or
"Mistah Kurz - he delicious."
Eliot says somewhere (I "forget-what-book") only an immature critic is possessed by a writer. It is childish to be possessed. This I admit. But I rarely come across possession anymore, as if Eliot predicted it. Because in reading massively one attains a critical mass, and this critical mass is a means to critique, this critical mass is a means to criticism, and this is a honed critical cynicism that comes en masse. Critical mass is what makes a critic critical. I like to play at being mature in this way much of the time. But. But I am childish today, for today I am absolutely possessed. Possessed by the spirit of a man-eater, a cannibal from Brazil called Haroldo de Campos.
It is harrowing to realize how far we are from modernity. Post-modernity, like Brazil, has no father, no child-hood. He is a dead-beat dad, and we must find him ourselves. And maybe eat him too. We are savages aping in imitation of that "man" of the quattrocento, the man who appeared to us from across the great sea, and who has as yet not returned. We have lost him, we miss him. In this sense we are passed past-modernity or post posed-modernity as you will. First past the post-modernity...The attraction of the work done in/by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is too often monolingualist. Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita I found this by accident in a concrete anthology:
se= reflexive
nasce= birth
morre= death
re= re
des= dis
As I said I found this. And a note by the author calling it a completed Joycean vicocyle. I was astounded. I found out this author champ-champ-champ-ioned Andrade de Oswalde's theory of literary cannibalism (long food-chain here: Amerigo, Montaigne, Rousseau, Picasso, Levi-Strauss). That he translated (he calls it transcreated) from Arnaut, Dante, Li Po, Basho, the whole Iliad, Mallarme, much more. That he spearheaded a vortextual renaissance (renascence?) in Brazil. That Derrida, Umberto Eco, others of such, laud him as a dreadful New World God.
Then I found that our esteemed purple prosed Canadian-Ivy University has a single book about him. Tucked deep in the jungles of the Brazil section. In English. With about 10 pages of his actual work. I devoured this whole and devoured his mummy whole.
I do not have the patience to seek out the one recently-made-but-already-out-of-print translation collection. Nor is it even dual-language. I found a single Portuguese volume in our library of his work with his brother Augusto and Decio Pignatari, De Noigandres I, and I impatiently translated/devoured his portion myself. I was too impatient to wait upon or to become a scholar of Portuguese. Here is the result of my latest immature non-critical innaccurate child-like tut-tut-said-T.S.-Eliot obsession. They do not happen nearly enough anymore. (...has not a little to do with my current degree):
TRANSLATION OF
Thalassa Thalassa
Haroldo de Campos
I
We do not know of the sea.
The virile Sea with his testicles of gold
The Sea with his cardial heart of green
leaves
And his immense bronchial gills of imprisoned fish
The sea, not that which gives our coasts
Panthers of foam that the domestic
women
In their latex nets
King of byzantium and moving unguent between
wives
The manicured hands.
We do not know of the sea.
The day confines us between poor matter of
silent wood
Between those hollow birds, those horses of power and
that electronic mucous
And at night we adore the Sun of Galalite and the
Forceful Ace of Spades
Meanwhile the cynocephalus runs above
our rooves
Expecting the Naked-Mother that will have to appear
with her tiny breasts
Beautiful like the musk that gnaws the pituitaries
And the dead sables enwrapping her
buttocks of silver.
II
We do not know of the sea.
O trumpets of bone!
Broken deaf face down in the sand!
-A bird who gets lost in the sky of
cellophane
Forgetting its own sea cry of the gull.
Here is the Death of Six-Feet-Under
And the triple crown of lead around the brow
Death, the Big-Dog mounting a black
donkey
Advances tolling the drums of mourning.
Here is Terra-Firma and the Ship-Anchors
The Wood-of-the-Law and the Contruction-of-Stone
-The man who reads sortes in sacred guts
Hangs from his door the bucranium of the crazy.
... And they speak of an antique City
Like those coins of clay
And living like the odour of the rose.
Of its markets where is drunk the wine of the lotus
Of its destinies entrusted to Ancients
bearded of papyrus
Of its Laws, of its Deities, and of its
Virgins, its Kings:
And the immense dike of stone erected for its
people
To hold off the sea
- there are those towers of silver that we see in the
lowtide-
And the The agora like a green
bat
Collecting the membranes of wings and their reverse
Hanging
Like a green bat in its lunar siesta.
