a fumaça (xii)

(fragmento de um 'work in progress')

vinha de longe

                   e  de perto.  

 embora embaçasse a vista,  fizesse a mão

errar o alvo,  eles a continuavam negando.  as casas que

ardiam  ainda à distância, não eram deles.   nem as selvas, as relvas.

nem a fome.  na noite de patas queimadas, o lobo mais uma

vez soltava seu uivo, ouvindo a fuga noturna dos cavalos

que  alguma vez foram mansos.   

It Takes Two to Tango

Here´s a work in progress which is giving me a bit
of a hard time, since initially it was supposed to be
funny, and now seems to have ended up more on the melancholy or
reflexive side. ( I wish, though, that it had come out more
humorous, because I swear that would better
reflect my state of spirit on these matters, these days...)

It Takes Two to Tango

Avenida 18 de julio
y suave la entrada del invierno
en Montevideo
we take in the evening
you, chain smoking in the crisp air
me, unbuttoning the grey wool jacket,
the unexpected warmth of the season
and around us, the plaza, the couples

sliding so ever-so gently
to the long, sweet chords
such perfect synchrony
if only through the tender beats of
the evening, as long as the dance goes on.

Stubborn girl, crazy boy.
It could be that everyone finds their rhythm,
or their moment – to samba or salsa,
to dance the waltz or rock n’ roll
and i think if i could master the movements
i´d choose forró -
which like the tango must be danced
in pairs, but is quicker and makes you laugh
at the parting, or losing the beat

yet tonight in Montevideo
there is music floating around us
with a penchant for tragedy
and they tell us, this is a city
of the old, and a grandfather
pulls his granddaughter gently by the hand
and like me she cannot
master the beat and the steps
as time spills messily around us,
as if that were the formula - a life
unfolding always in pairs, a language
of complicity or duplicity,
in which i am only falsely fluent.

what grabs you more?
is it tragic or comic,
together, apart?
the dancing ends early here,
but there is still Malena, singing
into the night of this city of old.

my choice, perhaps, should be
the pampas,
solitary ride under moonlit dome
or moving with the throngs,
just one more in a galloping herd
where if i lose the rhythm,
fall out of synch, don´t
deliver the goods
no one will notice:
no cruel duels,
no emptied side of the
bed or the closet,
and we can just go on with our lives
under the stars
of this planet
of billions

Mother's Day, 2011.

A new one of mine,after watching Claire Denis' film,
White Material. And thinking about all of us mothers,
and especially, mothers of sons...

(But let there be no room for doubt: my sons know where
they stand on this one. And can´t let mother's day
talk go by without thanking them for whom they have become!)

 First revision:  December  12, 2023

Mother’s Day  (A. T., 2011)

 

.

My mare and I climb
the last dirt road of the

outskirts, past the smokey lot
where some boys at their

half toothless end of childhood

wave at me.  A wisecrack or two,

they return to business    fanning debris

into flame:       a red t-shirt,  

coke bottles, milk cartons,

little plastic pools forming

over layers of stone and broken

asphalt. We meander the hill

         to its apex        to the boulder

overlooking this little top of the world

a place where it seems we are truly alone,

just Madja and I     her small ears

flicking backward to capture my voice,

forward again for the perfect canter,

the sandy trail coiling around a wall of stone
and pine trees split open near the root,

and no more than a rein on a halter

to tether our bond.

Return through the village,
my mare dances in careful steps
over hardened sandstone.
One tiny hoof at a time
           she is protecting me
and the foal to be born
when the seasons shift
when the moon changes.

The boys in turn have run off

elsewhere    leaving   
their wrinkled pile of rubble

 the muddy mutts who yap
         underfoot
and the senhoras, who pause in

the yellow winter sun to chat while

arranging their trash bags for pick up.
A girl with baby in arms, is it
              hers?
In last night’s film,
a mother whose son
went up in flame    is
history taking its course as
 on all those days we can do nothing
      to stop it.
We take stony roads     sandy paths

or follow the course of the flood
to the top or the bottom of the world.
Wastelands are burning on both sides.
And no use trying to stop the boys
once they’ve gone awry.

 

a response...

Just trying out a response to a poem I am translating. But since the translation is not yet ready (waiting for someone to go over it for me!) here goes what I´ve written...for whatever it is worth!


A kind of faithfulness
worse than a whining puppy,
docile as a woolly lamb or a llama
begging for cookies. A kind of
faithfulness that accepts every sort
of betrayal, wears blinkers, puts on
a fresh blindfold to begin the day
and comes back, week after week,
to drink, at the same fountain,
tainted with poison. Years
that don’t teach, don’t cure.
A poison that doesn’t kill,
Just a slow sadness that makes you
Believe you are empty.

a new one of mine...

