Laxmanrao Sardessai: "Avante, Goeses, Avante!"

On the 19th of December, 1961, Indian troops accepted the surrender of the oldest European colonies in the subcontinent, which had belonged to Portugal for the past 450 years. The Estado da Índia, comprised at the time of Damão, Diu, and Goa, wisely opted to put up little fight, despite direct orders to the contrary from the metropolitan government. In 1967 Goa rejected merger with the neighboring state of Maharashtra, and in 1987 Daman (as it's spelled in English) and Diu became a union territory, while Goa became a full-fledged state.

19 December is traditionally celebrated as Goa Liberation Day, though, as one might expect, "liberation" can be a contentious term. To recognize the occasion, rather than offer an ill-formed opinion, I've translated a 1966 poem by Laxmanrao Sardessai. In addition to writing hundreds of stories in Konkani and Marathi, Sardessai had poems published in Portuguese-language newspapers after Liberation. While not all of his poems were political, those that were were decidedly anti-merger, such as that which follows. My translation is a somewhat hasty one, but I hope that it'll do for the time being.

Como sempre, agradeço-lhe, caro leitor.

D.A.S.


P.S. The definitive end of the Portuguese empire also came on the 19th of December, albeit 38 years later: Macau, Portugal's last overseas possession, was returned to China on this date in 1999.


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Avante, Goeses, Avante!
Laxmanrao Sardessai
1966

Avante, goeses, avante!
Que está próxima a batalha
Que decidirá a vossa sorte.
Estão do vosso lado
A Verdade e a Justiça,
A Honra e a Dignidade
E, doutro lado,
A ambição do mando,
A cupidez nojenta,
Indignidades sem conta,
A mentira e a doblez,
A traição e a maquinação.
É a luta entre dois princípios,
O princípio do bem
E o princípio do mal.
Depende de vós a vitória
Dessa batalha imposta
Ao vosso povo pacato
Em nome da Democracia
Que entre nós está moribunda.
Na sua nudez a pergunta é esta:
Que quereis?
Viver na vossa terra
Ou lançar-vos ao mar?
A que miséria a Democracia
Vos lançou, santo Deus!?
Viver ou morrer?
Morrer é, de certo, diluir-se
Um povo na mole heterogénia doutro.
Vós, através da longa história,
Prezastes a honra e a dignidade.
Proclama ao mundo
Que sois um povo distinto.
A vossa língua e os vossos costumes
O vosso temperamento
E a vossa cultura,
A vossa humanidade,
E o vosso intelecto
Não são para serem
Apagados ou suprimidos
Da face da terra.
Não! Não!
Cabe-vos, goeses,
Repelir a afronta,
Esquecer, por amor
Dos vossos avoengos,
Vossas rixas e ódios
E as vaidades que vos minam,
Provar que os goeses têm um único partido,
Partido duma Goa una e livre,
Arrojai aos ventos
As diferenças que vos dividem,
Que mesquinhas ambições alimentais
Quando o povo é arrastado para o abismo!
Em que miseráveis partidos
Vos entretendes
Quando o inimigo procura
Calcar-vos, reduzir-vos à poeira,
Que criminosa negligência a vossa,
Quando as fileiras do inimigo
Se cerram
Para os fins da peleja.
Amigos! Sacudi, sem demora,
A letargia e a modorra!
Abraçai os ignorantes e os pobres.
Preparai-os com sacrifícios
Para a luta.
Levei a cada casa
A mensagem da guerra –
Guerra contra as ambições do mando – !
Sacrificai tudo!
Para salvar a terra,
Terra de vossos pais
E de vossos filhos.
Terra que está
Em iminente perigo
Por culpa dos vossos.
Avante, goeses, avante
E a vitória será vossa!


***


Onward, Goans, Onward!
Laxmanrao Sardessai
1966

Onward, Goans, onward!
For near is the battle
That will decide your fate.
On your side are
Truth and Justice,
Honor and Dignity
And, on the other side,
The ambition of power,
Vile cupidity,
Countless indignities,
Lies and duplicity,
Treachery and machination.
It is the fight between two principles,
The principle of good
And the principle of evil.
Victory depends upon you
In that battle, imposed
On your peaceful people
In the name of the Democracy
Which among us is dying.
Put nakedly, the question is this:
What do you want?
To live on your own land
Or be cast into the sea?
Into what misery has Democracy
Cast you, dear God!?
To live or die?
To die is, certainly, to dilute
One people in the heterogenous mass of the other.
You, throughout your long history,
Have valued honor and dignity.
Proclaim to the world
That you are a distinct people.
Your language and your customs
Your temperament
And your culture,
Your humanity,
And your intellect
Will not be
Erased or removed
From the face of the earth.
No! No!
It is up to you, Goans,
To turn away from insults,
To forget, for the love
Of your ancestors,
Your brawls and hates
And the vanities that undermine you,
To prove that Goans have a single body,
The body of a Goa unified and free,
Throw to the wind
The differences that divide you,
The petty ambitions you feed
While the people are dragged toward the abyss!
With miserable parties
You entertain yourselves
While the enemy seeks
To trample you, reduce you to dust,
Such criminal neglect of yours,
While the ranks of the enemy
Close in
To make battle.
Friends! Shake off, without delay,
Your lethargy and drowsiness!
Embrace the unlearned and the poor.
Prepare them with sacrifices
For the fight.
Take to every home
The message of war –
War against the ambitions of power – !
Sacrifice everything!
To save the land,
The land of your fathers
and of your children.
Land that is
In imminent danger
By your own fault.
Onward, Goans, onward
And victory will be yours!

