The Book of Disclosure
poems from Clepsydra by Camilo Pessanha
translated from the Portuguese and annotated by Adam Mahler
The Book of Disclosure: Selected Poems from Clepsydra by
Camilo Pessanha
translated from the Portuguese and annotated by Adam Mahler
cover art by He Li
CONTENTS
Introduction i
A Note from the Translator v
The Book of Disclosure I
Oblivion 5
Statue 7
Chinese Viola 9
After the Battle and After the Fall 11
Life 13
Venus, part II 15
Crepuscular 17
Retina 19
Footprints 21
Clepsydra: A final poem 23
Notes 24
Acknowledgements and Bibliography 29
1
INTRODUCTION: THE MYTH OF THE POET
Complicated tattoos on my chest:
Trophies, emblems, two winged lions …
FROM CAMILO PESSANHA’S CLEPSYDRA
Camilo de Almeida Pessanha (1867-1926) was conceived out of wedlock to an upper-class
law student and his domestic servant in Coimbra, Portugal. Scholars know little about his
early life and adolescence, except that he spent much of his childhood in the Azores
before returning to Coimbra in 1884 to study law. He spent his early years at the
university living with his mother and brothers because his intermittently attentive father
lent his family little monetary support. His studies were sporadic—he faced academic
probation in his fourth year, which was more likely a reflection of his family’s finances
than his prowess as a student. The interruptions had severe consequences for Pessanha’s
mental health. He fell victim to nervous breakdowns that would later become a common
theme in his poetry. After reentering the university, Pessanha at last separated from his
family, who rejoined their unreliable patriarch as he moved throughout the country.
Pessanha left few literary traces during this period of his life; he wrote one critical review
of António Fogaça’s poetry in 1890.
Pessanha graduated in 1891 and little is known about his life during the several years
that followed. Pessanha, who was usually a very productive letter writer, maintained few
correspondences during these years. Pessanha’s biographers believe that he instead
devoted all of his time and energy to a frantic and initially unsuccessful job search. The
poet desired to join the academy in Portugal, but difficulties in finding suitable
employment on the continent inspired him to apply for positions abroad. He would
ultimately reside in Macau, then Portugal’s remaining East-Asian colony. Early
scholarship and outmoded but often quoted encyclopedia entries about Pessanha’s life
cite an unnamed and vexed love interest as the primary motivation for his move to the
East. Pessanha actually came to Asia to serve as the philosophy chairman at the Liceu de
Macau. In Macau, Pessanha’s reputation was hazy: he was received by some as a brilliant
professor, and by others as a disgraced exile or oriental fetishist in search of concubines.
i
Pessanha did find a wife in Macau—in defiance of colonial etiquette, he married a
Macanese-Chinese woman, taking in her daughter and fathering their son, João Miguel.
As for his literary career, Pessanha became prolific during his five years in China: twofifths of his corpus was written during this time. Pessanha remained in China until 1896,
and when he returned to Portugal, he brought back a unique writing style that fascinated
his contemporaries, who had read some of the work he published in literature reviews
and magazines.
In the wake of lavish décadent poetry, Pessanha’s naturalistic and introspective
approach provided readers with a breath of fresh air. His style’s novelty was widely hailed
as an attractive and mysterious way of writing poetry. Such mystery was inescapable for
both the private citizen and writer Pessanha. Unaware of the true reasons for his travels to
China, his peers thought he was a disgraced and reclusive poet, who was wary of being
published, even though he composed what is considered some of the finest symbolist
poetry ever written in Portuguese. In time, critics called Pessanha’s poetic genius into
question, alleging that his work was too much an imitation—or even overt plagiarism—of
Verlaine, who, while certainly an influence, simply shared Pessanha’s symbolist style and
propensity for entering unorthodox romantic relationships. Little was off-limits for
Pessanha’s critics, peers, and public: his creative process became fodder for gossip.
Regular motifs in accounts and descriptions of the poet emerged. The most common and
persistent myth was that Pessanha was a misanthrope who kept his poems to himself; he
shared them only during private gatherings with close friends. According to the enduring
legend, Clepsydra was the poetic fruit harvested by Pessanha’s close friend and fan. This
friend allegedly transcribed the poems, as dictated by Pessanha. Although Pessanha had,
in fact, released some of Clepsydra’s poems years earlier, Pessanha’s image as a reluctant
publisher remained intact and unchallenged until the 1980’s, when scholars brought
previously unseen manuscripts to light. The exact circumstances of Clepsydra’s
publication are, at present, unclear, but recent archival discoveries have introduced an
increasingly accepted portrayal of the poet separate from sensationalizing accounts
written in years past. Unfortunately, the myth of the poet began to dwindle long after the
writer died in Macau in 1926.
ii
PESSANHA’S POETRY: THE NEVER-ENDING SUNSET
It was a day of useless agonies,
A day in the sun, a sun-drenched soul!