Half truth

Winter upon us. Yet
He returns from his month
in a hut, from his African mistress
whose fan breathes its breathless
artifice of wind along the milky whiteness
of his sleep, into
the dark-curtained rooms of a
Spanish lover.
Soon he will be off again, this time toward
east-lying plains
Where his girls will folk-dance him into the night
And offer him red wine, sausages, morning rides
Into the hills.
Daddy still pays for his plane tickets.
Women still believe his stories.
History proceeds at a breakneck pace
Yet sometimes so little changes:
Our foolishness, our deep-churning need
For the tiniest element, the smallest blue flame
sheltered for a second from the wind.

e estes...

escritos quando eu morava em NYC:


Lovers

they move into each other, pouring
from the separateness of their lives
into this brief burning, the way fire
melts all things together, leaves
nothing. the sea at the heels of
the city drums against silence,
the white line of the coast in
winter, abandon.

in the early evening, heat gone
from her thighs, she finds him
lost from her, moving off, the
distant streak of a dinghy
vanishing into salt fog. he
hears something stirring
in his past, something
that will make him need her
again. again, the long inching
toward their meeting.
a wisp of time.
the pale of the moon.
some other route out of or into the
darkness.


Michoacán

the hard hills of the sierra
nose up into blue and gray, bearing tracks
no one could count. the landscape swallows
time: here, women carry the earth, rub cloth
on stone, let the sweet smoke of corn out into
the air. there are clothes hung out, pencas,
adobe. here a girl-child grows, knowing
the brown paths into the mountain, one color
repeated in water and land. here, her breasts
ripen, as the sky gathers its rain clouds for
the season to come.

Aprendendo com as "mestras"...

Bom, enquanto Sabrina e eu vamos preparando novas traduções, publico mais um poema meu. Escrito numa época de intensa convivência com a obra de Diane.



Desert II


The numbers in my head are screaming.
The long list of severed names, the places
where the glinting train came to its
lurching halt. The blue lights
of a desert highway where angels
are spawned, where iguanas
blink and scuttle off into the
night. Some end of the road
Bagdad Café, some Last Chance
Texaco where you found her:
the one who made you forget me
again. A dancer perhaps. A
little one with a yellow spin of hair
who plays a shiny silver flute.
the eastern sounds floating out
into your tiny emerald oasis.
She doesn´t partake of the pomegranates.
the big chunks of crusty bread. Doesn´t
laugh loudly. Flutters in your life
like a wish, wispy, tantalizing. The
tatooed wrists, the small
bangled feet making no sound.

(miriam, 2007)

Diane Wakoski, poeta.

[Aproveitando meu novo ofício de blogueira, que me estimula a escrever mais livremente – ter a coragem de fazê-lo!- e partilhar coisas como, neste caso, o gosto pessoal pela obra de uma poeta:]

Nascida na Califórnia, em 1937, de origem étnica polonesa e com raízes na classe trabalhadora, Wakoski é uma poeta muito prolífica, mas pouco conhecida por aqui. Inspirada por poetas norteamericanos como os grandes William Carlos Williams e Allen Ginsberg, e pese as ressalvas que ela diz ter de ser identificada como uma poeta “feminista” (“One of the reasons I have not been wanting to be called a feminist poet is that the label seems to lump all women writers together, as if we have a common message. I am not even sure that I have a message, but if I do, it is full of contradictions and paradoxes and perhaps even baffling” ), sua voz articula, à sua maneira – observando, sentindo, se permitindo todas as viagens possíveis, sem exigências de “coerência ideológica” - um olhar sobre a vida desde uma perspectiva de sujeito-mulher, crítica e pois... feminista!

Tenho quatro livros dela (pouco, pensando que ela já publicou mais de 40), cada um lido já várias vezes. Venho nestes dias relendo Medea the Sorceress (Black Sparrow Press, 1995), um trabalho que me parece genial. É composto por poemas, cartas e até pequenos extratos de um livro sobre física quântica (para acrescentar reflexões sobre várias questões : por exemplo, o que é o “real”, ou o caráter inseparável de corpo, matéria, pensamento e imaginação ...) Também neste livro ela aborda sua passagem para a “meia-idade” (Me identifico!). E prevalece nele uma linguagem quase cotidiana, mas metaforicamente rica e sempre casada com reflexões filosóficas; trata-se portanto de um cotidiano denso, onde cada coisa, por “banal” que pudesse ser, se carregue de denso significado existencial onde nos poderemos encontrar, com nossas problemáticas partilhadas. Emprega muita ironia, e embora pretenda muitas vezes ser forte ou enfática naquilo que coloca, conserva também uma atitude brincalhona.

Cativam-me as diversas metáforas (figuras, “tropos”) que ela desenvolve para significar seu próprio caminho pela vida, que não só se repetem ao longo do livro senão representam uma continuidade com livros anteriores. Esboço apenas algumas, muito sinteticamente:

Medea dos poderes mágicos: embora à procura do amor, encontra-se com a traição. Assim, se o desencontro e as expectativas (românticas, ridículas?) falidas caracterizam sua vida, desta surge a agência feminina - movida, principalmente, por ciúme, raiva e o desejo da vingança, é verdade E afinal, recupera para si um poder. Jason, quem a trai, significa, de diversas formas, todos os homens... ou quase todos.

