MARIO FAUSTINO
(1930-1962)
The poetry of Mario Faustino (1930-1962) is a complex mixture of different aspects of the same reality: love and death; the spiritual and the carnal; the classical and the modern; the formal and the informal. The poet will try to order the often antagonistic elements in order to understand the world. Faustino also believed that the poet should try to recover the primitive incantatory power of poetry and that poetry should be important to contemporary man. These were views that he put across in his important “Poetry Experience” page in the Jornal do Brasil from 1956 to 1959. Faustino´s life was cut short by a tragic air crash in Peru.
(From Modern Poetry in Translation. New Series, No. 6 /Winter 1994-95. Special Feature: Modern Poetry from Brazil)
Translation by John Milton
Where will the restarted song hover
Where will the restarted song hover
On the acanthus column of your home?
Where goes on the dance that´s over
On the tiles of my weeping time?
Boy, with sand in my full hands
I count missing stars on the horizon
Of the hiccoughing sand
Where rides the froth of your end, sourceless tears.
Oh youth, canopy of innocence
Will never be spread over another dawn
Clearer than this clear adolescence
Where the brothel of the night devours today.
What´s the impure scarf of the elegy worth
On your face, lucid happiness?
A mis soledades voy*
Night, night after night, another night
Came to remind me of the beauty each
Night thinking of the ulcers of the lashes
Of the sun on my shoulders. Night inherited
From ancestral nights. A golden chain
Of moon linked to moon, star
Joined to star… The clear web
Fished the loneliness of the dream
For the glory of the sparkling find of this
Liquid night. Strange, strange feast
In which you make me drink, burning night:
Shrouds in the east, and in the west
Bonfires of joy…
Hard luck,
To have to leave death for another night.
*(Title in Spanish: “I go to my loneliness”)
Carpe Diem
What shall I do with this day that adores me?
Pull it by the tail, before the
Crimson hour when if sneaks from my feast?
Or put it into music, into lines,
Engrave it in stone, to be smoothed by the sun?
Best where to keep it, and one such day
It would now be leaving a tremendous night,
Brought to bed the night before,
Made a slave of the woman from whom it had fled
Through me, my lyre and voice.
But already I see it covered in shadows,
So deaf to the dream of staying – so noble:
Already the light of death — the moon — is living.
It is going away — made of betrayal.
The world I conquered gave me a love
The world I conquered gave me a love,
A dangerous trophy, this steed
Loaded with armoured princes.
The world I conquered gave a love
Winged and galloping in angry skies
Over any wall of creed,
Over any ditch of sex.
The world I conquered gave a love,
Love made of curses and tears and laughs,
Love to force the gates of hell,
Love to leap the peak of heaven,
Love that sleeps and shivers, that wakes
And turns against me, devours
And chews on me in songs of victory…
I don´t want to love the fleshless arm
I don´t want to love the fleshless arm
That hides in my arm or the silent
Breast that is placed at may side
Where a changed being throbs with fright.
In the present vision of past years,
In the future with no time to care,
In time with no rhythm to transfer
I reject the dead that lies in me.
I want to give myself to the living being that sweats
Afraid of losing myself while here I lie
Red with life and the death in which I lie
In the light of the fiery, grave full moon
Which, if Death calls “Mário” out loud,
It embraces me shivering in my shroud.
Inferno, eternal winter
Inferno, eternal winter, I want to give
Your name to the nameless pain
Of this sunless day, fireless sky, beachless sea,
Spume of the soul at the edge of agony.
Inferno, eternal winter, I want to look
Right into the burning gorge of the elegy,
Autumn and purgatory, climate and home
Of the silent dream, still and cold.
Winter, your inferno doesn´t bring me
More than the hard image of the final judgemenr
With which the loquacious beauty
Of your granite verbs confounds me.
Celestial mask, where the fleeting
Summer of your laughter — paradise?
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The folowing poems are from: BRAZILIAN POETRY 1950-1980. Edited by Emanuel Brasil and William Jay Smith. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. 187 p
ISBN 0-8195-5075-2 cloth 0-8195-6083-0 paper
Here you can find some other Mario Faustino´s poems: Sinto que o Mes Presente me assassina / This month will kill me I feel it; Juventude -/ Youth; Cavossonante Escudo Nosso / Our Hollow-sounding Shield; Moritorus Salutat; Ariazul /Blue Aria.
Prefácio
Quem fez esta manhã, quem penetrou
À noite os labirintos do tesouro,
Quem fez esta manhã predestinou
Seus temas a paráfrases do touro,
A traduções do cisne: fê-la para
Abandonar-se a mitos essenciais,
Desflorada por ímpetos de rara
Metamorfose alada, onde jamais
Se exaure o deus que muda, que transvive.
Quem fez esta manhã fê-la por ser
Um raio a fecundá-la, não por lívida
Ausência sem pecado e fê-la ter
Em si principio e fim: ter entre aurora
E meio-dia um homem e sua hora.