Bare, cool swords shone,
A day in the sun, a sun-drenched soul!
FROM CAMILO PESSANHA’S CLEPSYDRA
Pessanha’s signature brand of symbolism collapsed two poetic and sensory modalities
into one: through the fleeting sounds of language, his highly formal and rhymed verse
gave permanence to his poems’ rugged imagery. Pessanha’s modernité was not found in
the cosmopolitan ephemera that some symbolists wrote about. As the selection of poems
that follows will show, Pessanha was afflicted more by the sea’s changing currents than by
currency, more by the maritime than the manmade.
Pessanha wrote about an organic and insidious type of impermanence: memory’s allencompassing decay. For Pessanha, forgetfulness wasn’t a blissful state of ignorance or
the charming side effect of old age. In fact, remembrance and the rustic imagery drawn
from the everyday provided a terrain for the imagination, a realm of a different math and
a place where Pessanha felt in control and at ease. Recurrent motifs in Clepsydra include,
accordingly, sleep and wakefulness, forgetting and remembering, and the (often
vanishing) physical manifestations of movement and volition. The lyrical baseline for
Pessanha’s poetry is the angst of dreaming the simple but ungraspable dream, or a
meditation on a livelihood at the edge of the almost real. The definitive nostalgia of
Pessanha’s poetry had far-reaching stylistic and syntactical implications for his poetry.
Many poems in Clepsydra build rhymes around the words or phrases most evocative of a
mental state, and the imaginary is made tactile (e.g. bebê-lo/pesadelo; imbibe/nightmare).
The density of the poetic fabric is most arresting in some of Pessanha’s earlier sonnets,
whose rhymes center on the adverb, formed in Portuguese via a suffix identical to and
derived from mente, or mind.
The careful arrangement of words on the page speaks to Pessanha’s larger views on
language. Pessanha’s poems communicated more than an elevated writing style for
decorative purposes; their language was instead the basis for the physical laws that
iii
governed and bound the cosmos as Pessanha conceived them. In the structure and
constraints of rhymed verse the living pulse of his desires, beliefs, and regrets
reverberated. For Pessanha, the word can bring into being the world that the artist
intends; the sounds and sight of spoken and written language are the physical
representation of an artistic vision. This is topography through typography. Scholars and
critics of Clepsydra have characterized Pessanha’s poetry as the precise expression of this
desejo de existir, or the desire for existence.
That desire was, of course, highly resonant. Pessanha influenced poets from the Geração
de Orpheu and most importantly, Fernando Pessoa. On Pessanha, Pessoa writes: “He
taught us how to feel covertly … [and that] being a poet isn’t putting your heart in one’s
hands, but instead your simple dreams.” Indeed, Pessanha inspired Pessoa to pursue a
covert art. Pessoa’s signature and often confounding heteronymity ushered in a literary
renaissance in Portugal that garnered international acclaim and attention unseen in the
country since the publication of Camões’ The Lusiads in the late 16th century. At the core
of Pessoa’s movement, however, was the desire for existence that Pessanha conveyed
years earlier. I like to think that Pessanha’s desire and its push for creation radiated the
kinetic energy that expanded and shaped Pessoa’s universe of multiple personalities.
***
iv
A Note from the Translator
Every translation is a transformation of a fascination. In the case of my translation of
Clepsydra, I was captivated by the work of Camilo Pessanha, an overlooked poet who
influenced the Portuguese artistic milieu that correspondingly informed a nation’s
conceptions of what literature is and should be. And, in fact, the Portuguese do have such
conceptions. Any cab driver in Lisbon will quote and assert the literary supremacy of
Fernando Pessoa, an intellectual descendant of Pessanha and his poetry. The project also
had a preservationist tinge—I wanted to honor the moribund use of Portuguese in
Eastern Asia. But beyond that, it’s harder to articulate just what it is that drives me to
translate: How can one describe in words the forces that inform an instinct or yield a
procedure for improvising in the face of impossibility? How can the translator ever justify
violence to the text?
