by my senses, to the south by my dread,
to the east by St. Paul the Apostle, to the west by my education.
There I was all nebulous, roiling away, a fluid, and
then I become conscious of the earth, start walking like everyone else
and get nailed to a cross in my one and only life.
Highschool and rage. I get a number, can’t stand the hierarchy,
get a sign hung on me, Man, I start laughing, walking, in fits and starts,
I dance, laugh and cry, I’m here and there, all out of whack,
loving everybody and nobody, battling with spirits of the air,
someone on earth waves me over, I don’t know
what’s good or evil anymore.
My head’s flying over the bay, I’m suspended in ether, in anguish,
reeling with lives, smells, motions, thoughts,
and I don’t believe in any technique.
I’m with my ancestors, teetering on Spanish sand,
so sometimes I’ll rush around in the street, fighting with imaginary characters,
then go hang around with my crazy uncles, we’re cracking up,
in the farm in the country, watching sunflowers in the garden,
I’m on the other side of the world, a hundred years from now, inciting populations...
I’m desperate because I can’t be present to every act of life.
Where can I hide my face? The world sambas in my head.
Triangles, stars, night, women walking,
omens blooming in the air, all these weights and movements fascinate me.
The world’s going to change its face.
Death’s about to reveal the real meaning of things.

I’ll walk on air.
I’ll be in every birth and every agony,
I’ll nestle in every chink in the body of the bride,
in sick artists’ heads, in the heads of revolutionaries.
It’ll all become transparent:
volcanoes of hatred, explosions of love, other faces appearing on earth,
the wind blowing in from eternity will stop in mid-step,
I’ll dance in thunderstorms, kiss seven women,
tumble in the ocean’s canjerês, embrace souls in the air,
sneak into the four corners of the world.

Desperate souls, I love you. Dissatisfied, burning souls.
I hate these people who fool themselves,
play pin-the-tail-on-life, these “practical” men...
Long live St. Francis and all those other suicides, suicided lovers,
soldiers who lost the battle, really motherly mothers,
womanly women, the really insanely insane.
Long live everybody transfigured by perfection or long fasting...
Long live me, who founded the state of transcendent welter in the world.
Prey of the man I used to be twenty years ago,
of my few love-affairs,
of life on burning plains, deserts quivering under love’s fingers,
it’s all rhythm in a poet’s brain. Ascribing to no theory,

I’m in the air,
in every criminal’s, every desperate lover’s soul,
in my simple room by Botafogo Beach,
in the thoughts of the men who move the world,
not happy, not sad, a walking two-eyed flame,
forever transforming.





Timeless Poems


— Equilibrium —
To Ismael Nery

Maria do Rosário,
it’s been five years since another man led you to the altar.
For five years
life’s been waiting deep in your well-made belly.
Your definitive beauty depends
on the shadow of the child you don’t have yet.


— Relativity of a Woman Loved —

I love you with a brutal force I don’t quite understand.
I love you almost as much as myself.
But what a pity you’re not my daughter, too.
What a pity you’re not my daughter, my sister and my mother,
all at the same time.


— Dilation —

Daughter,
My body stayed bigger than your body.
My soul stayed bigger than your soul.
I was born another time with your birth.


— Grandpa Discovers Analogies —

The head of my dead daughter-in-law
is on my grand-daughter’s body.
Sometimes my son looks at his daughter’s body
and sees his wife’s head again
and thinks of his wife’s death
in both their lives
at the daughter’s birth,
on the wedding night,
the wedding procession,
the first meeting.


— The Mediator —

Family gathering.

They’re arguing. Bitter conversations.

The mother’s belly grows in shadow.
Everyone’s waiting for the birth of the child
to share the rhythms between them.
(After the birth there will be no place for fights.)


— Parallel Transformations —

He separated from his wife
because he noticed her shapes changing, little by little:
But his shapes were also changing, little by little.


— Affinities —

The dressmaker, that tall, young, pretty girl
with wide hips and breasts
bursting under her smock
(deep eyes a shadow on her face),
died.
And now her husband spends all day in the bedroom staring at a mannequin.


— Integral —

I married my wife
and her whole past.
I’m the father of my children,
of the child she had with an old lover
and of the children I can already see walking in the air.

— Confession —

I killed my wife.
I killed her.
(I hated her with a hate bigger
than the love I loved her with).
But I didn’t kill the mother of my children.
So I always have her picture on me.


— Parallel Temptations —

The Spirit transports me to a very high place
and shows me your low-cut body.
To kill that man,
to walk in the dark-skinned length of his body!
Angels transport me to the highest place in the world
and all they show me is your low-cut head thinking about me.





from O Visionário
1930-1933, published 1941


Solidarity

I’m joined by legacy of spirit and blood
To the martyr, the murderer, the anarchist
I’m joined
To couples on earth and in the air,
To the peddler on the corner,
To priest, beggar, woman of the night,
Mechanic, poet, soldier,
Saint and devil,
Builded in my image and semblance.





Final Judgment of the Eyes

Your eyes will be judged
With much less clemency
Than the rest of your body.
Your eyes settle too much
On breasts and hips,
They rest too little
On other eyes here
In this world of God.
They seldom rest
On the hands of the poor
And on the bodies of the sick.
Your eyes will suffer
More than the rest of your body.
They won’t be able to see
The purest creatures
In the other world.





Cry of the Up-To-Date Poet

I was given one body, only
One! to silently support
So many disunited souls
That bump into each other,
From so many diverse ideas;
One was born long before
I appeared in the world,
Another was born with this body,
Another is being born now,
There are others, I don't even really know them,
They're my natural children,
Delirious in me,
Waiting to change places,
Each one wants something,
I'm going to lose my rest forever.
Oh God, if you exist,
Unite my clashing souls.





Pre-History

Mama dressed in lace
Played piano in chaos.
One night she opened her wings,
Weary with so much sound,
Teetered on the blue,
So dizzy she no longer looked
At me, at anybody
And fell into the family album.





Mirages of the Century

Machines hurl propellors into space
Where future gods
Are born in a crush of rays and hips.
The neon annunciation leads all
In adoration of the worker’s daughter
Dead tonight.





Son of the Century

I'll never ride a bike again
Or chat up curly-haired
Girls at the gate
Goodbye Blue Danube waltz,
Goodbye lazy afternoons
Goodbye pure love
I threw the Virgin's medal in the fire
I'm not strong enough to shout a big shout
I've fallen on the floor of the twentieth century
Justice-hungry multitudes
Subjected with poison gasses
Wait for me outside
It's time for barricades
It's time for firing squads
The living seek revenge
The mineral vegetable dead seek revenge
It's time for widespread protest
It's time for flights of destruction
It's time for barricades, for firing squads
Hunger desire anxiety lost dreams
Every country's misery unites us
Angelplanes flee at a gallop
Taking the chalice of hope
Firm time space why have you abandoned me.





from Tempo e Eternidade
1934, published 1935


Five Psalms

1.

