Two Poems by Luís Miguel Nava
Translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin and Ricardo Vasconcelos
The Color of Bones
There is very little, in general, that we know about our organs and our blood. Comparable to that is the ignorance we quite often bear of our own genealogy, which, for a number of reasons, should be associated with our body.
One day, on a radio program dealing with the Roma people, I heard one being interviewed who said he knew nothing about his origins. The question had probably never come up before. This fact struck me, and it wasn’t long before I came to sense the connection between it and the ignorance in which, quite often, we find ourselves in regard to our own body. If it were possible for me to see a bone or an organ of mine in the street, it would be hard for me to tell the difference between it and one that might have come from other people close by, in the same way that I wouldn’t recognize an ancestor whose portrait I had never held in my hands.
Our anatomy is an enigmatic and distant land upon whose map we never thought to dwell. We carry with us, from birth, hills and mighty rivers about whose growth we have only an external idea, linked mostly to the total weight of it all, as displayed periodically by the dial of an anonymous scale. We have no idea of the fountains that gush within us for years on end, then slowly fade away, nor of what goes on inside us in processes apparently as simple and free flowing as our daily digestion.
Bones are, however, what worry me most. We don’t even know their actual color. Perhaps there are those who have colored bones, some blue, others pink; yet they go through life, sometimes a long existence, without even realizing it. Perhaps there are those who, throughout a lifetime, don’t even notice that they have bones, carrying them around for several decades as if they did not exist. The question that arises here is whether the different colors of their bones might alter the relationship, even if it is ignored, they have with them; that is, whether someone, because his bones are green, or at least some of them green and others blue, feels, for example, happier—even if, I repeat, this question is never posed to him—than someone who has brown bones, or simply bones of a color that cannot be defined clearly, as if only in certain circumstances would it be justified for the question of color to be raised.
Another step forward in these meandering ratiocinations leads us to consider the possibility that bones may take refuge, in certain cases, in our memory, as if the latter were absorbing them and whoever they constituted would then become an invertebrate or reduced to a mere filament on which the shell of memory might seat itself, in the interior of which the entire body might be engulfed until it vanishes from sight.
O Cor Dos Ossos
É muito pouco, geralmente, o que sabemos quer dos nossos órgãos, quer do nosso sangue. Comparável a essa ignorância, só muitas vezes a que diz respeito à nossa genealogia, a qual a vários títulos — e não por isso apenas — deveria ser relacionada com o nosso corpo.
Um dia, num programa de rádio em que falavam dos ciganos, ouvi um, ao ser entrevistado, responder que não sabia nada sobre a sua origem. O problema provavelmente nem sequer se lhe chegara alguma vez a pôr. O facto impressionou-me, e não tardou que viesse a pressentir a ligação que existe entre ele e o desconhecimento em que, não raro, mergulhamos no que toca ao nosso corpo. Se me fosse possível ver na rua um osso ou um órgão meu, dificilmente o distinguiria dos de outras pessoas junto dos quais ele estivesse, do mesmo modo que não conheceria o meu antepassado de quem nunca me chegou às mãos qualquer retrato.
A nossa anatomia é uma terra enigmática e longínqua sobre cujo mapa jamais pensámos debruçar-nos. Carregamos connosco, desde que nascemos, montes e caudalosos rios de cujo crescimento temos uma ideia exterior, ligada sobretudo ao peso que do conjunto periodicamente acusa o mostrador duma balança anónima. Das fontes que dentro de nós durante muitos anos brotam e depois se apagam lentamente, não temos a mínima noção, nem do que dentro de nós se passa em processos aparentemente tão simples e correntes como as digestões diárias.
Os ossos são, no entanto, o que, de tudo isso, mais me preocupa. Desconhecemos deles a própria cor. Talvez haja quem os tenha coloridos, uns deles azuis, os outros cor-de-rosa, e atravesse a vida, às vezes longa, sem que do facto se chegue a aperceber. Há talvez mesmo quem não dê, durante a vida inteira, por ter ossos, carregando-os consigo várias dezenas de anos como se eles não existissem. O problema que daqui decorre é o de saber se o facto de a cor deles divergir altera a relação que, mesmo que o ignore, com eles tem quem os possui; ou seja, o de saber se alguém, por tê-los verdes, ou verdes alguns deles e outros azuis, se sente, por exemplo, mais feliz — ainda que, repito, essa questão se lhe não ponha — do que quem os tem castanhos, ou pura e simplesmente duma cor que como tal se não chegue a definir, como se só em dadas circunstâncias se justificasse que a questão da cor fosse encarada.
