Carlos Drummond de Andrade - Multitudinous Heart

into the strange geometrical order

of all that is, and the primordial

absurdity, its riddles, its truths

above all monuments raised to truth,

and the gods from every age, and the solemn

feeling of death, which also thrives

on the stalk of the most sublime existence—

all of it appeared to me in that flash

and summoned me to its august realm,

submitted at last to human vision.

But since I was slow to respond

to that so wondrous invitation,

my faith having waned, and even my yearning,

even my slightest hope — the wish

that the trace of gloomy dark still lurking

amid the sun’s bright rays would vanish;

and since my dead beliefs, when summoned,

did not in frenzied haste emerge

to color once more the neutral face

I wear on the paths I follow;

and as if another self, in place of

the one who has lived in me for years,

had taken over my already fickle

will, which promptly and tightly closed

like one of those reticent flowers

both open and shut within themselves,

as if a belated gift had ceased

to appeal and instead deserved disdain,

I lowered my eyes, indifferent, tired,

scorning the thing that had opened up

to give itself to my understanding.

The sternest dark had already settled

on the stony road of Minas Gerais,

and the Machine of the World, rejected,

put itself carefully back together

while I went on my way, hands

at my sides, weighing what I had lost.

Deus me deu um amor no tempo de madureza,

quando os frutos ou não são colhidos ou sabem a verme.

Deus — ou foi talvez o Diabo — deu-me este amor maduro,

e a um e outro agradeço, pois que tenho um amor.

Pois que tenho um amor, volto aos mitos pretéritos

e outros acrescento aos que amor já criou.

Eis que eu mesmo me torno o mito mais radioso

e talhado em penumbra sou e não sou, mas sou.

Mas sou cada vez mais, eu que não me sabia

e cansado de mim julgava que era o mundo

um vácuo atormentado, um sistema de erros.

Amanhecem de novo as antigas manhãs

que não vivi jamais, pois jamais me sorriram.

Mas me sorriam sempre atrás de tua sombra

imensa e contraída como letra no muro

e só hoje presente.

Deus me deu um amor porque o mereci.

De tantos que já tive ou tiveram em mim,

o sumo se espremeu para fazer um vinho

ou foi sangue, talvez, que se armou em coágulo.

E o tempo que levou uma rosa indecisa

a tirar sua cor dessas chamas extintas

era o tempo mais justo. Era tempo de terra.

Onde não há jardim, as flores nascem de um

secreto investimento em formas improváveis.

Hoje tenho um amor e me faço espaçoso

para arrecadar as alfaias de muitos

amantes desgovernados, no mundo, ou triunfantes,

e ao vê-los amorosos e transidos em torno,

o sagrado terror converto em jubilação.

Seu grão de angústia amor já me oferece

na mão esquerda. Enquanto a outra acaricia

os cabelos e a voz e o passo e a arquitetura

e o mistério que além faz os seres preciosos

à visão extasiada.

Mas, porque me tocou um amor crepuscular,

há que amar diferente. De uma grave paciência

ladrilhar minhas mãos. E talvez a ironia

tenha dilacerado a melhor doação.

Há que amar e calar.

Para fora do tempo arrasto meus despojos

e estou vivo na luz que baixa e me confunde.

God gave me a love when, late in the season,

fruit isn’t harvested, or it tastes wormy.

God — or the Devil? — gave me this late love,

and I thank them both, because I have a love.

Because I have a love, I take up the old myths

created by love, and I add a few new ones.

I become a myth more radiant than any

and, sculpted in dusk, I am and am not, but I am.

But I am, more and more, I, who was tired

of a self I didn’t know and who deemed the world

a tortured void, a system of errors.

The long-ago mornings that I never lived,

since for me they never smiled, are dawning again.

But they always smiled from behind your shadow,

vast and contracted like a letter on the wall

and now present at last.

God gave me a love because I deserved it.

From all the loves I’ve had, or that had me,

the juice was squeezed to make a wine,

or perhaps this is a product of clotted blood.

And the time it took a hesitant rose

to extract its color from those spent flames

was the right time. It was earthly time.

Where there’s no garden, flowers sprout from a

secret investment in unlikely forms.

Today I have a love and make room in myself

to collect the paraphernalia of the many lovers,

disastrous and triumphant, the world has known,

and seeing them all around me possessed by passion,

I convert holy fear into jubilation.

Love’s left hand is already giving me

its grain of anxiety, while its other hand fondles

the hair, the voice, the step, the architecture,

and the immortal mystery that makes someone wondrous

to our enraptured vision.

But since I was touched by a twilight love,

I must love differently, paving my hands

with a grave patience. And it may be that irony

has torn and distorted this greatest of gifts.

I must love and say nothing.

Outside of time I drag my remains,

alive in this declining, confounding light.

… O apartamento abria

janelas para o mundo. Crianças vinham

colher na maresia essas notícias

da vida por viver ou da inconsciente

saudade de nós mesmos. A pobreza

da terra era maior entre os metais

que a rua misturava a feios corpos,

duvidosos, na pressa. E do terraço

em solitude os ecos refluíam

e cada exílio em muitos se tornava

e outra cidade fora da cidade

na garra de um anzol ia subindo,

adunca pescaria, mal difuso,

problema de existir, amor sem uso.

… The apartment opened

windows to the world. Children came

to glean from the ocean air the news

of life to be lived or of that inner life

we forget we’re missing. The poverty

of earth was greater among the metals

mixed up on the street with ugly bodies

in a hurry, unsure. The echoes receded

in solitude from the terrace,

and every exile turned into many,

and another city outside the city

rose slowly on a fishhook, a crooked

catch, a widespread ill, a problem

of existing, unused love.

Na curva perigosa dos cinquenta

derrapei neste amor. Que dor! que pétala

sensível e secreta me atormenta

e me provoca à síntese da flor

que não se sabe como é feita: amor,

na quinta-essência da palavra, e mudo

de natural silêncio já não cabe

em tanto gesto de colher e amar

a nuvem que de ambígua se dilui

nesse objeto mais vago do que nuvem

e mais defeso, corpo! corpo, corpo,

verdade tão final, sede tão vária,

e esse cavalo solto pela cama,

a passear o peito de quem ama.

Reaching the dangerous curve of my fifties

I skidded into this love. How dire!

How sensitive and secret a petal

torments me and makes me synthesize

this flower whose growth is a mystery: love

in the quintessence of the word, and mum