My spirit yearns for the coming of the bride,
My spirit yearns for the glory of the Church,
My spirit yearns for eternal nuptials
With a muse made ready for a thousand generations.
I’ll have to throw myself into God as into a river
Because I can’t hold myself to the limits of the world.
Give me too much bread and I’ll be sad.
Give me too much luxury and wealth and I’ll be even sadder.
Why solve the problem of the machine
If my soul flies above poetry itself?
I only want to rest in God’s immensity.

2.

O God of mine and everybody,
What have I done in the world till now
Except call on your appearance,
Except despair because I’m dust?
Dilate my vision,
Mightily, dilate my soul,
Make me relate all things to your center,
Make me appreciate all forms base and scorned,
Make me love what I don’t love.
Everything you created in the universe
Is the division of a vast unity
In different spaces and epochs.
Unite me to everything within you
And shine upon us outside time, all of us
Hoping for your divine parousia.

3.

I proclaim you great and admirable
Not because you made the stars to preside by night
And the sun to preside by day;
Not because you made the earth and all contained within it,
The fruit of its fields, its flowers, cinemas and locomotives;
Not because you made the sea and all it holds,
Its animals, plants, submarines and sirens:
I proclaim you eternally great and admirable
Because you make your self tiny in the Eucharist,
So much so that anyone, no matter how fragile, can contain you.

4.

O you who sent a seraphim
To purify Isaiah’s lips with a live coal,
Cleanse my heart of all impure desire.
Imprint me with your cross ignorant of limits.
Make me refuse all worldly knowledge.
Quench my enchantment with temporal conquests
And inspire me so that I might inspire others.
Deign to come down, at every moment, into my soul.
Factories, palaces, grass huts will fall,
Museums, theaters, churches and libraries will fall
With the poets, false saviors of the world, bosses and employees;
But an angel with wings uniting the universe from edge to edge
Will bear your words till the end of time, for all eternity.

5.

From the beginning I’ve been unimpressed
By massive exterior grandeur:
A skyscraper is the same as a brick.
Every machine ends up in rust.
Mankind’s inventions are transformed and lost.

I reach ecstasy only before divine creations,
Before Your mysteries, Your lucidity, and Your poems.
O immortal soul, thirst and essence of love!
O Eucharist, one God multiplied!
O flesh revived into eternal life!
O supernatural communication of the faithful!
O tangency of the invisible,
Obscure presentiment of Divine personage!
Poet, assimilate the substance presiding over the ages.





The Poet's Calling

I wasn't born in the beginning of this century:
I was born on eternity's plane,
I was born from a thousand superimposed lives
I was born from tenderness unfurled a thousand strong
I've come to learn good and evil
And to separate evil from good.
I've come to love and to be unloved.
I've come to ignore the great and comfort the small.
I haven't come to build my own wealth
Or to destroy the wealth of others.
I've come to quell the formidable weeping
Previous generations vouchsafed me.
I've come to experience doubt and contradiction.

I've come to suffer the influences of time
And to affirm the eternal beginning from whence I came.
I've come to hand out inspiration to the muses.
I've come to announce that the voice of humankind
Will muffle the voices of siren and machine,
And that the essential word of Jesus Christ
Will tame the words of boss and worker.

I've come to know God my creator little by little,
Because If I saw him suddenly, unprepared, I would die.





Filiation

I am of Eternity's race.
I was created at the beginning
And I unfolded in many generations
Through space and time.
I feel myself above flags,
Trampling the heads of chieftains.
I go on sea, on earth, on air.
I am of Eternity's race
Of love that will unite all humankind:
Come to me, poetry's orphans,
Let us weep over the mutilated world.





Essentialist Poem
to Aníbal Machado

The predawn of the love of the first man
The portrait of my mother at one
The film descriptive of my birth
The afternoon of the death of my last wife
The crumbling of mountains, the stanching of rivers
The drawing of eternity's curtains
The meeting with Eve combing her hair
The pressure of my ancestor's hands
The end of the idea of property, flesh and time
And permanence in the absolute and in the immutable.





from A Poesia em Pánico
1936-1937, published 1938


The Sphinx

O God
I was born to be deciphered by you.
One foot in limbo, heart for the evening star, head in the Church,
I’ve been waiting on your answer since the beginning of the world.
And you were born for me:
With your medallion on my breast, a memento of my origin,
I run gasping through this desert.
The definitive word must gush from your lips
At least at the moment of my death.





Spiritual Poem

I feel myself one of God’s fragments,
As I am a remnant of a root
A little water in the sea,
The strewn arm of a constellation.

Matter thinks by order of God,
Transforms and evolves by order of God.
Beautiful, varied matter
Is one of the visible forms of the invisible.
Christ, of the sons of man, you’re the perfect one.

In the Church there are legs, breasts, bellies and hair
Everywhere, even on the altars.
There are great material forces on earth in the sea and in the air
Interlacing, marrying, reproducing
A thousand versions of divine thought.
Matter is strong and absolute.
There’s no poetry without it.





from Mundo Enigma
1942, published 1945


Nature

Contemplate these washed-out mountains
And the light that falls in slanting dance.
Everything comes from so ancient a world
Where we misfit fragments of photographs will meet:
Clippings from visual thoughts
And a love unwilling to cooperate with death:
— Vast bird pecking washed-out mountains.





from Poesia Liberdade
1943-1945, published 1947


Dialectical Poem

1.

All forms are found still in sketch,
Everything lives in transformation:
But the universe marches onward
To perfect architecture.

From profane trees
We draw forth the vast ancient lyre:
Its secret music
Belongs to the ear, to the heart of all.
Each new poet born
Adds another string.

2.

A life begun 1,000 years ago
Can find its complement, its fullness
In another life that flourishes today.

Nothing can be interrupted
Without breaking the unity of the world.

In the beginning was created a seed
To unfold in multiple planes.
Our sighs, our anxieties, our sorrows
Are engraved on the field of the infinite
By the most supreme spirit presiding over the generations.

3.

For many, all that’s left is hell.
What’s theirs in the monstrous share of life
If not anguish without nobility and the soul-plague.
They’ll never hear music bloom from the rustling of trees,
Never watch continuous annunciation
Or the continuous birth of beautiful forms.
They never could see the night come without elements of terror,
They go on guiding punishment and the shadow of their acts,
They eat the dust and drink their own sweat,
They’ve never bathed in an open stream.
And all the while transfiguration precedes death.
Each must assume it in flesh and spirit
For happiness to be complete and definite.

4.

You have to know your own abyss
And keep polishing the candelabra that lights it.

Everything in the universe marches on, and it marches to hope:
Our existence is a vast expectation
Where beginning and end meet.
The earth must be portioned among all
And restored in time to its ancient harmony.
Everything marches to perfect architecture:
Dawn is collective.





