Four Poems

Paulo Leminski

’til soon

Even you, raw matter,
even you, lumber, mass and muscle,
vodka, liver and chuckle,
candlelight, paper, coal and cloud,
stone, avocado meat, falling rain,
nail, mountain, hot-press iron,
even you feel saudade,
first-degree burn,
a longing to return home?

Clay, sponge, marble, rubber,
cement, steel, glass, vapor, cloth and cartilage,
paint, ash, eggshell, grain of sand,
first day of autumn, the word spring,
number five, the slap in the face, a rich rhyme,
a new life, middle age, old strength,
even you, matter my dear,
remember when we were only a mere idea?





sets versus setbacks

     a flashback
a flashback inside a flashback
     a flashback inside a flashback of
     a flashback
a flashback inside a third flashback
     memory falls into memory
rockflower on smooth water
     all tiresome (flashback)
minus the recollection of the recollection of the recollection
     of the recollection





warning to the castaway

This page, for example,
wasn’t born to be read.
It was born to be pallid,
a mere plagiarism of the Iliad,
something that silences,
leaf that returns to the branch,
long after having shed. 

It was born to be a beach,
who knows maybe Andromeda, Antarctica,
Himalayas, sensible syllable,
it was born to be the last
the one that hasn’t been born yet.

Words brought awhile
away by the waters of the Nile,
one day, this page, papyrus,
will have to be translated,
to symbols, to Sanskrit,
to all the dialects of India,
will have to say good morning
which one only whispers,
it will have to be the abrupt stone
where one has dropped the glass.
Is life not like that?





reportedly

              The world ending,
you can relax. 
               All that
will come back.

        Reconstruct it all
according to the structure of my verse.
        Wind, I said how.
Cloud, I said when.
        Sun, house, street,
reigns, ruins, years,
        I said how we were. 

        Love, I said how.
And how is it again? 

translated from the Portuguese by Elisa Wouk Almino

Read the original in Portuguese

Listen to the poems read in the original Portuguese by Elisa Wouk Almino:

Paulo Leminski loved to play with words, and this is perhaps the most challenging aspect of his poetry to translate. His lines rhyme like songs and his puns, like witty jokes, make you laugh. He found words within words and repeated them, never tediously, to express their multiple connotations. In a Leminski state of mind, I’ve played around with the English words, letting go at times of the original Portuguese, trying to retrace his seemingly loose, associative process in another language.

English can use up many more words than Portuguese, relying on pronouns that in Portuguese are implied, which has made translating the light, lean quality of Leminski’s poems also a concerted effort, as I’ve literally carved the same zigzaggy shapes he often made with his verses.

The concise, quick quality of Leminski’s poetry is not just a stylistic choice, but one of communication. He believed that poetry was for all. He read his poems as though he were speaking, and he spoke like his poetry. He once said, “Poetry is part of those useless things of life that don’t need justification because they are the very reason for living . . . poetry is part of those things that don’t need a why. Why a why?”

Unlike his neoconcretist contemporaries, his poems are personal and emotional—he wrote about nature, love, and loss, but never in a way that was sentimental or hackneyed. In “’til soon,” he writes about saudade, one of Portuguese’s famously untranslatable words, roughly meaning the feeling of longing. One of my favorite definitions of “saudade” is in a Leminski poem: “when near becomes far / when far becomes near.” I have chosen to keep the word in Portuguese, and this is a personal choice; as a Brazilian who grew up speaking Portuguese, my intent is not only to translate the words, but also the lived experience of a culture.

Paulo Leminski was born in 1944 in Curitiba, Brazil, where he would remain until his death at the age of forty-four. He was popular and prolific—the author of nine collections of poetry, in addition to three books of prose, one “concept novel,” and four biographies, including that of Jesus Christ and Matsuo Bashō, who was a great influence on Leminski. He was also a journalist, publicist, avid judo practitioner, and professor, and translated works from English, Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew. A number of his poems were adapted as songs by the likes of Caetano Veloso, and Leminski wrote music himself. While historically minded, he was also passionate about the now, including many aspects of popular and street culture. Perhaps, if he were to reflect on his own life, it would come through the words of one of his songs, “Valeu” (“It Was Worth It”): “it was worth facing this life that should be better.”

Elisa Wouk Almino is a writer, editor, and literary translator based in Los Angeles. In 2017, she published This House, a translated collection of poetry by Ana Martins Marques, with Scrambler Books. She teaches an online translation class with Catapult and writes about the craft of translation for Words Without Borders, where she was formerly the book reviews editor. She is currently a senior editor at Hyperallergic.