Um outro passo a dar nos meandros deste raciocínio é o que nos leva a pôr a hipótese de os ossos se poderem refugiar, em certos casos, na memória, como se esta os absorvesse e quem por eles fosse constituído então se invertebrasse ou reduzisse a um mero filamento onde assentasse a carapaça da memória, no interior da qual o corpo inteiro se engolfasse até completamente se sumir.
*Editors’ note: Writing in the 1980s, Luís Miguel Nava used the term “dos ciganos,” the standard exonym of that decade (as well as now) to refer to the Roma people in Portuguese. In English, Roma or Romani is considered to be the term preferred by the Roma themselves. We’ve chosen to use the currently preferred usage in English to acknowledge that, while an English translation faithful to usage in the 1980s would likely use the word “gypsy,” we also recognize that the usage of that once-common word is currently being challenged and/or discontinued because of its pejorative nature. For example, the Entomological Society of America, which creates the Common Names of Insects Data Base, has recently replaced the common name gypsy moth (used for the widespread, invasive insect Lymantria dispar), with “spongy moth,” referencing the spongy-looking eggs the insect leaves on infected tree trunks rather than perpetuating language that evokes an ethnic slur.
Gentle Wires
Through one of those swift transitions
from winter to windowpane,
from glass to the subtle
dearth of water on distant hope’s horizon,
we enter but we do not see
on the blue side of speed itself
a single bone of ours that might serve
as provender against the course of scarcity.
A bone is a root in chaos.
A root in solitude.
The flesh that covers it lingers in
the gentle narrow wiring
that beneath the shadow of future fossils
is already stirring at the edge of nakedness.
Estreitos Aros Dóceis
Por uma dessas rápidas passagens
do inverno ao vidro,
do vidro à escassez
subtil das águas no horizonte da esperança,
entramos mas não vemos
do lado azul da própria rapidez
um só dos nossos ossos que nos possa
servir de apoio contra o curso da escassez.
Um osso é uma raiz no caos.
Uma raiz na solidão.
A carne que o reveste prende-se aos
estreitos aros dóceis
que sob a sombra de futuros fósseis
se movem já nas margens da nudez.
Luís Miguel Nava’s Poesia, consists of four completed collections, Where Nakedness, Pounding Surf, Beneath My Entrails, Sky, and Volcano, and eighty pages of posthumous publications. It was brought 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. His undaunted examination of the role of eros in the human condition seems most reminiscent of the American writer Paul Bowles and the English painter of torment, Francis Bacon. Poems drawn from his forthcoming collection in English have been accepted by Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, Bitter Oleander, Gavea-Brown, Hollins Critic, Los Angeles Review, Metaforologia, Metamorphoses, Mid-American Review, Osiris, Plume, Poet Lore, 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. His translations have appeared in well over two hundred magazines, including American Poetry Review, Agni, Delos, Epoch, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, New Letters, New York Times, Partisan Review, and Prairie Schooner. 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). Translations from Brazil include five collections of poetry by Salgado Maranhão. Levitin 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 director of the minor in Portuguese at San Diego State University. His scholarly work on modern and contemporary Portuguese literature, focusing on Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós, among others, has been published in several countries. He edited Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s correspondence to Fernando (Em Ouro e Alma — Correspondência de Mário de Sá-Carneiro com Fernando Pessoa) and that author's Poesia Completa. He also published a bibliographic and critical study comparing Herman Melville and Eça de Queirós, José Matias/Bartleby. He is also the author of Campo de Relâmpagos — Leituras do Excesso na Poesia de Luís Miguel Nava [Lightning Field—Readings of Excess in the Poetry of Luís Miguel Nava], the first scholarly volume dedicated to the works of Luís Miguel Nava, which received support from the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. In 2020, he brought forth a long-awaited critical edition of Luís Miguel Nava’s Poesia, from which he and Alexis Levitin have produced an American co-translation.
Published April 25 2022