The Century’s Tunnel

I

Under the sky of zinc and tremor
Walk prisoners, muffled drums:
Night’s gauntlet weighs down
Upon their shoulder blades, their communicant dreams.

The Erynies, most ancient leeches of the people, muffled drums,
Walk, step by step,
Presenting arms of hatred, ruthless fists,
All flesh is offered up to unclothed fright,
Stone castles are coming undone
As heroes shake the armor-plated cane.
The Furies reproduce by night
And by morning we find the open
Womb-rose.

II

Under the sky of dread and tremor
Childhood’s statue is shot with arrows
By descendants of the subterranean idols
That consecrate the dancing sword.
They curse bread and wine,
Shred the rosebush daybook.

The blind fence in a tunnel and
Build their own tombs.

Under the sky of dread and tremor
Clandestine men, shrouded drums, walk by.





The Christ of the Cold Stone

The Christ of the cold stone
Sat here up front
With his shoulder’s open sore.

The devil’s world falls to the ground.
The Morningchrist
Sat on the cold stone
O cold I feel by the lament of the dead,
O cold of the hunger of others,
O cold of extreme dejection,
— Of Christ’s dejection in me, in you, in all,
On the cold stone that leaves out
Our souls, that mauls.





Something
To Maria da Saudade

That form
Seldom reveals.
That lives without evidence.
That the violet dreams.
That crystal contains
In its early childhood.





Chaos’ Window

1

Everything happens
In an Egypt of aerial corridors.
Wait in a lampless
Gallery for Someone
To scrape the ‘cello
— Or your heart?
Blue of war

2

Embroglios phone in,
Laments phone in,
Useless meetings,
Yawns and remorses.

Ah! Somebody call consolation,
The pure dew and
The crystal carriage.

3

You’ve never carried
Pianos or stones,
But in your soul

— Nobody recalls,
But ancestral beaches heard —
The piano carriers’ chant goes on,
The stone carriers’ chant goes on.

4

The sky falls out of doves.
Echos of a band fly
Away from the foundlings’ home.

You’ll never be an ancestor
Because you had no children:
You’ll always be the poets’ future.

In the distance the diminished sea
Billows innocently.

5

Terror’s harmony
When the soul destroys pardon
And the cycle of flowers closes
In particular and general:
No flute-sound,
Not even a Greek temple
On a blue hill
Would decide the recuperative act.

Hunger, littoral without choruses,
Death’s hard birth.
Earth opens bloody,
Abandons white Abel,
Hidden from God.

6

Childhood comes from eternity.
Then, only magnificent death
— Gag and muzzle’s destruction:

And maybe you already glimpsed it
Playing with your top
Or dismounting your beetle.

Balanced between two eternities,
Astonishing hunger
For love and music:
Raw sweetness,
The last free passage.

We only see heaven from behind.

7

This desire for obscurity
falls from the pyramid’s shadows.

Enigma, innocence, barbaric,
Birds galloping the elements.
Equestrine clouds
Burst in the deep sky.
Where is justice’s communicant arms,
Where are her paratroopers?
Cuirassed forms watch over
The sabotage of harps.

8

What are they all waiting for?
The wind of nocturnal crimes
Destroys august harvests.
Harsh wild waters
Fertilize cemeteries.
Mothers pour
The ghosts of another war
From their bellies.

No sign of alliance
Over the annihilated table.

Purple waves,
Rise out of man.

9

Soul’s crest,
Ancient future tradition:
?If the soul has no crest
Can it resist the Destroyer?

10

Velocity opposes
Essential nudity.
To deserve the breaking of Seals
You’ll weave your crown of thorns,
Or you’ll be left lying around,
All alone, with the corpses of your books.

11

Pendulum marking
Disillusion and solitude,
Give up your place to the pipes of the sovereign
Organ surpassing time:
Humanity’s pulsation
Has sought between boredom and tears,
From beginning to end,
With its miserable flesh,
Among bloody necklaces,
Between uncertainty and abyss,
Fatigue and pleasure.
Eternal peace and delight.
Beyond ocean, beyond air,
From beginning to end,
Beyond combat,
Rocking cradles,
Serene mixed choruses
Out of deep hope and white harmonies
Keep rising.





from Contemplação de Ouro Preto
1949-1950, published 1954

Crucifix of Ouro Preto
to my sister Virgínia Eucharis

Crucifix fix fix,
Crucifix, God stilled
So I might fix you,
God occluded on your cross,
Between you and me, O God,
All the times I’ve rounded you,
All the gazes, anxieties,
Mute tortures, silences,
Helplessness and aridity,
Crucifix fix fix,
Passion’s purple Christ,
Pierced, transfixed,
Wounded, blugeoned,
Bespat; abandoned
By compassion’s Father,
Crucifix fix fix,
God fixed in love,
Human God, Divine God,
God Occluded on your cross,
Crucifix fix fix,
Our brother Christ Jesus.





Siciliana
1954-1955, published 1959


Sicilian Atmosphere

Trinacria, three legs, triangle:
Sicilian soil, banged
By the sun, rings.

Sex explodes. Omens breathe
The god at the heights:
So many women in black
At the wake of their own youth.

Oh work, rough life
For man, the horse of man,
And rough for the horse.

The temple of august signs
And lucid architecture
Marks the distance of the real:

Earth occupies the sky.
Etna’s fierce form,
And Stromboli’s, dominate.

The center of the earth erupts in
Cactus, jasmine, sulfur.
Auguries breathe the air,
The barbarous ocean and its gongs.
Trinacria, three legs, triangle.





Temple at Segesta

Because severe and naked, you disdain the superfluous,
Because wind and untouched birds choose you,
You uphold solitude, you maintain the space
Barbaric humankind constrains.
About your columns
The free sky’s blue gravitates.

Music come to us from number and from peace,
Music come to us from organized space.
The number-god is favorable to space,
And by the sequence of rhythm
Time’s unity is reconstructed.

I’ve come to Segesta with lucidity and love
To gather what death never sealed,
Sounding the oracle that is you yourself,
Your lines of force and calm stone.

The diagonal spirit accepts your
Break of the anguish of the origins:
In sharpened Segestan light
Form and solitude are fitted.





The Ruins at Selinunte

Corresponding to star-fragments,
Wayward bodies of giants,
Forms elaborated in the future,
Tumbling, severe,
Over the sea in a blue line, the ruins,
Tumbling, severe,
Compose — doric — the wide sea.
Rising, severe,
Self-seeking, -organizing,
In theatrical form they call forth —
Vertically, horizontally — the god.

Our human measure:
— Unmeasured measure —
Is expressed at Selinunte:
To catastrophe, searching
For survival, we are born.





