Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (36)

To the Veritable Judge Belchoir da Cunha Brochado

 

Learn’                          wis                                noble huma                  afa

               >d                          >e                                               >n                      >ble

Principle                      awar                                         benig                amia

 

Differ                                      singular preci                                    unshaka

               >ent                                                  > ous                                           >ble

Magnific                                              ilustri                              incompara

 

In the worl                      of grave just                                                inimita

                    > d                                                >ice                                          >ble

Much love           lauds                     slu                              of applause incredi

 

For endeavor        so much work and so tru                                            terri

        > ing                                        > ly                                                > ble

Render                                                 readi              executions always indefatiga

 

Your reputa                  sir, true                                                       noteriet

                        >tion                                                                                        >y

In that loca                   that never sees                                                    da

 

Where from Ereb          there remains only a                                         memor

                            >us                                                                                       >y

So             gracio                        to grant                     such                       energ

 

A      in all thi          land there is            gentle                                         glor

   >s              > s                                                                                                  >y

A      remote a                                         any                                           felicit

 

Translated from Portuguese by Jennifer Cooper

 

Soneto/Sonnet

in Portuguese and Tupi

 

Is there anything like seeing a Paiaia

So much inclined to be a Caramuru,

Descended from the bloodline of the tatu,

Who speaks a twisted language like Cobepá?                           

 

The female line of which is called Carima

Muqueca, pititing, caruru,

Manioc mush, wine of fermented cashew

Mangled in a mortar from Priraja

 

The male line of which is called the Aricobe, 

Whose Cobe daughter and a pale-faced Paí

Cohabited on Passé Promontory

 

The white man was a Mara-u marauder

She an Indian maiden all the way from Mare; 

Cobepá, Aricobé, Cobé, Paí

 

Translated from Portuguese by Jennifer Cooper and Jerome Rothenberg

 

 

Commentary

 

 

If you are fire why do you glow so weakly?

If you are snow why do you burn without a break?

                 — Gregório de Matos

 

(1) [An experimental poet avant la lettre], Gregório de Matos came to be known as Boca de Inferno — “Mouth of Hell” — for his searing criticism and satire directed to the evils and hypocrisies of both the Bahian elites and the Portuguese colonial project in general. After working as a judge in Portugal for thirty years, de Matos returned to his hometown, Salvador, Brazil, where for his activities and his poetry he was banished by the colonial authorities to Angola. A year after, De Matos was allowed to go back to Brazil, where his publications were banned.

 

In his works — which move from the religious to the laudatory, the amorous to the pornographic — he not only criticized and caricatured the elites but registered the daily life and the language of marginalized voices, including Tupi-Guarani and Afro-Brazilian, with a burgeoning move toward a new orality.

 

(2) The opening piece presented here is from a group of laudatory poems, this one to the judge Belchoir da Cunha, of Bahia. The form involves a playful construction common to the anagrams and labyrinthian forms developed first in the Iberian and European Baroque. In the wordplay here, the last letters or suffixes of various words are shared from one line to the next.

 

In “Soneto,” the terminal words of each line are from the indigenous Tupi-Guarani and appear, as in the English version, without translation.

 

[Commentary by Jennifer Cooper]

 

N.B. Another excerpt from the assemblage of the poetry of the Americas “from origins to present,” edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada, is scheduled for publication by the University of California Press.