I find some answer in my translation’s title. I’ve called this work The Book of Disclosure
for several reasons. The first was to pay homage to Pessoa’s lifetime project, The Book of
Disquiet, a collection of some of the finest and most influential literature ever composed
in Portuguese. This nod to an existing tradition befits the practice of translation as a
whole—a translation entails a derivation from a source. The title also serves as a loose
reference to the hazy circumstances of Clepsydra’s publication; it honors persistent and
fictitious rumors that Pessanha disliked the attention of critics and was forced to publish
his poems on account of his friends’ insistence. This sounds right because translation
offers Pessanha an avenue for better-late-than-never restitution. English readers will
approach the writer with blank notions of who he is. In the spirit of Clepsydra itself, the
title underscores the intimacy a poet like Pessanha might expect from his readership,
given that his poems are a public glimpse at a private lapse into artistic neurosis.
But to best answer the question at hand, I appeal to the title’s less obvious metaphor for
the broader field of literary translation. Translation is not the task of a gatekeeper or
secret keeper. It’s the task of the secret teller.
The text is a secret because it was written in one language’s code, a system of words
maintained for communication only between those who can understand them—in a
v
sense, for the purpose of secrecy. Only speakers of the language come to the literary text
already aware of the untaught rules of wordplay. These speakers are alone in their casual
ability to go deeper into the weave of their language. The translator, of course, works in
binary opposition to this alienating and esoteric force: he seeks to disclose something. He
has the humanitarian goal to declassify the text for all those who speak the target
language. When disclosing, he embarks on a formidable journey—language encodes
shibboleths that resist non-native apprehension. This makes sense, for the shape of
language itself is closed. Conversation is bound between two speakers in close proximity;
to read the written word or to speak with its author is an event that historically has taken
place in a small and circumscribed radius of monolingualism.
In an important act of literary espionage, the translator enters and escapes this stockade
to uncover and parley what he wasn’t supposed to or naturally able to know. When he
renders in one language a text that is originally known only in one other, he is revealing
his discoveries to others who cannot even don the functional disguise that this bastard
speaker has acquired. They cannot speak or read one word of the secret. In this
commitment to revelation, the literary translator draws many parallels with the mystic
who longs for the spiritual apprehension of the intellectually inaccessible, or the divine
secret. The mystic believes that this apprehension of this secret signifies absorption into
an absolute—the translator’s linguistic equivalent being the exact word and meaning. No
clever approximation or synonyms.
This union with the irrevocably absolute or the exact word is the supreme aim of
translation and also its primary obstacle. The translator, however, is not without a sacred
text to guide attempts to find the right word. If language directs its negative animus
towards non-native speakers, nativism is its positive and characteristic spirit. The
uncomfortable logos of the Translator’s Gospel is, then, the following: the right word is
in-born and unbreakable. And it’s true. To translate is to reproduce the threedimensional cultural matrix that makes the word mean what it does in a typeface that has
height, width, and no depth. This is clandestine language’s defense against would-be code
breakers. In its inability to immediately convey each word’s intimate and definitive
history and connotations, the translation breaks the bond between the speakers and the
vi
spoken. An inevitable failure via fissure. The natural world keeps its secrets irreducible
and undecipherable in a similar manner: no matter how knowledgeable the parents, a
precocious child’s “Why is the sky blue?” will eventually go unanswered. If a word is
innate and irreplaceable, why do we bother to break apart its syllables in search for a new
word in a different code that is equally misunderstood by all but a native speaker of this
other language?
The dangerous and malformed assumption, however, is that this refraction of the
language takes place in a solitary prism that is deaf to the secret’s call for intimacy
altogether. The translator shines his light through a very different type of prism that is
equipped with adaptive optics—a piece of amber. The word is filtered through a resin that
resonates with life; the translator’s fossilized values and entrapped biases tell the secret in
his own stealthy way. We are still dealing with a prism that distorts, divides and
reallocates the author’s intended frequencies, and, yes, like any inspired secret telling,
translation is, to some extent, a game of telephone. Should this admission encourage us to
accept defeat when facing the problem of translation?
But like amber of varying quality, some translators are less opaque and more filled with
life. Translators playing telephone can have better or worse ears. To determine how to
attain lively and transparent translation, we can leave behind mysticism and the
refraction of light for a delightfully prosaic explanation. The texts we read are circulated
among libraries whose members search the aisles, moving from the work they’ve already
admired to its Dewey-decimal neighbor. Thus, our secrets are a family matter, and our
secret telling a family business. And like the owner of a family business, the translator
must hope for children better suited to the trade than himself. In this way, the first
translation is the first opening of the text in the new language. A dis-closure. Translation
isn’t just an asymptotic art, but also part of a shared culture of asymptotes—an infinite
exodus to Logos.