Leaving Cefalu

You stay in stone and horizon.
It’s sad to leave your strength
Planted on the hard cliff
Enlarged by the vertical sun.
You breathe in that grandeur
Coming to us from water, from light
And from beaten earth,
From fish. We go with you
On the cosmic wheel, and on the wind.
Do not adorn yourself for the cult:
Poor and solemn Cefalu
Planted on the hard cliff,
Your rite is ancient in origin:
It comes from the raw unveiled soul
And so fishermen love you
With that strength, that graveness
Extracted from your rock
Enlarged by the vertical sun.





Meditation In Agrigento

Who could tame our empty force,
Who could suffocate our instinct
That we might remain
In line with the line of the sky,
With these perennial columns,
With the ocean hidden down below.

Who could turn us into leaf
Or sudden lizard
Slinking under your stones,
Tenple F, serene temple F,
Architecture of reserve and peace.

To transform or not to transform, that is the problem.
To endure in memory’s farthest zone,
At the limits of desire,
Or submit to stone, do the rough work,
Learn from fieldhand or soldier.
Which is the poet’s form? The poet’s ritual?
Which is the poet’s architecture?

Mute, between capital and cactus,
The oracle subsists.
Morning gilds stones and vague names,
Agrigento contemplates me, and I go.





Song of Termini Imerese

I’ve come to Termini Imerese,
I’ll be leaving Termini Imerese.
I probe form in chaos,
I probe the nucleus of sound.

O Sicilian stone,
Sulphur, cobalt sea,
I fathomed the concrete force
Of the elements, of god.

But who disclosing the sun
Communicates earth to me?
Without death’s filter, who
Makes me absorb the blue?

I’ve come to Termini Imerese,
I’ll be leaving Termini Imerese.
I’ve turned into my image,
Am myself the oracle.





The Cloister at Monreale

Abstract and afar I found myself
In the space of twinned columns.
Eastern water
Whispers the sudden passage
From nothing into being,
And, fluid, is transformed.
If only, raising our hands,
We could return to the ancient model,
Tame the soul’s complaint.

We drink solitude,
Solitude by humankind elaborated
In light and stone
And even these flowers
Perhaps are too much.

I confront what’s gone before me:
In 1901 I was six
Million years old.
Those who sleep under gravestones,
Anticipating the future,
Saw the god remain
Since the beginning of time
In the twinned columns.





Elegy at Taormina

Blue’s double profundity
Sounds the gardens’ limit.
And descending to the earth transposes it.
On one side of the horizon Etna
Watches over the ruins of the Greek
Theater, enthroned.

Nobody consciously receives
Blue’s charisma.
Nobody exhausts the blue and its enigmas.

Armed by history, by the century,
Awaiting blue’s undoing, the bomb’s outcome,
We’ll never again distinguish
Beauty and death, those limitrophes.
Not even leaning over Taormina’s ocean.

O intolerable beauty,
O perfidious diamond,
Since initiation, none endure
In your center of contrary lights.

We live under the tragic sign,
Even when we raise bread
And wine in contentment.
O intolerable beauty
In hiding, deathless.





Palermitan Marionette

Portable woman
All metal and feather,
So genteel she doesn’t speak.
Some times she tries, but it hurts.

I take her everywhere I go,
She’s one with my ring finger.
Made of metal and feathers,
I open her when I want,
She’s held up by cloud,
But the wind’s breath hesitates
At the threshold of her knees.
I put her to my ear, and she muffles
The whirling noise
That comes from the Palermitan sky.
She brings me flowers from Villa Giulia
Or from her breasts.

In no way alone, she’s in no way
Against blue and Mount Pellegrino.

One day she’ll interpellate
With feet, hands, teeth and down:
Before her empty elaborated clarity,
Saddened by the breaking of the common line,
Opaque, I’ll die.





Palermitan Song

The horse comes and passes,
Pulls Palermo by the bellyband.
The horse comes and passes,
The Palermitan sun turns.

Springs drip and gardens,
Fountains, bitter laments,
Winds from Greece, Rome, Africa
Blow through lemon trees.

The dark oracle breathes
Words from ancient eras:
Palermo, in you violently
Will grow love of life.

History’s weft widens:
Norman light, and Byzantine,
Are brightening the arcades
Of the cloister degli Eremiti,

Communicant magnolias
— Martorana and San Cataldo —,
Monreale and Palatine
Joined by mosaic.

The horse comes plumed,
Pulls Palermo by the bellyband.
The sea opens its sails
And the greek light of its line.





Spirit and Fire

At Capo de Sant’Andrea
— Here is the sun and its sword —
A high fire spoke to me:
What comes from the center of the earth
Comes from the fearsome oracle.
Could it be some unleashed god’s
Emissary or arrow?

“I am the genius of a time past.
Born of earth and air,
I create the future synthesis
Of the age-old and the coming-to-be.
I engendered the wind-rose,
I conciliate the horizons,
They believe me a demon:
I am the communicant
Between contrary elements.
I show humankind
The chart drawn up
In primitive times.
With the prodigy of my breath
I will unite earth, God and humankind.”

Over Sicily’s belly
Here is the sun and its sword.





Royal Tombs
(Palermo Cathedral)

Death in porphyry and basalt,
Death white and scarlet, throne hanging
From stone, from subsoil, from air;
Empress Death,
Triumphant over sword, bloodless matter
And decomposed death:

Inverted sun,
Fundamental death, root of being,
Give birth to us, dishevelled princes all,
Princes all tenderness or basalt,
Gutter urchins, hidden under form,
Growing under the sign of the ash;
Give birth to us in the light, into the divine burden;
Give birth to us, all of us, Incarnation’s mannequins,
Displaced persons,
Boaters without an oar on the wide secret river,
Exhausted between not-being and coming-to-be.

Death, grand female,
I justify you; I pardon you.





Echo in Syracuse

In your oblong caverns
Arises a god
Reconstructed in echo:
Let us touch the world with voice.

Gardens that explode, latomias watch over
The physical breath of ancient death’s
Passage through Syracuse:
History marches violently over your flagstones,
Suddenly runs dry.
        Behold, the drama
        Is come undone
        Because the god ministers
        Thicketed oracles:
        But the echo is strong,
        Only it is kept
        More alive than the
        Original augury.
        Your force was extinct,
        Stony Syracuse,
        But the aerial gong,
        But the distant echo
        Reconstructed you.
        Harsh voice, double echo
        Inhabited by the god
        That yet subsists
        In humankind inhuman
                Echo.





from Tempo Espanhol
1955-1958, published 1959


Numancia

Prefiguring Guernica
And the Spanish Resistance,

A column maintained
In the null space of past days.

Hunger’s hard memory
Endures in the terrene landscape,

The lesson Spain receives
In her blood and consumes her.





The Sun of Granada
In memory of Manuel Altolaguirre

The sun of Granada aspires
To abstract architectures.

The sun of Granada gyres
Lindajara’s body.

The sun of Granada inspires
Gypsy blood and rhythm.

The sun of Granada’s eyes
On Spain’s two faces.





