said Rilke one day to no one in particular
as good poets everywhere address the six directions.
If you can’t bow, you’re dead meat. You’ll break
like uncooked spaghetti. Listen to the gods.
They’re shouting in your ear every second.
Jim Harrison, After Ikkyu and Other Poems
Un poème sommeille en moi
Qui exprimera mon âme entière.
Je le sens aussi vague que le son et le vent
Non modelé dans sa forme accomplie.
Il n’a ni stance, ni vers, ni mot.
Il n’est même pas tel que je le rêve.
Rien qu’un sentiment confus de lui,
Rien qu’une brume heureuse entourant la pensée.
Jour et nuit dans mon mystère intime
Je le rêve, je le lis, je l’épelle,
Et sa vague perfection toujours
Gravite en moi à la frange des mots.
Jamais, je le sais, il ne sera écrit.
Je sais et j’ignore à la fois ce qu’il est.
Mais je jouis de le rêver,
Car le bonheur, même faux, reste le bonheur.
*
The poem
There sleeps a poem in my mind
That shall my entire soul express.
I feel it vague as sound and wind
Yet sculptured in full definiteness.
It has no stanza, verse or word.
Ev’n as l dream it, it is not.
‘Tis a mere feeling of it, blurred,
And but a happy mist round thought.
Day and night in my mystery
I dream and read and spell it over,
And ever round words’ brink in me
Its vague completeness seems to hover.
I know it never shall be writ.
I know I know not what it is.
But I am happy dreaming it,
And false bliss, although false, is bliss.
***
Fernando Pessoa (1888—1935) – Poèmes anglais (Points Poésie, 2011) – Traduit de l’anglais par Georges Thinès
Roubado daqui
1.
It came to me one night as I was falling asleep
that I had finished with those amorous adventures
to which I had long been a slave. Finished with love?
my heart murmured. To which I responded that many profound
discoveries
awaited us, hoping, at the same time, I would not be asked
to name them. For I could not name them. But the belief that they
existed–
surely this counted for something?
2.
The next night brought the same thought,
this time concerning poetry, and in the nights that followed
various other passions and sensations were, in the same way,
set aside forever, and each night my heart
protested its future, like a small child being deprived of a favorite toy.
But these farewells, I said, are the way of things.
And once more I alluded to the vast territory
opening to us with each valediction. And with that phrase I became
a glorious knight riding into the setting sun, and my heart
became the steed underneath me.
3.
I was, you will understand, entering the kingdom of death,
though why this landscape was so conventional
I could not say. Here, too, the days were very long
while the years were very short. The sun sank over the far mountain.
The stars shone, the moon waxed and waned. Soon
faces from the past appeared to me:
my mother and father, my infant sister; they had not, it seemed,
finished what they had to say, though now
I could hear them because my heart was still.
4.
At this point, I attained the precipice
but the trail did not, I saw, descend on the other side;
rather, having flattened out, it continued at this altitude
as far as the eye could see, though gradually
the mountain that supported it completely dissolved
so that I found myself riding steadily through the air–
All around, the dead were cheering me on, the joy of finding them
obliterated by the task of responding to them–
5.
As we had all been flesh together,
now we were mist.
As we had been before objects with shadows,
now we were substance without form, like evaporated chemicals.
Neigh, neigh, said my heart,
or perhaps nay, nay–it was hard to know.
6.
Here the vision ended. I was in my bed, the morning sun
contentedly rising, the feather comforter
mounded in white drifts over my lower body.
You had been with me–
there was a dent in the second pillowcase.
We had escaped from death–
or was this the view from the precipice?
–Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night, 2014
Ela vive unicamente assegurada por uma desmesurada confiança. Nesse sentido, a fé tem a forma de uma hipótese. A fé é expectativa. Caminhamos às apalpadelas, como se víssemos o invisível, segundo a bela formulação da Carta aos Hebreus (Heb 11,7).
José Tolentino Mendonça, A Mística do Instante. O tempo e a promessa.