The following poems are, then, my call for group inquiry. May it be the first of many
mappings of Pessanha’s most beloved mental worlds onto the geography and textures of
English. And my simplest guiding philosophy for the translation may be the implanted
fascination itself. This collection grew “out of a simple, modest love for the original and
vii
the study that this love implies,” to quote Wilhelm von Humboldt, who, like many of the
romantic translation theorists, expresses the underlying love for the word that spurs on
the translator.
***
viii
THE
BOOK
of
DISCLOSURE
Selected poems from Clepsydra by Camilo Pessanha
Translated from the Portuguese and annotated by Adam Mahler
ix
For Mom, Dad & Spencer
x
I saw the light in a lost nation.
My spirit is tired and naked.
Oh! Who could slip without making a sound!
Into the ground, vanishing, like a worm …
CAMILO PESSANHA’S INSCRIPTION TO CLEPSYDRA
3
Desce por fim sobre o meu coração
O olvido. Irrevocável. Absoluto.
Envolve-o grave como véu de luto.
Podes, corpo, ir dormir no teu caixão.
A fronte já sem rugas, distendidas
As feições, na imortal serenidade,
Dorme enfim sem desejo e sem saudade
Das coisas não logradas ou perdidas.
O barro que em quimera modelaste
Quebrou-se-te nas mãos. Viça uma flor,
Pões-lhe o dedo, ei-la murcha sobre a hasta…
Ias andar, sempre fugia o chão,
Até que desvairavas, do terror.
Corria-te um suor, de inquietação…
4
Oblivion
At last, oblivion falls
on my heart. Fully. Finally. Shrouding it,
severe as mourning’s veil. Body,
you can sleep in your coffin.
The brow, now smoothed,
and face, forever serene, sleep
at long last, without longing
for things you’ve lacked or lost.
But the clay you made a chimera
broke in your hands. A flower grows …
and withers with your touch to the stem.
When you tried to leave the floor always fled,
until you went mad—out of fear
and sweat of disquiet poured.
5
Estátua
Cansei-me de tentar o teu segredo:
No teu olhar sem cor, —frio escalpelo,—
O meu olhar quebrei, a debatê-lo,
Como a onda na crista dum rochedo.
Segredo dessa alma e meu degredo
E minha obsessão! Para bebê-lo
Fui teu lábio oscular, num pesadelo,
Por noites de pavor, cheio de medo.
E o meu ósculo ardente, alucinado,
Esfriou sobre o mármore correcto
Desse entreaberto lábio gelado …
Desse lábio de mármore, discreto,
Severo como um túmulo fechado,
Sereno como um pélago quieto.
6
Statue
I had tired of trying for the secret
in your cold and colorless scalpel stare
when my gaze broke—contested,
like a wave on the ridge of a rock.
For a sip of your soul’s secret,
my fixation and my demise,
I was your lip to kiss in a nightmare
through nights filled with fear.
Then my hot, hazy kiss
cooled over the true marble
of that half-open, frozen lip …
That discreet, marble lip,
harsh like a closed tomb,
hushed like a silent sea.
7
Viola Chinesa
Ao longo da viola morosa
Vai adormecendo a parlenda
Sem que amadornado eu atenda
A lenga-lenga fastidiosa.
Sem que o meu coração se prenda,
Enquanto nasal, minuciosa,
Ao longo da viola morosa,
Vai adormecendo a parlenda.
Mas que cicatriz melindrosa
Há nele que essa viola ofenda
E faz que as asitas distenda
Numa agitação dolorosa?
Ao longo da viola, morosa ...
8
Chinese Viola
To the tune of a slow viola
idle-chatter goes to bed.
Bleary-eyed, I don’t attend
to humdrum palaver.
My heart beats on
as snuffling, fussy
idle-chatter goes to bed
to the tune of a slow viola.
This heart—what faint scar does it bear
that melody provokes,
to make those tiny wings stretch
in restless dolor?
Slowly, to the tune of a viola …
9
Depois da luta e depois da conquista
Fiquei só! Fora um acto antipático!
Deserta a Ilha, e no lençol aquático
Tudo verde, verde, — a perder de vista.
Porque vos fostes, minhas caravelas,
Carregadas de todo o meu tesoiro?