Gardens of Generalife
To Rafael Alberti

Here’s the high song of the Alhambra,
The objective chant of Arabia,
Water’s own judicature.
Spain’s liquid chant.

Wind’s live angles.
Unresting water,
Long slender water.
The touch of water rings

Moorish towers.
Water made of sound. Syncopated,
Gushing from Granada.
Water observing its rite.

Sun-, magnolia-water.
Water’s continual song
Dictates time in the moorish quarter.
Red tower water.

I see the water’s roads
In the center of Generalife.
Never ending water.
Cold fiery water.





from Convergência
1963-1966, published 1970


Graffito on a Chair

Chair                with arm surgery
Basic as a bone

No armchair with metal feet by
Knoll
Or designed by some sub-Moholy-Nagy
With a didascalic note

Before this chair was for real
Wooden chair
Anonymous
Inanimate
Unanimous
Quadruped                        chair

You’re not waiting on any
Particular “illumination,”
No goddess’s rump or shoulderblade

Who’d bang you — gong —
Not even some van Gogh
To make you suddenly
Eternal

Rome 1964





Graffito in Meknès

Your open spaces,
I’ll breathe them, Meknès:

I feel the Bomb breathing
Over my shoulder, Meknès

Europe’s breath clotted
With naval bases, Meknès

With aerial terrestrial bases
Planted partout, Meknès.

Meknès: camels drag
Time’s wagon.

Oh Meknès millidental
Tanks will prowl

Meknès your veiled ladies
Will give birth to terror and anguish

Oh Meknès they’ll
Strangle your spaces.

     •

Meknès on your wasted shoulder
My hand will come to rest
Without paper, ink, language,
Dust of the letter, Meknès.

Meknès, 1963





Graffito for Vladimir Mayakovsky

A singing cosmonaut circles the cosmos
While I unshave my beard.

The tenth muse builds itself
Economy directed Unatotal
That should move the new man

In the laboratories the future
Direction of the winds draw plans
Energy extracts from the algae
The sun operates itself

Eternity electrifies
Reversible

Meanwhile

THE PLANET IS NOT MATURE ENOUGH
FOR HAPPINESS

Rome 1963





Graffito for Piranesi

1.

What verb adequate for these prisons
What adjective for these massive
Mono-mental machines
Constructed in man’s enormity?

Here the leopard loses his fatherland
Vegetable and mineral shudder

Lost in these echo-vaticans
Rising and falling: terms equally
Analogous to any staircase,
Mankind judged by stone.

Here one suddenly sees:
Every king was false.
Every king an ex-king.

The wayfarer without his tessera
Disoriented by superimposed blocks
Vainly beseeches keyless
Kafka, this enigma’s interpreter.

2.

Everything is secret, alludes to chaos.
Everything derives from the sign manifesting
Force (in spiral or pyramid)
Of the word pronouncing the nocturnal
Act of existence; inside-out dream
In murocracy’s domain.

3.

In any ruin
One cannot distinguish the sign
Liberating the subterranean pace of
Templo                                (temple)
Tempo                                (time)
Tampo                                (cover, lid)
Plano.                                 (plan, scheme)
Man postpones himself in the thing.

4.

Doors disclose
Doors disopen

5.

The horoscope “no” says
Each one bears his infraname.

Reciprocal echoes
Self-hating -waving
Dynamystify the air
Awaiting eversion
Dark disaster
Past present future
In etcetera’s holds

Rome 1965





Murilogram to the Creator
To Luciana Stegnano Picchio

Since the bone of the abyss
I’ve invoked Your feet.

I was born — one day — between parentheses
I’ll die — when I do — between parentheses.

I’m my heteronym
In no way electronic:
One is never
Quite enough born.

•

Bearing the tessera of Jonah
I call Your number
Down to my humerus.

I exist in bone and through bone
That confers identity to me.
From the inside out sky I guard
Electropressure’s timbre.

•

My work: to surpass myself, my nothingness,
My bony context.

I’m all but the universe
You loaned to humankind
Nuclear physics
In Your image and likeness:
Expansionist.

•

You construct my form in a cross
For nine billion years.
I should
Fabricate my form in time
With these autonomous hands:
A WORK IN PROGRESS
OPERA APERTA

•

Armed with a million-volt eye
We discovered the galaxies
You hid in your pocket:
Now they’ve become
        Humdrum subjects.

Our problematic progresses
To the dimension of the universe.
Scrutinizing it
We scrutinize You
Ex-totem.

We hunt You with starships:
No more our alibi,
But our goad.

Rome 1964





Murilogram to O.L.J.C.

    C’est le Christ qui monte au ciel mieux que les aviateurs.
    Il détient le record du monde pour la hauteur.
        — Appolinaire

A

Triangular fish. Angular stone.

•

Eternity’s pastor. Time’s hero.

•

Cooperative sun, catacombed Hidden.

•

Only thousand-handed actor. Open theater.

•

God’s equipole. Son of man.

B

Icastic                        Lamb of God
                                    panify
                                    vinify
                                    pacify
                                    vivify this world ex-world

C

Holiest lamb
Verb’s alpha and omega

Hanging on your cross
— Tall polemical machine —

Give us until the end of the end
Your subversive bread of peace

D

Qui tollis:

Rome 1965





Murilogram to Rimbaud

He invents. Exceeds the century.

•

Bears the partitura of chaos.

•

Blouson noir/beat/arrabiato:

•

Hard. Red air. Gorgon.

•

Orients the Occident.

•

Drunkenboat. Anarclear.

•

Electric-heaven-in-the Index.

•

Sets vertigo, silences.

•

Dioscurus, excludes the Obscure.

•

Abolishes Musset, occidual star.

•

Refractory. Ambiguous. Phallic.

•

Osiris with T-square and flail.

•

He sings: the flute takes cover.

•

“Merveilleux”: read “merdilleux.”

•

He ungives. Disintegrates. Toothes.

•

Consonantizes the vowels.

•

Perpetuum mobile. Medium.

•

Pyroklept, he antecedes himself.

•

Dies in spurts: self-surpasses.

•

Unsays compact night.

•

Self- and cosmoseer.

•

Beyond sign and symbol.

•

The idea of the Flood settles.

Rome 1965





Murilogram to Mallarmé

In oblique exile your placation
You hold upright the crosier of the word

Fairsome sign of the Book
Yours unabolishable & the tribe’s

What victoriously you design
Identical to semantics

Suddenly casting dice
You now a decubate indigete

In unharmed glory you take on
MALLARMÉ that sibylline name

Paris 1961





Murilogram to Debussy

1.

Tangency with Stephane Mallarmé.

•

Considers the structure of silence.

•

Abolishes the axis of tonality.

•

Vertical sway weighs on measure.

•

Clepsidra seperates day from night.

•

Suspends the fury of the windmanwagner.

2.

