Quatro Poemas

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.