`The Shape and Sound of a World'

Thanks to Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti for introducing me to Eugénio de Andrade (1923-2005). On Monday, Mike posted one of the Portuguese poet’s characteristically brief poems, “On the flyleaf of a copy of The Georgics,” in Portuguese and English, and linked to an interview with de Andrade by Paulo da Costa. The interview is brief and fragmentary but it impressed me, especially de Andrade’s seriousness and love of Shakespeare and Melville. Here’s an excerpt:

“`Poetry and truth, the ethic and the aesthetic, go hand in hand as Goethe told us.’ For Eugénio de Andrade poetry is the supreme art form, everything else is secondary. Prose is the poor child of literature, although he is quick to point that the novels of Tolstoy are poetry to him. `Poetry is a kind of music,’ he adds. Andrade is a lover of music and spends much of his time listening to chamber music, from Bach to Bartók. He is clear that poetry is his life and that he has lived for poetry. The rigor he imparts to poetry is not a science-like rigor but derives from the obstinate sense as proposed by Leonardo da Vinci. Eugénio de Andrade searches for exactitude in his work, he searches the exact words for each poem and despises anything that is not exact. `In its end result poetry has to be capable of communicating.’”

De Andrade’s words seduced me into borrowing four translated collections of his work from the library: Inhabited Heart (1985), Memory of Another River (1988), Another Name for Earth (1997) and Dark Domain (2000). All are translated by Alexis Levitin, de Andrade’s friend and a professor of English at the state University of New York at Plattsburg. De Andrade’s poems are seldom longer than 20 lines, highly concentrated, and dense with thought and music. He often writes of elemental natural objects – stones, sand, wood. He’s at home in a pre-Christian world of earth, water, air, and fire. This is “In Words,” from Dark Domain:

“I breathe the earth in words,
and on the back of words
I breathe
cool whitewashed stone;

“I breathe a vein of water
that is lost
somewhere between shoulder blades
or rounded cheeks;

“I breathe a recent sun
in words,
smooth and fresh,
with the stately slowness of an animal.”

In de Andrade’s poems, words reflect the world. Words are discrete objects, surrounded by soft, warm Mediterranean light. In “Crystalizations,” from Inhabited Heart, he writes: “I love with words.” From the same collection, this is “Words”:

“They are like a crystal,
words.
Some a dagger,
some a blaze.
Others,
merely dew.

“Secret they come, full of memory.
Insecurely they sail:
cockleboats or kisses,
the waters trembling.

“Abandoned, innocent,
weightless.
They are woven of light.
They are the night.
And even pallid
they recall green paradise.

“Who hears them? Who
gathers them, thus,
cruel, shapeless,
in their pure shells?”

What he says of words -- “Secret they come, full of memory.” – is reminiscent of Emerson likening language to “fossil poetry.” De Andrade’s emphasis on poems being “capable of communicating” is a reproach to highly hermetic poetry. While hardly simple, declarative or prosy, his poems acknowledge the reader’s active existence, the other half of the conversation. The American poet Ron Slate recently wrote on his blog:

“But writing poetry isn’t primarily an opportunity for self-awareness. It’s an opportunity to make an effective poem for someone else’s awareness. (Yet we also insist that the poet discovers as he/she writes. What is discovered? Mainly the shape and sound of a world.)”

Slate’s observations reflect a minority opinion among contemporary American poets. Most mornings, when I hear Garrison Keillor intoning a poem on “The Writer’s Almanac,” it’s not a poem at all but a prose anecdote chopped into short lines, usually someone’s precious revelation, dull and unmemorable. However, Keillor will defy expectations on Wednesday when he reads “Rain in Childhood,” by the estimable Eric Ormsby.