I’m having trouble focusing on this poem, which I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Pedro and Inês, and holding it in my head while translating, long enough to take it all in so I’m going to write out a translation of the five pages I have in English. I can’t find a version of it online other than this which only really allows you to see a tiny piece at a time so if you want the original you’ll need to buy it like a decent upstanding citizen.
CAPÍTULO XXVII
COMO ELREI DOM PEDRO DE PURTUGAL DISSE POR DONA ENES QUE FORA SUA MOLHER REÇEBIDA E DA MANEIRA QUE ELLO TEVE
How I predicted the night. How many times.
How many times I rested on the deep darkness
Or your sleep only noticing one or another small sound
By night I search for your earthly now
That tiny god-space* like those ships ate deserted
Like everything is strange to anything that lives. Under the night here
I enclose the secret of these rites,
Taking apart this, my bodily landscape
Feeding an ancient glow
Hair I understood. I say nothing, this time must be valued
Little by little I renounce the sun
For the water of your eyes
I have to wait so long. This death happens slowly
I have no hunger, thirst or desire
I just come back by another road
These ships are ours
The little greyhound that sits here
Was the one that was born out of the cold we learned about
Tonight I lost myself in your fingers
I repeated your steps walking not
as fast as you wanted
that before the sunrise we would say it
See how the landscape changes. I don’t even find despair
and how many times I say I don’t have anyone here
Only this ship, undoubtedly the most beautiful
To show you.
Apparently nothing changed but in truth everything changed
A wind passed me by like the wake
of gulls on the surface of the sea
These stones in place, these arches covered in limes
Your absence drawn by a stone
Walking toward me
I don’t remember any more
My memory has swept itself clean of your face under the work of hands
And however many times I say
You can’t bear alteration
It’s late. The moon is dying. I let myself sleep.
COMO ELREI DOM PEDRO DE PURTUGAL DISSE POR DONA ENES QUE FORA SUA MOLHER REÇEBIDA E DA MANEIRA QUE ELLO TEVE
The day on which the arrival of summer was announced
The month of June, I tried to hear, drom the valley
The singing and the shouts that say the arrival of the traveller
By words of the present
Maybe I won’t find you again while this body
Stays until the time of your death
There won’t be movement. How will I be able? If
I have to separate destruction in myself
You will have to set out to find me. By the road and in the course of centuries
Those who will come to life, what part of them will come to be the same,
We are alone. Without a third person let alone more
While the night is what we alone open – that
By night you wait, seeming like earth, the earth itself in the nighttime still
Over time I will bring as much as you need. A long time ago
Chance had no part in our meeting, searching for the
Most distant, the thing that grows. It’s what I want to tell you
Far from trying at each step the beginning or the reliable piety
For sustenance over the years. The lack of response will never
Cease to pursue me. Reply to me.
We feel the pain, the knowledge the causes the forms
The things break like everything and what remains stands out
The difference, the meaning among the innovation
The inception in the act and in the wanting. The wise
finality of existence.
The end is to know you. Nothing else. I see you watching me
Even in the mirror of the sword blades, eroded
By rust, by so much
The sun still hasn’t set
There are men who think a lot. I don’t know if they bring a joyful heart to their work with the stone. They greet us and offer consultations. Nobody contradicts them. They don’t have the one thing I need to win: Your praise.
Nothing erases it from my memory. Because
I imitated the acts. I bring them with me. I guard them.
It’s a small thing.
Please, repeat with me the song:
The eyes are light
And anyone who stares into them
Has the rain, the sun,
That he requires
The current emphasises
the green, the green of your eyes.
* “esse mínimo espaço deus” – sounds like it should mean something but I’m not sure what! Deus isn’t capitalised so I am taking it as him meaning the space has some sort of godlike power, rather than it being some sort of space for God
Oof. I probably could have written a lot more footnotes for that one because there are lots of lines that make little sense to me.
Luso 