With a cold sun caught fast to his shoulder
He pronounces the word: free accords.

Reserves rhythm and blood for another
Who never saw nor will see him: will barely hear him.

•

The space of the staff yields margins
Between pure arhythmic IMAGES.

I won’t say crystal, already deformed.
But I say the strong froth of writing.

3.

The music that he — conscious — set out
Was imposed on him as cloud or star.

Rome 1965





Murilogram to the Creator
To Luciana Stegnano Picchio

Since the bone of the abyss
I've invoked Your feet.

I was born — one day — between parentheses
I'll die — when I do — between parentheses.

I'm my heteronym
In no way electronic:
One is never
Quite enough born.

•

Bearing the tessera of Jonah
I call Your number
Down to my humerus.

I exist in bone and through bone
That confers identity to me.
From the inside out sky I guard
Electropressure's timbre.

•

My work: to surpass myself, my nothingness,
My bony context.

I'm all but the universe
You loaned to humankind
Nuclear physics
In Your image and likeness:
Expansionist.

•

You construct my form in a cross
For nine billion years.
I should
Fabricate my form in time
With these autonomous hands:
A WORK IN PROGRESS
OPERA APERTA

•

Armed with a million-volt eye
We discovered the galaxies
You hid in your pocket:
Now they've become
        Humdrum subjects.

Our problematic progresses
To the dimension of the universe.
Scrutinizing it
We scrutinize You
Ex-totem.

We hunt You with starships:
No more our alibi,
But our goad.

Rome 1964





Murilogram to Dallapiccola


Atonal mankind breaks the tonic,
Does not break the shape of sound.

•

Sound made by leaf or iron
Impels choral mankind, soloist mankind.

•

A high music pro-visions
        The desert.
A high music whirl-sounds
        The verb
A high music echo-moves
        The epos.

•

Without rhythm to attract cosmocaritas
Man would be a mute cymbal. / ST. PAUL

•

Rupture. Drama. Communication.
The composer makes sacred lay space;
        Founds the cosmic stave,
        Dallapiccola does.

Rome 1965





from Poliedro
1956-1966, published 1972

Tortoise

Truly, the tortoise-in-itself almost doesn’t exist: it’s carapace exists. With it, according to the ancient Chinese, the tortoise supported the heavens. Not only the sky’s caryatid; autocaryatid.

The tortoise lives for centuries and, furba, succeeds in circling the world, piano piano. It’s thought to be the anti-modern animal par excellence: hostile to movement. So I shouldn’t admire the tortoise. But I consider that, by carrying its home on its back, it anticipates camping. In this matter, the tortoise is a very modern animal, indeed.

•

All signs seem to indicate that the problem of circulation in larger cities will bring about the return of draught vehicles. The tortoise might be of great aid in this. Moreover, in the XIX century many Parisians, among them (in all probability) Baudelaire, while flaneuring along certain streets and passages of the city, pulled a tortoise by a string. As has been revealed to us by Walter Benjamin.

If we all carried on like the tortoise, there’d be no time to manufacture and circulate the bomb. With the added advantage of our arriving less quickly to the cemetery, absurd aim.

•

Même le tortue se croit sans doute parfois composée uniquement d’enticelles. Qui fit qu’elle a tort? (Henri Michaux).





Saw

I tremble when I examine a saw.

I become anxious when I hear the toothy music of the rasping saw, father to Antonin Artaud, whose mother is one of the Gorgons.

•

To free myself from the saw, I’ve written a mini-drama:

        DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
                THE SAW
                MYSELF, WITH BINOCULARS AND SUNGLASSES
        SET: ANY OLD THING
        TIME: 1910-1965
        PLACE: JUIZ DE FORA — RIO — ROME

I get just close enough, put on the sunglasses and emit the smallest screenplay in the world:

        OH!

•

Out, damned saw. But even so I prefer it to the atomic bomb. It neither threatens nor thunders. Besides, there aren’t any “clean” or “dirty,” american, russian or chinese saws. They’re all international.

(I’m going to end up praising the saw.)

Saw, nazi musicbox.





Telegram

The telegram is a folded paper clover that tells us the news — the news! — hot, cold, soothing, humdrum — from afar.

In my boyhood, I remember the arrival of a telegram in my father’s house being quite an event. The whole tribe was summoned, even the help, and the rite was observed. My father officiated. After a very long moment of silence, he opened the telegram and read the text in a strong voice. Sometimes he’d even phone a relative or friend to tell them the extraordinary news: “I got a telegram today...”

•

In a certain era, I was a great producer of telegrams. I sent one to Felix Pacheco, who published his translations of Baudelaire in each and every Sunday edition of the “Jornal do Comércio.” I scarcely approved of these translations:

        “REQUEST YOU LET ME RELAPSE INTO FRENCH”
        CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Having just gotten news of the occupation of Salzburg by Nazi troops, I dispatched the following to Hitler:

        “IN THE NAME OF MOZART I PROTEST
        THE MILITARY INVASION OF SALZBURG”
        MURILO MENDES

In 1915, a young Juiz-Forano studying in Rio had good luck in the lottery, and communicated the fact in a letter to his family. He soon received the following telegram:

        AVOID FRIENDS MOTHER LAUGHING HELPLESSLY

•

Some authors claim the telegram was invented centuries ago, in the beginning of classical antiquity. They’ve even discovered a telegram from Sappho to her boon companion Kleide:

        COME DEAR FRIEND STOP LYDIA WILL RECEIVE
        US NEXT SATURDAY STOP COME RUNNING LIKE
        THE WIND STOP I CAN’T BEAR ALKMENE ANYMORE





Butterfly Bones

They’re so lovely, butterfly bones. Oh, I know they only exist figuratively; that’s what we call knick-knacks; a penny, a sixth real or unreal, a thousandth of a nil. But I believe stubbornly in the existence of butterfly bones.

I know, for example, that the bones of the cuttlefish or sepia are admirable: so much so that Montale baptized one of his best books Ossi di seppia. And of course I’m well aware that the mollusc Sepia oficinalis is precious even in the painter’s studio.

Butterfly bones, though! What finesse, how delicate! They fly.





Yeti

Once again, the singular being has laughter in his unfathomable eyes: he’s just seen a man from the other side of the earth come with an expedition to find him; said expedition has succeeded in capturing only his tracks.

•

Snow his floor, his ceiling and vehicle. Silence, his craft of being, his magic way of attaining “his” perfection, this creator of words and images only he interprets; snow’s particular silence, fluid somnolent hum translated into communication.

•

The demons, that is, the men from the other side, wanting to destroy him, don’t need lasso, sword or bomb: all they have to do is interview him, film him, put him on TV. If they can do that, they will have killed him. But, guided by an ageless instinct helping him sniff out any adverse force, Yeti, who has already escaped sun, wind and caribou, volatizes while radios unleashed over all the world discuss the existence or nonexistence of an “abominable” snowman, the last descendent of an extinct race, who trembles in fear before chaos, intimacy, paper, machines and nuclear physics.