Preface
Who made this morning, who fathomed
The labyrinths of treasure in the night,
Who made this morning predestined
Its text to paraphrases of Taurus
And translations of Cygnus: made it
To be consumed by vital myths,
Deflowered by impulses of a rare
Winged metamorphosis in which the god,
Changing, and living transformed, never tires.
Who made this morning made it so as to be
A ray that could penetrate it, not a pale
Sinless absence, and made it with
Beginning and end in itself: between daybreak
And noon a man and his hour.
Translated by Richard Zenith
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Vida Toda Linguagem
Vida toda linguagem,
frase perfeita sempre, talvez verso,
geralmente sem qualquer adjetivo,
coluna sem ornamento, geralmente partida.
Vida toda linguagem,
há entretanto um verbo, um verbo sempre, e um nome
aqui, ali, assegurando a perfeição
eterna do período, talvez verso,
talvez interjetivo, verso, verso.
Vida toda linguagem,
feto sugando em língua compassiva
o sangue que criança espalhará — oh metáfora ativa!
leite jorrado em fonte adolescente,
sêmen de homens maduros, verbo, verbo.
Vida toda linguagem,
bem o conhecem velhos que repetem,
contra negras janelas, cintilantes imagens
que lhes estrelam turvas trajetórias.
Vida toda linguagem —
como todos sabemos
conjugar esses verbos, nomear
esses nomes:
amar, fazer, destruir,
homem, mulher e besta, diabo e anjo
e deus talvez, e nada.
Vida toda linguagem,
vida sempre perfeita,
imperfeitos somente os vocábulos mortos
com que um homem jovem, nos terraços do inverno, contra a chuva,
tenta fazê-la eterna—como se lhe faltasse
outra, imortal sintaxe
à vida que é perfeita
língua
eterna.
Life Nothing but Language
Life nothing but language,
an always perfect phrase, perhaps verse,
generally without any adjectives,
an unornamented column, generally split.
Life nothing but language,
but there is a word, always a word, and a name
here, there, insuring the eternal
perfection of the period, perhaps verse,
perhaps interjection, verse, verse.
Life nothing but language,
fetus sucking up with compassionate tongue
the blood which child will splatter— oh busy metaphor!
milk spurting in adolescent spring,
semen of mature men, word, word.
Life nothing but language,
as the old ones know, who repeat,
against black windows, scintillating images
that spangle their overcast trajectories.
Life nothing but language —
we all know how
to conjugate those verbs, name
those names:
to love, to make, to destroy,
man, woman and beast, devil and angel
and god perhaps, and nothing.
Life nothing but language,
life always perfect,
only the dead words imperfect,
words with which a young man, in winter's terraces, against the rain,
tries to make it eternal — as if he were missing
another, immortal syntax
for the life that is perfect
eternal
language.
Translated by Richard Zenith
POESIA SEMPRE. Revista da Biblioteca Nacional do RJ. Ano 1 – Número 2 – Julho 1993. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Biblioteca Nacional / Ministério da Cultura – Departamento Nacional do Livro. ISSN 0104-0626m Ex. bibl. Antonio Miranda
This month will kill me I feel it
JL his month will kill me I feel it,
Today's birds were born mute
And time is truly sovereign
Over naked men south of curved moons.
This month will kill me I feel it,
I run unclothed behind a captive christ,
A noble gentleman who loathes me
And lures me to the gall of the crooked light
In the alley of agony where I am watched
By the spatial death that illumines me.
This month will kill me I feel it
And the thieving tempest takes from me the dames
Of sailor apostles who drag me
Along the current where irreverent
Seagulls sample miracled fish.
This month will kill me I feel it,
The roses of this dawn are mourning,
Bells ring irony on the hour
(Libra's scorpions weight out my fate),
There are cloths for imprinting the hard face
By force of sweat, of blood and festering flesh.
This month will kill me I feel it,
The lastborn stars are deformed
And time is truly sovereign
Over the dead who bury their own dead.
Time is truly sovereign,
Amen, Amen I say to thee, is sovereign
And laughs at who hurls words, eternally
False darts that return to
Kill us in a killing month.
Translated by Richard Zenith
Moriturus salutat
The sky blues the pool
the sun sun yellows
the grass.
Man
(Soldier,
your number's up!)
reddens the river.
Centipede,
the footed worm,
advances:
can I laugh at the stag
running for no reason through the woods?
the leech advances,
I run for a reason:
I kill —
I fall, losing all reason,
I die.
The stag runs free
over the gay green hill;
I love.
I feel the stream bleeding (forward!)
— the sky blues the pool, the sun
sun, yellow branch, flyingdice:
oh Fate of one hundred feet, who calls me?
Soldier,
forward! face against
ants,
dedicated soldier, gun,
sociable ants, retreat! for no reason
(enemies?)
face in the mud:
soldier,
who loves you?
Blue yellow green red cube,
death is getting tired:
ant, leech, centipede,
gun pressed against the bones
— they won't give back what is ours;
the sky, sun, river, stag and branch,
gun: "Here lies..."
—Will they give back peace?
Translated by Richard Zenith
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