— Longas teias de luar de lhama de oiro,
Legendas a diamantes das estrelas!
Quem vos desfez, formas inconsistentes,
Por cujo amor escalei a muralha,
— Leão armado, uma espada nos dentes?
Felizes vós, ó mortos da batalha!
Sonhais, de costas, nos olhos abertos
Reflectindo as estrelas, boquiabertos…
10
After the Battle and After the Fall
After the battle, aftermath—in victory,
I am alone. It was a mean business.
The islands are empty and the sea—
green into the distance.
Why did you leave, my caravels,
laden with my spoils?
Golden moonbeam gossamers
laid maps to diamond stars.
Who unmade the fragile silhouettes
for whose love I scaled high walls
and slayed a fearless lion?
Lucky you are, war’s victims,
who open-eyed dream of the shore,
reflecting starlight, mouths-open.
11
Vida
Choveu! E logo da terra humosa
Irrompe o campo das liliáceas.
Foi bem fecunda, a estação pluviosa!
Que vigor no campo das liliáceas!
Calquem, recalquem, não o afogam.
Deixem. Não calquem. Que tudo invadam.
Não as extinguem. Porque as degradam?
Para que as calcam? Não as afogam.
Olhem o fogo que anda na serra.
É a queimada ... Que lumaréu!
Podem calcá-lo, deitar-lhe terra,
Que não apagam o lumaréu.
Deixem! Não calquem! Deixem arder.
Se aqui o pisam, rebenta além.
— E se arde tudo? – Isso que tem!
Deitam-lhe fogo, é para arder ...
12
Life
After the rain soaked the earth,
spring came to a hyacinth field.
The honey milk rain seeped in.
I felt strength amid the freshness.
The rain let up, but you and I
came down, stomping and stomping.
I paused. Let the blossoms breathe
under the rain shower, by the tree.
Don’t crush them.
Now fire rises along the range,
And the burning makes a clearing.
We can stomp on the flames
and lay down sweet earth,
trying to no avail
to smother the bitter smoke
of what’s become a bonfire.
Let it be.
Sidestep the burning brush.
If we stomp here,
it will burn there.
And, if everything burns?
We set a fire meant to burn.
13
Vénus
II
Singra o navio. Sob a água clara
Vê-se o fundo do mar, de areia fina ...
— Impecável figura peregrina,
A distância sem fim que nos separa!
Seixinhos da mais alva porcelana,
Conchinas tenuemente cor de rosa,
Na fria transparência luminosa
Repousam, fundos, sob a água plana.
E a vista sonda, reconstruir, compara.
Tantos naufrágios, perdições, destroços
—Ó fúlgida visão, linda mentira!
Róseas unhinhas que a maré partira ...
Dentinhos que o vaivém desengastara ...
Conchas, pedrinhas, pedacinhos de ossos ...
14
Venus
II
Ships sail, and beneath clear water,
the seafloor stretches, filled with flour sand.
Pilgrim figurines—immaculate—,
there’s endless space between us.
Twilight porcelain pebbles
and shells a pale shade of rose
shimmer coldly with candor,
lying below level sea.
My sight pries, repairs, compares
shipwrecks, downfalls, ruins.
Sunstruck vision tells beautiful lies.
Rosy scales that the tide parted …
Little teeth, uprooted in swaying swell …
Conches, skipping stones, pieces of bone …
15
Crepuscular
Há no ambiente um murmúrio de queixume,
De desejos de amor, d’ais comprimidos ...
Uma ternura esparsa de balidos,
Sente-se esmorecer como um perfume.
As madressilvas murcham nos silvados
E o aroma que exalam pelo espaço,
Tem delíquios de gozo e de cansaço,
Nervosos, femininos, delicados.
Sentem-se espasmos, agonias d’ave,
Inapreensíveis, mínimas, serenas ...
— Tenho entre as mãos as tuas mãos pequenas.
O meu olhar no teu olhar suave.
As tuas mãos tão brancas d’anemia ...
Os teus olhos tão meigos de tristeza ...
— É este enlanguescer da natureza,
Este vago sofrer do fim do dia.
16
Crepuscular
In the air there’s a murmur of a moan,
of love’s longing and carbonated ows.
A scattered ballad’s notes of bleating
fray, like a lace of sprayed perfume.
Honeysuckles dry in the brush—
their breath’s aroma fills the breeze,
as they swoon—from joy and yawn—asleep.
Nervous. Girlish. Pastel.
They feel spasms, birds’ outburst,
Ungraspable. Minute. At ease.
