Three Poems by Lêdo Ivo

Translated from the Portuguese by Andrew Gebhardt

The Crows 

To this day I see the crows.
The grass was their abode.
None of them cawed.
I’ll always remember the crows
and the luster of their feathers
that shone on the unmoving day.
Whenever I’m walking through a big city
and cross a bridge above a river
the silent crows accompany me.
It’s that silence that disturbs me.
The silence of the crows on the grass.
The silence of the world when there are crows.

Cockroach

Praise the cockroach,
queen of the world,
inheritor of the earth.
This evening
she advances, dark
and magnificent
nuclear bride.
Along the gutter
among so many rumors
that deafen life
she pauses, alert,
her sheathed wings detecting
the first signals
among the stars, of war.

Image of the Desert

Here there are no more birds.
They have all left, in search of new forests
to reconstruct their nests.
Here it no longer rains.
Hunger advances across the cracked land
with a rusty plow.
In the dry riverbed, stones shine
between drowsy cobras.
And cobwebs hang from warehouse rafters.
Here there are no longer birds or fish.
The dead are buried without flowers.
Our hearts, too, have dried up.
We have no more love.
In the evening our shadows stop crawling
across the rough ground that blinds hoes,
and gaze up resentfully at the starry sky.
But we were the ones who cut down the forests and dried up the river.
This desert was once our kingdom.

Lêdo Ivo was born in Brazil’s northeast state of Alagoas in 1924, and wrote prolifically, producing poetry, essays, novels, short stories, and journalism. He wrote passionately of his beloved native city of Maceió, but was equally a citizen of the world, at home writing from many places and perspectives. He was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and has received numerous national and international awards for his writing, including the Casa de las Américas prize for Brazilian literature in 2009. He also translated into Portuguese work by Jane Austen, Arthur Rimbaud, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Lêdo Ivo’s writing began to appear in the 1940s and continued steadily with dozens of books until his death in 2012, creating a distinguished body of work in several genres, and crafting highly original poetry — from sonnets and short aphoristic poems to prose and persona poems. Though he is an important figure in Brazilian letters, and his work has been amply translated in other languages, the vast majority of his poetry has yet to appear in English (a novel, Snakes’ Nest, was published by New Directions in 1981). I believe that this is an unfortunate lacuna for readers of poetry in English, and I am pleased to present these examples of his work drawn from several of his books.—Andrew Gebhardt

Andrew Gebhardt is a writer and teacher who has lived in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, and Cyprus. He is working on translations of poems by Lêdo Ivo as well as his unique memoir, Confissoẽs de um poeta.

Published January 30 2022