Carlos Drummond de Andrade - Multitudinous Heart

passeias brandamente

como ao que vai morrer se estende a vista

de espaços luminosos, intocáveis:

em mim o que resiste são teus poros.

Corto o frio da folha. Sou teu frio.

E sou meu próprio frio que me fecho

longe do amor desabitado e líquido,

amor em que me amaram, me feriram

sete vezes por dia em sete dias

de sete vidas de ouro,

amor, fonte de eterno frio,

minha pena deserta, ao fim de março,

amor, quem contaria?

E já não sei se é jogo, ou se poesia.

I’ve earned (I’ve lost) my day.

And that cold thing called night

falls, and the cold blends with cold

to make fog, in a breath.

And I question myself and breathe that same self

in the parting of this day that was a thousand

for me who expected

big, explosive suns. I felt rich

with this day, and there it quietly went,

behind the cold ridge.

Did I lose my soul in the prime of day, or had I lost

that vague treasure in a prior age?

But why wonder when, if I was lost

before birth

and in birth I woke up to a life of losing

fruits I never had and would never harvest?

I spent my day. And lost myself.

Out of so many losses a clear path

was bound to open

from me to me, a cold headstone.

The trees outside reflect on their treeness.

In me the winter’s warm, since I cradle it,

and it melts in me

this crying lump of salt.

Oh, enough laments and verses uttered

to the ear of a faceless being without justice,

to the ear of a wall,

to the smooth, dripping ear

of a pool that distractedly weaves

its watery rug, indifferent to time.

I’m going to retreat

to the strongbox of ghosts, where news

of the lost can’t reach me nor catch the attention

of watchful love’s patrolling eyes.

Don’t look for me: I’ve lost myself

as some men kill themselves, and eels

retreat to their cold-water dens.

Day:

a mirror of what I didn’t live,

and yet the life the gods promised

was so vibrant; and it is so austere

amid deserted chapels

where a baroque soul seeking comfort

discerns, in the coldness, only more coldness.

My God, essence extraneous

to the vessel or useless form I feel is me,

since I, in my essence, am not fit

to inhabit your lofty architecture;

my God and my conflict,

I don’t plead my cause or defy

your ineffable claws. I witness

my slow dissolution, resigned

to becoming open country treaded on

by serfs, oxen, and soldiers in the service

of darkness, and by a child

the new era promises but denies me.

Earth I bow to, under the cold

of my brow growing longer in time,

earth I feel closer to, the more I inhale

the ancient scent of my relatives in you,

earth that’s my earth, I’m yours; and indulgently

you stroll your captive

even as men doomed to die are given

to see luminous, untouchable expanses:

what in me still resists are your pores.

I cut the leaf’s coldness. I am your coldness.

And I’m my own cold closing in on me,

far from the liquid love I fled,

the love of others loving me, wounding me,

seven times a day seven days out of seven

in seven golden lives,

love, fountain of eternal cold,

my pain and pen abandoned, at the end of March,

love, who’d tell the story?

And I don’t know if it’s a game, or poetry.

Não cantarei amores que não tenho,

e, quando tive, nunca celebrei.

Não cantarei o riso que não rira

e que, se risse, ofertaria a pobres.

Minha matéria é o nada.

Jamais ousei cantar algo de vida:

se o canto sai da boca ensimesmada,

é porque a brisa o trouxe, e o leva a brisa,

nem sabe a planta o vento que a visita.

Ou sabe? Algo de nós acaso se transmite,

mas tão disperso, e vago, tão estranho,

que, se regressa a mim que o apascentava,

o ouro suposto é nele cobre e estanho,

estanho e cobre,

e o que não é maleável deixa de ser nobre,

nem era amor aquilo que se amava.

Nem era dor aquilo que doía;

ou dói, agora, quando já se foi?

Que dor se sabe dor, e não se extingue?

(Não cantarei o mar: que ele se vingue

de meu silêncio, nesta concha.)

Que sentimento vive, e já prospera

cavando em nós a terra necessária

para se sepultar à moda austera

de quem vive sua morte?

Não cantarei o morto: é o próprio canto.

E já não sei do espanto,

da úmida assombração que vem do norte

e vai do sul, e, quatro, aos quatro ventos,

ajusta em mim seu terno de lamentos.

Não canto, pois não sei, e toda sílaba

acaso reunida

a sua irmã, em serpes irritadas vejo as duas.

Amador de serpentes, minha vida

passarei, sobre a relva debruçado,

a ver a linha curva que se estende,

ou se contrai e atrai, além da pobre

área de luz de nossa geometria.

Estanho, estanho e cobre,

tais meus pecados, quanto mais fugi

do que enfim capturei, não mais visando

aos alvos imortais.

Ó descobrimento retardado

pela força de ver.

Ó encontro de mim, no meu silêncio,

configurado, repleto, numa casta

expressão de temor que se despede.

O golfo mais dourado me circunda

com apenas cerrar-se uma janela.

E já não brinco a luz. E dou notícia

estrita do que dorme,

sob placa de estanho, sonho informe,

um lembrar de raízes, ainda menos

um calar de serenos

desidratados, sublimes ossuários

sem ossos;

a morte sem os mortos; a perfeita

anulação do tempo em tempos vários,

essa nudez, enfim, além dos corpos,

a modelar campinas no vazio

da alma, que é apenas alma, e se dissolve.

I won’t sing of loves that I don’t have

and didn’t celebrate when I had them.

I won’t sing of laughs never laughed

and which, if laughed, I’d give to the poor.

My subject matter is nothingness.

I’ve never dared sing about things from life.

If a song comes out of my self-centered mouth,

the breeze brought it, and will take it away,

nor does the plant know what wind shakes it.

Or does it? Something of us is imparted,

but it’s so hazy, scattered, and strange

that if it comes back to me, who launched it,

its supposed gold is tin and copper,

copper and tin,

and what’s not malleable isn’t noble,

and what was loving wasn’t love.

And what was hurting wasn’t pain,

or does it still hurt, after it’s gone?

What pain, knowing it’s pain, doesn’t cease?

(I won’t sing of the sea; let it avenge

my silence through this seashell.)

What feeling lives and already thrives

by digging in us enough ground

to bury itself with the grim resolve

of someone living his own death?

I won’t sing that death: it’s the selfsame song.

And I’ve quit caring about fear,

about the wet terror that comes from the north,

rises out of the south, and four-foldedly clads me

unto the four winds with its three-piece suit of sorrows.

I don’t sing, for I don’t know how, and when a syllable

happens to join up

with its sister, I see them as two vexed serpents.

A lover of snakes, I’ll spend my life

bent over the grass, watching

the wavy line that lengthens, then

contracts and attracts, beyond the meager