Poems by Luís Miguel Nava translated by Alexis Levitin and Ricardo Vasconcelos

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Cityscape      

The flesh for blazing

moments opens up to where

the rigor of its reign

becomes unthinkable.

Then all we have of it are rapid

glimpses, next to fleeting signs

from our heart, lonely

and barren, reflected

from behind bones turned now to stone.

From certain angles one can see our spirit-cords 

stretched tight across the inner yard.

Clothing hurts us for, although

it covers up our flesh, it is within

the spirit that the tissue’s weave is set.

Paisagem Citadina

A pele por fulgurantes

instantes muitas vezes abre-se até onde

seria impensável que exercesse

com tão grande rigor o seu domínio.

Não temos então dela senão rápidas

visões, onde os reclames

do coração se cruzam, solitários

e agrestes, reflectidos

por trás nos ossos empedrados.

Em certas posições vêem-se as cordas

do nosso espírito esticadas num terraço.

A roupa dói-nos porque, embora

nos cubra a pele, é dentro

do espírito que estão os tecidos amarrados.

Blindness                   

Vasconcelos

A sudden brushstroke 

does not give 

the exact dimensions of the flesh,

though it is there the heart proclaims itself.

Everybody knows it, revealing

the cords that bind heart to destiny,

we feel

our skin tear in the blindness of our woven flesh. 

Cegueira

Um traço agudo e anónimo, apesar

de nela o coração fazer publicidade,

não dá

da pele a exacta dimensão.

Qualquer de nós o sabe, ao exibirmos

as correias que prendem ao destino o coração

sentimos

romper-se a pele sob a cegueira dos tecidos.

Portrait                

Vasconcelos

Skin was the loneliest part of his body.

There are those who, having locked it

in a chest as deep as the deepest roots,

pretend to not have skin, when

in fact it is but a bit behind in relation to the heart.

With him however it wasn’t like that.

His skin would imitate the sky as best it could.

Small, alone, it was a shy,

a timid skin, which served as a well, 

wherein, more than water, he would seek protection.

Retrato

A pele era o que de mais solitário havia no seu corpo.

Há quem, tendo-a metida

num cofre até às mais fundas raízes,

simule não ter pele, quando

de facto ela não está

senão um pouco atrasada em relação ao coração.

Com ele porém não era assim.

A pele ia imitando o céu como podia.

Pequena, solitária, era uma pele metida

consigo mesma e que servia

de poço, onde além de água ele procurara protecção.

Insomnia  

He closed his eyes, trying to add to the darkness of the room the additional darkness of his entrails. It pleased him, the idea that, through that simple action, he could make the outside and the inside one, as if the darkness in which the room plunged and the darkness emanating from within him were of the same nature, and, through a growing porousness of his body, circulated in both directions until they had completely erased all of his boundaries. In a way, he no longer had a body, or in any case an exterior body, and what would typically be confined in it when there was light could now be reduced to a core or expand itself in circles that could encompass the room, the apartment, the building, the neighborhood, if that made any real sense in the darkness. The only reference was, from time to time, the distant rumble of a passing truck or the whistle of a train on the Sintra line. That sound, which to him was the way in which distance expressed itself, offered him then an enormous pleasure, which could arise either from the fact that his ear had moved closer to his heart, due to the transformation that the darkness had caused in his body, or from the fact that, thanks to the melding of the inside and the outside brought about by the darkness, those noises came to him as if arriving from within himself, from within his own heart, against which his feelings seemed to be resting, and, thanks to the joining of space and time to which the darkness was also propitious, those sounds seemed as if arriving from a remote time, as distant from the present as his bed was from the stretch of highway or railroad from where they would blare out now and then. 

Insónia

Fechou os olhos, procurando adicionar à escuridão do quarto a escuridão suplementar das suas entranhas. Agradou-lhe a ideia de que, através desse simples gesto, pudesse homogeneizar o exterior e o interior, como se as trevas em que o aposento mergulhava e as que dentro de si assim se desprendiam fossem de uma só e mesma natureza e, por uma progressiva porosidade do seu corpo, circulassem em ambos os sentidos até por completo lhe anularem os limites. De certa forma deixava de ter corpo, ou pelo menos um corpo exterior, e o que a ele se atinha quando havia luz podia agora reduzir-se a um núcleo ou expandir-se em círculos que só não abarcavam sucessivamente o quarto, o apartamento, o prédio, o bairro, porque no escuro nada disso chega a ter sentido. A única referência era, de quando em quando, o longínquo motor de um camião ou o apito de um comboio na linha de Sintra. Esse ruído, que em seu entender constituía o modo de a distância se exprimir, proporcionava-lhe então um incomensurável prazer, que tanto podia advir de, na sequência da transformação que as trevas haviam provocado no seu corpo, o ouvido se ter aproximado do coração, como de, graças à assimilação que essas mesmas trevas haviam produzido entre o interior e o exterior, esses ruídos lhe chegarem como vindos de dentro de si próprio, de dentro desse coração a que os sentidos pareciam encostar-se, e, mediante uma identificação entre o espaço e o tempo a que a escuridão também era propícia, se lhe apresentarem como provenientes duma época remota, tão distante do presente como da sua cama o inimaginável troço de estrada ou de linha férrea donde a espaços irrompiam.

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Luís Miguel Nava’s Poesia, consisting of four completed collections and eighty pages of posthumous publications, came out in 2020, twenty-five years after the young poet’s shocking death.  Nava’s poetry relies on a fearless visceral depiction of the body, accompanying surging seas of memory and desire. His work, well-known in Portugal. has also appeared in French and Spanish translations. He seems most reminiscent of Francis Bacon and Paul Bowles. Poems drawn from his forthcoming collection in English have been accepted by Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, Bitter Oleander, Dodge, Gavea-Brown, Hollins Critic, Massachusetts Review, Metaforologia, Metamorphoses, Mid-American Review, Osiris, Plume, Puerto del Sol Rosebud, and Spoon River Poetry Review.

Alexis Levitin has published forty-seven books in translation, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent translations from Portugal include Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press, 2015) and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord (Milkweed Editions, 2016). Recent publications from Brazil include Astrid Cabral’s Gazing Through Water (Aliform, 2021) and Salgado Maranhão’s Mapping the Tribe (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021) and Consecration of the Wolves (Bitter Oleander Press, 2021). He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal, The Catholic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil and has held translation residencies at the Banff Center, Canada, The European Translators Collegium in Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Ricardo Vasconcelos is a 2020-2021 Fulbright U.S. Scholar and Professor of Portuguese at San Diego State University. His scholarly work on modern and contemporary Portuguese literature, including Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós, among other authors, has been published in several countries. He is the author of Campo de Relâmpagos — Leituras do Excesso na Poesia de Luís Miguel Nava [Lightning Field — Readings in Excess in the Poetry of Luís Miguel Nava], and in 2020 he published a long-awaited critical edition of Luís Miguel Nava’s Poesia.

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31 May 2022