I have in between my hands your tiny hands.
My stare in your smooth stare.
Your hands so pale and anemic
and your eyes so mild in woe
This is nature’s illness—
empty pangs at dusk.
17
Imagens que passais pela retina
Dos meus olhos, porque não vos fixais?
Que passais como a água crystalina
Por uma fonte para nunca mais!...
Ou para o lago escuro onde termina
Vosso curso, silente de juncais,
E o vago medo angustioso domina,
—Por que ides sem mim, não me levais?
Sem vós o que são os meus olhos abertos?
—O espelho inútil, meus olhos pagãos!
Aridez de sucessivos desertos ...
Fica sequer, sombra das minhas mãos,
Flexão casual de meus dedos incertos,
—Estranha sombra em movimentos vãos.
18
Retina
The images that pass on the retina
in my eyes—why won’t you set?
You pass like crystalline waters,
through a fountain to never again…
Or to the dusk lake that ends
your course—silent in the reeds,
where harrowing, vacant fear reigns.
Why do you leave without me?
Without you, what are my open eyes?
This mirror is useless—and my eyes pagans.
The dryness of deserts in sequence…
Now desert, shadow on my hands,
uncertain fingers in haphazard bends—
strange umbras in vain movements.
19
Quando voltei encontrei os meus passos
Ainda frescos sobre a húmida areia.
A fugitiva hora, reevoquei-a,
— Tão rediviva! nos meus olhos baços ...
Olhos turvos de lágrymas contidas.
— Mesquinhos passos, porque doidejastes
Assim transviados, e depois tornastes
Ao ponto das primeiras despedidas?
Onde fostes sem tino, ao vento vário,
Em redor, como as aves num aviário,
Até que a asita fofa lhes faleça ...
Toda essa extensa pista — para quê?
Se há-de vir apagar-vos o maré,
Com as do novo rasto que começa...
20
Footprints
When I returned I found my steps
still fresh on wet sand.
A runaway hour came to mind,
reanimated in my matte eyes …
Eyes now thick with restrained tears.
Tracks of modest means, why dupe
with déjà vu—why travesty yourselves,
returning to the point of former farewells?
You flew unimpeded into the evening wind—
all around, like birds in a cage
until their cotton wings pass away.
These vast clues—for what?
If the tide will come to erase you
and the tracks of the fresh-begun path.
21
Poema Final
Ó cores virtuais que jazeis subterrâneas,
—Fulgurações azuis, vermelhos de hemoptyse,
Represados clarões, cromáticas vesânias —,
No limbo onde esperais a luz que vos baptize,
As pálpebras cerrai, ansiosas não veleis.
Abortos que pendeis as frontes cor de cidra,
Tão graves de cismar, nos bocais dos museus,
E escutando o correr da água na clepsydra,
Vagamente sorris, resignados e ateus,
Cessai de cogitar, o abysmo não sondeis.
Gemebundo arrulhar dos sonhos não sonhados,
Que toda a noite errais, doces almas penando,
E as asas lacerais na aresta dos telhados,
E no vento expirais em um queixume brando,
Adormecei. Não suspireis. Não respireis.
22
Clepsydra: A final poem
The inkwell hell-spring, unready for rapture
traps, you, troubled colors within the depths.
Blues of dying flames and reds
of bloody coughs await asylum—crazed.
In limbo you await the cleansing light.
Now lower your eyelids and dismiss your gaze.
Miscarriages drape that cider brow
bent by heavy brooding—
the gate to your museums.
Listening to the water-clock run,
you smile slightly, resigned and godless.
Stop dwelling. Do not touch the abyss.
You murmur undreamed dreams
and wander the night, sweet souls in sorrow.
You thrash your wings on the rooftop gutter
and breathe smooth sighs into the wind.
Goodnight. Don't sigh. Don’t keep life in.
23
NOTES
INTRODUCTION (i-ii)
Poems translated in the introduction are from Clepsydra and reproduced in Portuguese
below.
“Tatuagens complicadas no meu peito:
Troféus, emblemas, dois leões alados …”
“Foi um dia de inúteis agonias,
Dia de sol, inundado de sol!...
Fulgiam nuas as espadas frias…
Dia de sol, inundado de sol!...”
inundado de sol: lit. flood of sun. Soul was chosen for sake of homophony.
INSCRIPTION [p. 2]
“Eu vi a luz em um país perdido.
A minha alma é lânguida e inerme.
Oh! Quem pudesse deslizar sem ruído!