A Carteira (“the Postmistress”). A portadora de cartas e mensagens (entre os ancestrais da poeta, há alguém que cavalgou o país pelo legendário Pony Express). Para esta personagem, a vida gira em torno da lógica da comunicação/conexão: o impulso de levar aos outros cartas e mensagens, de construir pontes com as palavras.

the Silver Surfer/Steel Man/King of Spain: as várias versões de suas fantasias erótico-amorosas.

O marinheiro, ou o pai: que na cultura patriarcal norteamericana, é livre no sentido de ir e vir em função de si mesmo, e de quem não se deve esperar... que volte!

A dama da luz/o arquiteto da luz: quem – mulher, homem, qualquer um , talvez uma forma de assumir os desafios existenciais?

Bom, por enquanto paro por aqui com minhas reflexões. Demorei muito para escolher um poema dela para partilhar com vocês. Decidi por este: poema perceptivelmente autobiográfico, muito forte. Publico aqui na versão original. [Pretendo em algum momento tentar traduzir algo da obra dela, mas os poemas costumam ser muito longos, com uma densidade e certas outras características que me dificultariam o caminho à produção de uma boa “versão” , percebo...Ou talvez alguém queira me ajudar! ].

MEDEA THE SORCERESS

She is in the Home for Unwed Mothers in
Pasadena, the only girl who reads poetry. He
writes to her from his prep school, and she memorizes
the sonnets of Shakespeare as she takes her exercise
on the dusty, scrubby grounds of
The Home.

No enchantment changes her life.
She is told by the Social Worker that she has
FAILED because
she still loves J
she doesn´t regret doing anything for love,
she doesn´t believe she is bad
she doesn´t regret giving up her child
she believes her life will go on, the same as it has
always gone on
she won´t talk about her mistakes.

This is the same as being on the desert,
this life in the linoleum-floored room,
eating with girls who have been raped by their fathers,
and girls who got caught but didn´t know with what man
and girls who were only 13
and girls who were nurses sleeping with doctors
and girls who wanted to forget everything and join the army,
girls who were all pregnant and ashamed and who knew they were
wandering some desert, though most of them,
most of us, didn’t know
the names of desert rattlers, or moths like the Dusty
Silverwing, or
about the tiny burrowing owls, or the lingering scent of
sagebrush
when the night was pure, pure as we knew we still were.

So, if she were Medea, when the letters came
talking casually about his dates with other girls, un-pregnant
girls,
she decided that she would have no choice. She
would kill him, and her children, and like the Sorceress
leave for another world, in her chariot drawn by dragons.

She gave up her baby. No regrets. Only the weak have
regrets. She flew in her chariot with all her dragonlady power to Berkeley,
then New York, then the Midwest, and finally to this Café
where she sits telling the tale, not of the tribe,
but of herself, and in spite of what others say, she knows
that the song that this Silvery Moon Questing Lady of the
Dragonlight sings,
is the tale for at least half
of the tribe.

Strum, Gunslinger.
Hail, Maximus.
Ascent is descent, Dr. Paterson,
O, Love, one-eyed poet, where are you leading me now. No
one should
Be at the Home for Unwed Mothers. That is the real
Wasteland.
These epistles, not Cantos or songs will be for Craig,
Knight of Hummingbird Light,
for Jonathan who understands the myth of the woman
“Sleeping In
Flame”,
For Steel Man, my husband, who loves me at night in his
invisible Cap of
Darkness,
and for all women, the other half of the tribe,
for Eve who dared to eat the apple, I write this letter
and sign myself,
Diane

The Lady of Light.

Projetos e poemas...

Pretendo logo começar a postar - como trabalho em andamento -poemas de várias poetas "chicanas" (que geralmente escrevem em inglês, com uso também de palavras e frases em espanhol) que farão parte de um novo projeto de tradução, a ser realizado em 2009. Aliás, estamos com trabalhos de Cherrie Moraga e Sandra Cisneros em mãos, mas estamos à procura de outras vozes; se alguém tiver recomendação, agradeceremos.

Hoje, para o segundo dia do ano novo, vou resgatar mais um poema meu, meio antigo, escrito em inglês e sem versão em português:

Gypsy II.

there were days i would step out
from my cove, into the sunshine
of some midday, to pick red
berries and feel the company
of doves and slippery fishes.
my hands were two open gourds,
swishing cool water for the little ones,
gathering the grains of sand through the green
hours, finding in them some shining stone or
some dark stone brighter than the others.

now solitude has slipped
from the summer. others have
settled the furthest shores,
and so we recede, past the blue
hotel and the rocks with their angry
black letters. my children
cling hungrily to me. in the
distance, the craggy outline
of the city looms. the soles of my feet
thicken, not stumbling now
on the long-rooted vines
or the twisted brush of the beach.
gulls stalk close to me, take bread crumbs
from the shiny leather of my palms.
when the wind comes, it is cold and low
and loved. we are alone, waiting for night.