III
I also practice the funereal rites of the
Rose
When the Friends -The Templars of a
Mystery without a Temple-
Cross lances and take leave in a melancholy
farewell
I know nothing of the sea, but the Poem supplants it,
And a scarab of emerald lands on my forehead
Speaks to me in his crude maritime gibberish.
-The Sea, Cockerel Sultan with its bugle of
Spain
Its triumph of three hundred colts of amethyst
When beautiful and animal it gnaws its own
entrails
And a hilt of salt slaughters itself on the horizon.
The Sea recumbent on its dorsal of green
leaves
Sargon from a distant dynasty of purple
Dom Diniz labourer of his labours of foam
Falconero, and in the man his falcon-the
Moon.
-The Sea,
Not that lion of gemstones that gives to our
beaches
Hydropic Sun, tiger
Of sunflower which the women tame with a
triangle
Nubile in their bellies of benzoin and electromagnet.
-The Sea, shaggy young'un
With pisces in the groin
-The Sea, cardial heart
Riddled with swordfish
And in the breast of the hard marine substance
The coral skeleton of all its own deaths.
IV
And a child rose among the men and he feels
Himself among the wise
(Your sign, o Mystery, the carbuncle about
the brow of lynxes!)
A child of magnificent orphanage, like the
last of a Race,
Between the People of the Caves, the people of Terra-
Firma
The Feeders-on-Earth
Whose firstborns fester in pitchers
of clay
And they are the gods of concrete, the forefathers, the
lares
Of the Constructions-of-Stone and the Goods-of-the-root.
A child feels himself among the wise and rises
among the men!
The Bastard, the Heir,
Alleged from a line in extinction
(Like the hybrids of a species carrying the
barren seed)
And he speaks of the Sea and of ancestors
of limpid marine generations
To the Doctors who write upon placards
of adobe
To the women who tint the nails of their feet
with enamel of murex
And to a man who buries his dead in
The mornings of Sunday
Placing beneath the tongue a small
coin
And stuffing the bowels with natron and spices.
V
A child, and his brow
Like the wing of a bird of ivory.
A child, and his voice like the temper of a
sword
And a sunstroke of vowels restoring the
langue-d'oc from predictions!
VI
-You, Lioness-Goddess
O death of bronze spurs
-Maritime Death, not of the Six-Feet-
Under...-
Lift the trident of gold, favour
As well the trade winds of the Poem.
Baroque Vrigin, figure
On the prow of ships
Shake the abysmal head of hair perfumed with
octopus
When the Sea-Admiral carries you away and the
Tattoos on the fish
With the coral skeleton of all his
dead.
Sustain the cadence of the poem, o Favourite one,
Of nude funerals for besieged eunuchs
Meanwhile those clear dates like digitals
open above You
And on Your flank you steer by the warlike shoal
of the dolphins.
* * *
And You, Tree of Language,
Mother of the Word,
Whose roots catch in the belly button of the Sea
Your cup rises alight with dialects
Where Paradise-Avenue and an Iris of Alliance
And the phoenix devours its very own rubies.
Recieve this pure-blood idiom as a golden votive
And the first-fruits of the Poem, unyoked
heifer
Be they agreeable to you!
You, Mother of the Word encircled by nude
hesperides.
Of whom it is said has the sinister voice of the oracle
And biforked like the tongue of the Dragon.
VII
A Child, and his Song
Like a little salt in the rites of Friendship.
VIII
... But one day the People will tire of hearing it.
The people will tire of calling "The Just!"
(That day the telephones will be
gargantuan hollow birds
Repeating forever the perfidious names
of Exile
And domestic scorpions will have devoured
The tongues of the nightingales
So that all can hear the irrefutable
Dialect of the Electronic Brain)
-And just as the Ten Thousand who saw the sea and
said "The Sea!"
-And just as the Doge of silver harness in the
nuptial Bucentaur
-Or that creature -the jellyfish- of pure
marine substance
So limpid that the retina does not filter -blue without
taint,
A man falls from Terra-Firmas and
gains
The Sea
-The Sea virile like his testicles of gold
-The Sea, fatherly of raging thorax
And sonorous lungs of corralled buffalo
And against that immense heart of nard
and green leaves,
Collects its filial heart surrounded by amethysts.
***
-And that helmet of purple that we see in the
descent of the waters...
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