The Shield of Achilles

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

W. H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles, Faber & Faber, 1955.

Auden, Entrevista à Paris Review, 1972

Entrevistador: Do you have any aids for inspiration?
Auden: I never write when I’m drunk.
(...)
Entrevistador: Have you read, or tried to read, Finnegans Wake?
Auden: I’m not very good on Joyce. Obviously he’s a very great genius—but his work is simply too long.

Gamado daqui.

Orwell, Auden, Spain

Orwell praised Auden's Spain as "one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war," but he objected strongly to the idea that those who intervened on the Republican side should have any "guilt in the necessary murder." After the combat injury, and after having to flee Spain for political reasons, he spent a lifetime speaking out for the socialist ideal; Auden revised and eventually renounced Spain, feeling it inferior as both politics and poetry.

How not to be a genius

There is a close relation between the ideas which men hold and the way in which they live. In a slowly changing society the ideas of an individual are the ideas of his class; that is the meaning of the word Tradition. The development of industrial civilization, by enormously accelerating the speed of historical change, and by splitting up the old dual or three-class structure of societyinto smaller and smaller units, has already destroyed tradition. The life of each individual is becoming increasingly unique.

The Composer

All the others translate: the painter sketches
a visible world to love or reject;
Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
The images out that hurt and connect,

From Life to Art by paintstaking adaption,
Relying on us to cover the rift;
Only your notes are pure contraption,
Only your song is absolute gift.

Pour out your presence, a delight cascading
The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine,
Our climate of silence and doubt invading;

You alone, alone, imaginary song,
Are unable to say an existence is wrong
And pour out forgiveness like a wine.

W. H. Auden, O Massacre dos Inocentes: Uma Antologia, José Alberto Oliveira, Assírio & Alvim, 1994

Musée des Beaux Arts

Ícaro de Brueghel

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden, O Massacre dos Inocentes: Uma Antologia, José Alberto Oliveira, Assírio & Alvim, 1994

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

W. H. Auden, O Massacre dos Inocentes: Uma Antologia, José Alberto Oliveira, Assírio & Alvim, 1994

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

W. H. Auden, O Massacre dos Inocentes: Uma Antologia, José Alberto Oliveira, Assírio & Alvim, 1994

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.


W. H. Auden, O Massacre dos Inocentes: Uma Antologia, José Alberto Oliveira, Assírio & Alvim, 1994

For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.

W. H. Auden, O Massacre dos Inocentes: Uma Antologia, José Alberto Oliveira, Assírio & Alvim, 1994

Rimbaud

As noites, as pontes de comboio, a má estrela,
Os seus temíveis companheiros não as conheciam;
Mas nessa criança a mentira do retórico
Queimava como uma fornalha: o frio fizera um poeta.

As bebidas que o seu amigo tíbio e lírico
Lhe comprava, perturbavam-lhe os cinco sentidos,
Terminando com todo o nonsense corriqueiro;
Até se alhear dos pecados e da lira.

Os versos eram uma doença específica do ouvido;
A integridade era de menos; parecia
O inferno da infância: devia tentar de novo.

Agora, galopando pela África, ele sonhava
Um novo eu, um filho, um engenheiro,
Cuja verdade mentirosos aceitassem.

W. H. Auden, O Massacre dos Inocentes (Uma Antologia), José Alberto Oliveira (trad.), Assírio & Alvim, 1994

A propósito de Verlaine acaba-se sempre por falar de Rimbaud, aqui há dias falou-se de Verlaine e lembrei-me deste poema.
Tenho duas traduções de Rimbaud na estante, a de Cesariny de Iluminações e Uma Cerveja no Inferno, tradução do título Une Saison en Enfer e O Rapaz Raro em tradução de Maria Gariela Llansol.
Não sei porquê embirro com as traduções de MGL (todas as que até agora me passaram pelas mãos sem excepção). Enquanto a tradução-versão-interpretação de Cesariny me fez adorar Rimbaud, é um exemplo de um trabalho sobre determinado corpus de texto bem feito e a edição bilingue permite-nos ver onde começa Cesariny e acaba Rimbaud, a de MGL deixou-me a impressão de estar perante uma tradução demasiado presa à língua de partida que por vezes se esquecia da língua de chegada (este pode ser um reparo injusto), e isso também não é bom para o texto traduzido.
Creio que a tradução de Cesariny demonstra que um tradutor pode ser interpretativo sem se esquecer do texto que está a traduzir e, apesar dos desvios, creio que Cesariny nunca se esquece do seu papel de tradutor. O leitor desta tradução assume o acordo tácito (logo ao olhar para o título) de jogar pelas regras do tradutor e a experiência de leitura ganha com isso. Cesariny não tem pretensões a verter literalmente o texto (a própria tradução do título é um trabalho de interpretação) mas tudo isto converge para termos uma excelente versão de Iluminações e Uma Cerveja no Inferno. Com a tradução de MGL sucede um pouco o inverso, um tradutor demasiado preocupado com a língua de partida, o que é legítimo mas também retira «movimento» ao texto em português, olhamos para a edição bilingue ao lado e na tradução temos apenas um Rimbaud mais desengraçado. A tradução perdeu coisas porque o tradutor foi bastante fiel mas esqueceu-se do espírito do texto. Isto não é necessariamente mau, mas o trabalho de Cesariny é melhor, também, trata-se de Cesariny. Neste campo, Herberto Helder fez algo semelhante com os seus Poemas Mudados Para... mas aí já nem estamos no campo da tradução.
De qualquer forma, no caso de ambas as traduções, as edições feitas são bilingues, e a beleza dos textos de Rimbaud resiste (ou é mantida) nas traduções.