The Experimental Boy

The experimental boy eats grandma’s rump and throws the dog the bones.

•

The experimental boy, future inquisitor, devours the book and spells out the saw.

•

The experimental boy doesn’t walk on clouds. He knows how to pick his objects. He adores rope, scissors, hammers, saws, pincers. He dances with them. He talks with them.

•

The experimental boy sets fire to the sanctuary to see if the firemen can do their job.

•

The experimental boy, declaring the 1962 handbook out of date, corrects his phenomenology teacher.

•

The experimental boy confesses that he’s atheist and all adrift.

•

The experimental boy is weaned when he’s one day old. He looks down his nose at Romulus and Remus. He thinks the wolf is a chicken. In the prenatal hollow he was shouting: “Champagne, Mom! Make it snappy!”

•

The experimental boy declares Aristotle’s alienation. He expels him from his zone with only the clothes on his back and a muzzle.

•

The experimental boy repels the advances of his 18-year-old cousin. He calls her his great-grandmother.

•

The experimental boy takes the painter’s brushes and locks them in the toilet bowl, thus forcing the painter to invent pop art as the only way out of the predicament.

•

The experimental boy teaches the vamp to love. He sleeps with a radar under his bed.

•

The experimental boy only admits two animals: the tiger and the bomber pilot. He leaves even the fiercest dogs and civilian pilots to the fleas.

•

The experimental boy blesses the lightning.

•

The experimental boy forefilms the aggressive event, the Apocalypse, fact of the day.

•

The experimental boy celebrates his birthday with his guests, Jean Genet and Sophia Loren. Stuck in the table are three daggers with burning pommels.

•

The experimental boy dismisses television, that “plaything for the illiterate, the deaf, the mute, the sick, antinietzsches, padres, rotters, croulants.”

•

The experimental boy tosses a grenade shaped like a phallus at Christopher Columbus’s mother, entombing the Americas.





from Conversa Portátil
1931-1974, published 1995


Christmas 1961

Dislocated by a bureaucratic operation — the census — the Virgin and the carpenter Joseph approach Bethlehem.

“There’s no room for these people,” shouts the hotel manager. “We’re hosting a solidarity congress!”

The couple head to a stable, where they are received by a white ox and a donkey worn out from work.

Herod’s soldiers hand out radioactive food to all boys under the age of two. A potent cloud shaped like a mushroom opens the horizon and suddenly explodes.

The Boy is stillborn.

Rome, 1961



•—•—•—•—•

after Sintaxe

To Live

A line. A wine. A wane. A wave. A weave. Awove. A love. Alive.



•—•—•—•—•

          He was a saint, you know.
            — AS Bessa

Murilo Monteiro Mendes was born in Juiz da Fora, Minas Geraes, Brasil, on May 13, 1901. His birthday coincided with the 13th anniversary of the official abolition of slavery in Brasil, and he proudly repeated the fact all his life. He was the second son of Onofre Mendes, a public servant. His mother, Elisa Valentina Monteiro de Barros Mendes, died in childbirth in 1902. Soon after, his father married Maria José Monteiro. “My second mother, Maria José, a great lady in the kitchen and the salon, resumed our Brasilian tenderness,” Murilo would later write. “I struck the word ‘stepmother’ from my vocabulary.”

In 1910, the sight of Halley’s Comet caused Murilo to “awaken to poetry.” A neighbor and friend of his father, Belmiro Braga, allowed Murilo access to his library, taught him the rudiments of versification and discussed literature with the young poet. Murilo’s family, distressed about his growing penchant for spinning tall tales, brought him to a medium in order to discover whether he was possessed by a mendacious spirit.

A passable student in primary and secondary school (he did very well in subjects that interested him, not so well in subjects he didn’t care about), Murilo was once asked by a teacher to read in French for a visiting professor. Though he was the best French student in the class, he read with a rough accent, stumbling over many of the words. When his teacher inquired as to why he had fared so poorly, he confessed that he hadn’t wanted to make his schoolmates feel ashamed.

After completing his secondary education, Murilo entered a pharmacological institute, but quit after one term. In 1917, he was sent away to school in Niterói, near Rio de Janeiro, but he promptly ran away to Rio to watch Nijinski “dance on the rainbow” with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. He began to write poetry in earnest and refused to continue school. He became “a great problem for the family.”

Over the next decade, Murilo’s father secured his son various jobs as a telegraph operator, pharmacist’s assistant, bookkeeper, notary and high school French teacher. However, the wayward son kept none of those jobs for very long. Eventually, he went to Rio to work for his brother, who held a post in the Agricultural Ministry, where the young poet met and befriended the painter and poet Ismael Nery. Nery’s art and poetics had a profound impact on the young writer.

In 1920, Murilo began to write pseudonymously for the Juizdaforan newspaper “A Tarde”, contributing articles on various subjects, including a regular column called “Mundane Chronicle”. In 1922, a group of writers and artists organized Modern Art Week in São Paulo, thus inaugurating Brasilian modernism. While he kept his distance from the movement, Murilo did begin to publish poems in various literary journals, including Revista de Antropofagia and Verde, the two main modernist reviews. During this period, he worked as a clerk in the Merchant’s Bank in Rio. One morning he was scolded by his fellow workers because he didn’t greet the bank manager with the customary doffing of his hat. From then on, Murilo started every workday by removing his hat and bowing deeply before the vault, announcing that he knew very well where the real authority was.

He became something of a gadfly or provocateur — opening his umbrella at concerts when a pianist chose to play some perfumed trifle, standing midway through a recital to offer a stern rebuke to the performer if he didn’t like what he heard. A great lover of classical music, Murilo wrote many articles about on the topic, including a column called “How to Build a Record Collection” in the late 40’s.

In 1930, his first book of poems, Poemas 1925-1929, was published in Juiz da Fora. His father paid for the edition. The book would eventually go on to win the prestigious Graça Aranha Award, granting him a measure of fame, and the first overwhelmingly positive critical responses to his work began to be published in journals in Rio and São Paulo. His family was assured that he had made the right decision. For the poet, the decade would be a period of great artistic growth and financial insecurity. In 1931, his long dramatic poem Bumba-meu-Poeta was published. In 1932, Hístoria do Brasil, a collection of poemas-piadas (the poema-piada, or joke-poem, was a typical, and very influential, early modernist form), was published with a cover by the famous artist Portinari. Murilo later excised this book and the dramatic poem from his first Collected Poems in 1959, asserting that they didn’t coalesce with the body of his work. In 1934, the death of his great friend Ismael Nery provoked a religious crisis which led Murilo to embrace a highly idiosyncratic version of Catholicism.