No chão sumir-se, como faz um verme ...”
If the basis for poetic expression in Clepsydra is the author’s tenuous grip on a desired
reality, his inscription serves as his neuroses’ national anthem. There is, also, a historical
basis for his book’s inaugural pessimism. Pessanha’s generation conspired to successfully
murder its monarch and with his death came the symbolic death of an empire. As a
result, many Portuguese poets wrote in the shadow of a colossus, and Romanesque
register seemed emblematic not of where writers were going, but rather of where they had
been. Pessanha’s inscription acknowledges this decline, and many of Clepsydra’s poems
are concerned with the maritime past of the Portuguese. Pessanha’s verse is replete with
imperial (Greco-Roman) diction.
inerme: lit. helpless. Replaces the inerme/verme rhyme with a near rhyme.
OBLIVION/OLVIDO [p. 4]
Although this poem may signal the emotional tenor in the presented collection, it is the
most fantastical and surreal. Pessanha rams at loggerheads the formal constraints of the
sonnet with illusory images. The poem responds to the disorder with a panicked closing:
the sweat of disquiet pours.
saudade: considered untranslatable by the Portuguese. A profound longing felt in absence
of the most cherished.
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chimera: The mythological and alchemistic readings of the word are of a similar flavor—
Pessanha wants to create the impossible.
véu de luto: lit. widow’s veil.
STATUE/ESTÁTUA [p. 6]
This is one of Pessanha’s more titillating poems, but, as intended, the poem’s
onomatopoeia cools the passions. The sharpness of the consonants breaks (quebrei) the
orotund gaze (olhar).
pélago and ósculo: These words are highly Latinate, even by the standards of a Romance
language. Typical usage would be mar aberto (open sea) and beijo (kiss). I have tried to
reallocate the elevated register elsewhere in the poem by replacing, for example, obsession
(obsessão) and exile (degredo) with the emotionally heightened fixation and demise.
CHINESE VIOLA/VIOLA CHINESA [p. 8]
Pessanha seems bored with the chitchat of others. Here the word seems empty. However,
the (physical) power of language is not lost. The tune of the slow viola—recursively
embedded in the poem in the fashion of human language—converses with and tears at
the narrator’s heart.
lenga-lenga: chitchat. The nursery-rhyme quality of the word intensifies the emptiness of
the soporific conversation; Pessanha quickly recedes into introspection. Humdrum
restores some sonic parity.
AFTER THE BATTLE, AFTER THE FALL/DEPOIS DA LUTA … [p. 10]
This one is a soldier’s poem and acknowledges an arbitrary victory. The sea, perhaps
green with envy, has taken away his spoils (cf. Venus, part II). The defeated victor faces
brutal reality alone, where he finds himself wishing that he dreamed like the dead, who
are one with light.
legendas: As in English, legends can be cartographical or mythological.
silhouettes: This word feels very Portuguese, as it maintains the distinctive lh digraph.
Replaces formas (forms).
espada nos dentes: lit. sword into the teeth.
LIFE/VIDA [p. 12]
This translation is visibly expansive. My rendition is a translation born of two irrefutable
fascinations: one with John Dryden and one with Ezra Pound. Dryden pioneered a trifold
taxonomy for translation theory consisting of metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation.
Vida’s pronoun ambiguity (não o afogam; you/they don’t drown it) felt more comfortable
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in the English with a narrator, and, after I took initiative from imitation, Pessanha and
the reader became coconspirators. Ezra Pound’s cleaner style was infectious and welcome
in a poem about birth and death—a poem about our curt first and last words.
In both English and Portuguese, the poem repents for wrongdoing, and the forces of
nature struggle to respect man’s changing wishes. Ultimately, Pessanha comes to terms
with nature’s self-erasure and his complicity in destructing the self: “We set a fire meant
to burn.”
liliáceas: The flowers Pessanha writes about are lilies. Under the influence of Pound’s
“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” I wrote bluebells, before finally choosing a flower
from the lily family.
calquem, recalquem: The repetition of final nasal vowels inspired “stomping and
stomping.”
VENUS, II/VÉNUS, II [p. 14]
Originally a two part poem, Pessanha’s “Venus, I” is about gluttony. The transition to the
relative poverty in “Venus, II” is made natural by the part one’s final scene in the sand.
