Poetry

Four Poems from Orides Fontela's Transposition (1969), translated by Chris Daniels

Brazilian poet Orides Fontela (1940-1998) taught philosophy at University of Sao Paulo for a time, and was also a librarian. Her third book of poems, Alba (Aubade, 1983), won the Premio Jabuti, one of Brazil's prestigious literary awards. Some have described her as eccentric, though it is also well known that her life was circumscribed by serious illness, easily cause for eccentricity. She was born syphylitic, and later in life, tuberculosis exacerbated by alcoholism brought an early death at age 58. Translator Chris Daniels writes that, poetically, she was a "quiet visionary," and can be "ectatic, but it's terribly clear she was wounded--not alienated, but wounded, spiritually, and her work is at least partly a way to deal with that bitter wound, which must have had something to do with being born syphilitic into an impoverished and illiterate working-class family and being constantly faced with literary people who took their educations for granted and who for the most part simply weren't her equals as poets--she was very much aware of her unique worth."

THIRST

1.

To drink the hour
to drink water
to get drunk
on water alone.

2.

Water? Only this
purifies.

3.

Greater spring 
unhidden spring
with neither Narcissus
nor flowers.

4.

Blessed be thirst
for tearing our eyes away
from stone.

Blessed be thirst
for teaching us the purity
of water.

Blessed be thirst
for gathering us around
the spring.

THE NAME

Choice of name: that's everything.

Name circumscribes
the new man: same,
repetition of the human
in unnamed being.

Man all blank, word's
virgin
is to be evented:
his naked existence
begs the name.

Blank
sacred name that does
not define, yet points:
that nears it to us
marked by the human verb.

Choice of name: that's
the secret.

SENSATION

I see the bird sing
I touch this song with my nerves
its taste of honey. Its form
generating itself from the bird
as aroma.

I see the bird sing and through
denser perception
I hear distance opening
like a rose
in silence.

RECUMBENT STATUE

I

Contained
in its free abandon
dynamism feeds
on its own pure contention.

Recumbent
an atmosphere encircles
silence with such force, 

as if one, recumbent, guarded
secret's total gesture.


II

The recumbent
is more than the dead: it inhabits
times unknown
to dead and living.

The recumbent
ressucitated to silence
possesses itself in being
and inhabits us.

 
III

We see only repose
as a neutral face
beyond all it
signifies.

(But if we saw ourselves
in the totalized verb
-form concentrated
beyond us-

(But if we saw ourselves
in being's contention
repose would be
clearcut expression.)

We see only
repose:
word's contention
in silence.

IV

It is recumbent
upon the real, the useless
gesture: this palm.

Word conquered
and forever inexhaustible.