1935 saw the publication of Tempo e Eternidade, a collaboration with the poet Jorge de Lima, another of Murilo’s close friends. In 1936, O Sinal de Deus, a collection of prose poems and aphorisms, was published, but Murilo quickly withdrew it from the market. In 1937, he came out with what is generally considered to be his first book fully in the style we have come to associate with him, the celebrated A Poesia em Pánico.

In 1940, the famous Portuguese historian and novelist Jaime Cortesão fled Salazar’s dictatorship and the war which had started the year before, moving to Rio de Janeiro with his daughter, Maria da Saudade Cortesão. Saudade, as she is called, herself a talented poet, would later marry Murilo. They were inseperable almost from their first meeting. In 1941, Murilo published a book of poems entitled O Visionário. In 1943, he entered a sanatorium to recuperate from a tuberculosis attack. Later that same year, his father died.

The next few years were unusually productive for the poet. In 1944, Murilo saw As Metamorfoses published, and in 1945 came Mundo Enigma, Os Quatro Elementos and O Discípulo de Emaús. Between 1946 and 1947, he wrote Sonetos Brancos, which remained unpublished for some years. In 1947, there appeared perhaps his most famous book, Poesia Liberdade. One of the poems in this volume, Janela do Caos, provided the title for a Portuguese language selection of his work published in Paris in 1949. The edition was illustrated with six lithographs by Picabia.

In 1952, Murilo was sent to Europe as a cultural ambassador by the Brasilian government; first to Belgium and then to the Netherlands. In 1953 he lectured at the Sorbonne on the subject of the poetry of Jorge de Lima, who had just died. In 1954, while still in Europe, Murilo came out with Contemplação de Ouro Preto, a collection of neo-baroque poems about the metropolitan center of Brasilian gold-mining and Baroque art. That year, Office Humain, a volume of selected poems translated into French, was released by Seghers in Paris.

In 1956, he returned to Brasil and lectured in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. When Franco’s government denied him a visa to enter Spain as a professor of Brasilian literature, Murilo opted to teach at the University of Rome in 1957, and by the end of the year, he and Maria da Saudade had found the apartment they would live in for the remainder of Murilo’s life.

From 1957 until his death in 1975, Murilo’s reputation soared in Europe. He had close friendships with a number of important writers, such as Rafael Alberti, Henri Michaux, Michele de Ghelderode and Giuseppe Ungaretti. He also became friends with the Italian composers Giacinto Scelsi and Dallapiccola (who set some of his poems to music, as did the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson), and the artist like Jean Arp. He developed especially close relationships with the painters Alberto Magnelli and Vieira da Silva. During this time, Murilo wrote a significant amount of art criticism and several more books of poetry that were published posthumously.

His book Siciliana, written during a visit to Sicily, was published in 1959 in Palermo, with a preface by Ungaretti and translations by A.A. Chiocchio. In that same year, his stunning Tempo Espanhol was published in Lisbon. In 1962, a Madrid publisher brought out a selected poems in Spanish, translated by Damaso Alonso. Another Selected Poems was published in Lisbon in 1964, and As Metamorfoses was translated into Italian that same year.

In 1965, Murilo participated in the Ottavo Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. He shared the stage with Ingeborg Bachmann, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salvatore Quasimodo, Pablo Neruda, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Rafael Alberti, Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Miroslav Holub, Barbara Guest, Ted Hughes, Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Weiners and Stephen Spender.

In 1968, his first book of prose, A Idade do Serrote, a memoir of his childhood, was very well-received in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1970, Murilo published his last, most forward-looking book of poems, the astonishing Convergência, in São Paulo. Convergência shows a 69-year-old poet still not only in close contact with the most advanced poetic trends of his time, but also perfectly willing to learn from and absorb techniques developed by younger poets, and to make those techniques his own.

In 1972, he was awarded the prestigious Etna-Taormina Prize, which he shared with Ionesco. In the same year, the first book-length study of his work, written by the poet Laís Corrêa de Araujo, was published in Brasil. In August of 1972, when Murilo visited Brasil for the first time in more than a decade, he gave a series of interviews, and was fêted and honored wherever he went.

Murilo stopped writing poetry in the mid-60’s, and turned to prose. In 1973, Retratos-Relâmpago, a collection of short prose memoirs of various people he had met over the years, was published in São Paulo.

In 1975, Murilo Mendes died while on vacation in Lisbon, and was buried in that city. In his last years, the worsening political developments in Brasil and indeed the entire world terrified, saddened and confused him. He was firmly against war for any reason, and detested all forms of tyranny. The Brasilian coup of 1964 and Brasil’s subsequent military government distressed him terribly.

After his death, many previously unpublished books came out, and his reputation in Brasil, Portugal and the rest of Europe kept growing and growing. A rising tide of acclaim has led to the publication of the monumental Poesia Completa e Prosa (Nova Aguilar, Rio, 1994), which runs to 1,782 pages. Hundreds of critical articles as well as book-length studies have been written on him, and his writings in French and Italian are being translated into Portuguese. Many poets and critics now consider Murilo Mendes to be one of the greatest Brasilian poets of all time. In 1994, The Centro de Estudos Murilo Mendes was set up in Juiz da Fora. The building houses Murilo’ library and extensive art collection, and is devoted to the study and promotion of not only the work of the poet, but all Brasilian poetry and art.

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João Cabral de Melo Neto has said that he began writing poetry because of Murilo Mendes, and proudly called himself a disciple of the poet. Manuel Bandeira called Murilo “the great conciliator of opposites”. Murilo was a deeply Catholic poet who could write “In the Church there are legs, breasts, bellies and hair/Everywhere, even on the altars,” and also maintain that “Matter is strong and absolute./There’s no poetry without it.” Mendes is not interested in the simple reconciliation of these “opposites” so much as the power of poetic language to transform the rigid conceptuality implied by such sharp distinctions.

Absorbing International Romanticism, Symbolism (particularly the work of Rimbaud and Mallarmé) and Modernism, Mendes synthesized a lyrical, intellectually rigorous style all his own. Mendes’ hard, rasping musical line is a rarity within the Portuguese language, which is known for its mellifluousness. I have tried to reproduce his sharp, consonantal musicality in English, especially in the dense, compressed syntax of the later poems, such as “Murilogram to Rimbaud”.

Murilo is one of the few Brasilian poets to have attained an international reputation. His poetry has been heavily anthologized in several languages, including all the Romance languages, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Magyar. Full-length collections of his work have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian and Rumanian. His poems have been set to music by Luigi Dallapiccola and Allan Pettersson, and recorded by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Christoph Donhanyi, and others. Several exhibitions in Brasil and Portugal have been devoted to his life and work. To the best of my knowledge, less than 10 of his poems and one short prose piece have been translated into English.

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First posted by Berkeley Neo-Baroque Gang of One, 3.14.2006
Translation based on the critical edition by Luciana Stegnano Picchio
Under continual revision, augmentation and correction
Reproduction rights granted upon request