“Venus, I” portrays the sand as a hotbed for quarrel, as the waves fight atop. By the start
of the second part, the sand has become sedate. Ships sail above, and the ocean is a
graveyard for the life it once held. The remnants of quarrel in the animal world forebode
the inevitable ruin of the repaired shipwrecks that Pessanha envisions; the shells in the
currents and at the ocean floor are an honest warning.
impecável: lit. impeccable
fúlgida visão: lit. lightening-bright vision. Pessanha uses the term to describe the
hallucinations.
o vaivém: The Portuguese word for a to-and-fro motion or current. To produce the word
imitates its image; the up-and-down changes in vowel height have been approximated
with swaying swell.
CREPUSCULAR [p. 16]
The poem’s rhythm and sounds mimic the very action Pessanha describes. The first
stanza, taken line by line, becomes increasingly compressed—each line starts with round
vowels and ends on a consonant. (The e in queixume and perfume are virtually silent in
the Portuguese). In the second stanza, the sounds bloom when the drying flowers breathe;
the rhythm is reversed to produce vowel-final rhymes. The aroma turns putrid, and the
rhymes react with metaphor: nature is sadness, and the day is anemia (natureza/tristeza;
anemia/dia).
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comprimidos: lit. compressed. The Portuguese is more lively and less scientific than
English’s compressed. Carbonated speaks to the poem’s trapped spring.
ternura: lit. tenderness
agonias d’ave: lit. bird's agonies. In Pessanha’s work birds that suffer abound cf. Retina,
Clepsydra: a Final Poem.
RETINA/IMAGENS QUE PASSAIS… [p. 18]
In starkest contrast with his contemporaries was Pessanha’s obsession with encapsulating
the brightest beauties. Other symbolist poetry often sought to build tombs for la belle
ténébreuse, the shadowy beauty, to steal Baudelaire’s term. Pessanha begs here for
everlasting light to make a permanent imprint in his eyes.
Fica sequer: lit. stay no longer.
sombra: without a doubt, a more prosaic word for shadow than umbra. The two terms
are, however, in close phonetic alignment.
FOOTPRINTS/QUANDO VOLTEI ENCONTREI… [p. 20]
This translation was a great exercise in homophonic translation that retains the texture
and, perhaps unusually, the meaning of the original. The homophone most difficult to
engineer was dupe, with déjà vu for Pessanha’s doidejastes, literally, you fooled. The verb
doidejar calls a lot of attention to itself to begin with, as its etymology is traced directly to
the dodo bird that Portuguese mariners discovered (doido). The poetry is some of
Clepsydra’s most nostalgic.
transviados: lit. perverted. This becomes travesty yourselves, obeying a similar
homophonic principle.
extensa pista: translated as vast clues. The Portuguese word for clue is the same as clew;
vast clues, nearly fast clews, are my nod to the prevalent maritime history of the
Portuguese people and literary tradition.
CLEPSYDRA: A FINAL POEM/POEMA FINAL [p. 22]
The last poem in the original collection, Poema Final is very Christian. The poem’s first
stanza brings the reader to hell where colors wait to escape their entrapment. It’s no
coincidence that the last and namesake poem of Clepsydra implicates colors in salvation
and regret (colors … in limbo await the cleansing light; miscarriages … cider). Pessanha’s
poetry is, after all, a practice of synesthesia. His poem is thematically, then, the final
transformation of the word into a world. The narrator waits anxiously, envisioning his
world through his dictation—he murmurs undreamed dreams.
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Ó cores virtuais que jazeis subterrâneas: lit. O virtual colors that lie underground.
Inkwell hell-spring unready for rapture is more intense, but it compensates for the
reduced Christian content later in the stanza. The original light baptizes.
Abortos: can also mean abortions.
clepsydra: clepsidra, more often called a water clock. It’s suiting that the meditator’s final
comfort is something simultaneously ancient and new with each passing second.
cogitar: lit. cogitate. Dwelling seems particularly appropriate in the context of building
mental worlds.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The translator wishes to thank Peter Cole for his help and advice in preparing the
translations and He Li for his wonderful cover art. The project in its current form would
not be possible without Paulo Franchetti’s O Essencial Sobre Camilo Pessanha.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.1 INTRODUCTION AND PESSANHA’S POETRY
Franchetti, Paulo. O Essencial Sobre Camilo Pessanha. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa Da
Moeda, 2007.
1.2 POEMS
Pessanha, Camilo. Clepsydra. Edited by Gustavo Rubim. Lisboa: Coloquio/Letras, 2000.
Pessanha, Camilo. Clepsydra; Poêmas. Lisboa: Edições Lusitania, 1920.
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