Camilo Pessanha: "E eis quanto resta do idílio acabado"

It's been a while since I wrote anything about my old friend Camilo Pessanha, at least in English. (Full disclosure: I'm not getting around to translating the post I wrote about his tombstone anytime soon). I haven't even revisited Clepsydra lately for my own enjoyment. So, Thursday afternoon, after wrapping up some other translation business and doing some sparring in preparation for my martial arts rank test the following Saturday, I pulled some of my Pessanha books off the shelf and got down to reading.

My usual online source for the text of Clepsydra titles the following poem "No claustro de Celas", while the original 1920 edition of the book gives no title at all. I'm going with the latter, not only with regard to the title, but to punctuation as well; spelling follows modern Portuguese orthography where it doesn't interfere with the original. (These decisions, made after reading António Baronha's postface to the Assírio & Alvim edition of Clepsydra, aren't set in stone, but make a lot of sense to me.)

While I'm unsure how the online source chose its title, it did lead me to learn about the Monastery of Santa Maria de Celas (sorry, there's no equivalent Wikipedia page in English) in Pessanha's hometown of Coimbra, which once belonged to Cistercian nuns- the kind of neat information that sheds light on the poem, as well as the possible experiences Pessanha had that led to its creation.

Enjoy, caro leitor.

D.A.S.



***



E eis quanto resta do idílio acabado,
— Primavera que durou um momento...
Como vão longe as manhãs do convento!
— Do alegre conventinho abandonado...

Tudo acabou... Anémonas, hidrângeas,
Silindras — flores tão nossas amigas!
No claustro agora viçam as ortigas,
Rojam-se cobras pelas velhas lájeas.

Sobre a inscrição do teu nome delido!
— Que os meus olhos mal podem soletrar,
Cansados... E o aroma fenecido

Que se evola do teu nome vulgar!
Enobreceu-o a quietação do olvido.
Ó doce, ingénua, inscrição tumular.


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And behold what remains of the finished idyll,
— Spring that lasted a moment...
How far away the mornings of the convent!
— Of the happy little convent, abandoned...

Everything is gone... anemones, hydrangeas,
Mock-oranges — flowers that were such friends of ours!
In the cloister now grow nettles,
Snakes crawl through the old loggias.

Over the inscription of your effaced name!
— Which my eyes can barely spell out,
Tired... And the withered scent

That emanates from your common name!
The quietude of oblivion has ennobled it.
Oh sweet, naive, tombstone inscription.

The Mystery Grows Clearer: some notes on Laxmanrao Sardessai

 I don't believe I've discussed it here, but a few months ago I received an email from Dr. Paul Melo e Castro, the man responsible for the Archive of Goan Writing in Portuguese, from which you may recall I chose a poem almost at random and translated it into English. As it turns out, Dr. Melo e Castro found my translation of Laxmanrao Sardessai's "O Mistério Aclara-se" good enough to invite me to translate several more of Sardessai's poems for a future issue of Muse India. Said issue will be dedicated to Indian writing in Portuguese that's been translated into English. I'm excited to make a contribution.

Over the past three and a half months I've been reading and translating the bulk of Laxmanrao Sardessai's published poetic output, which consists of under a hundred poems, I think, written and published between 1962 and 1966. To my knowledge Sardessai did not write poetry in anything but Portuguese, but he wrote hundreds of stories in Marathi and Konkani, which makes his relatively brief foray into a língua portuguesa all the more interesting. Given that Goa was facing a 1967 referendum on maintaining its independence as a territorial unit vs. integration with the neighboring, and much larger, state of Maharashtra- a fate Sardessai opposed- it makes sense that he would employ Portuguese, as well as the languages in which his writing was better-known, to sway a wider audience into voting against integration. Once the referendum ended with Goa remaining independent of Maharashtra, there was no more need for Sardessai to write in Portuguese. (For publication, anyway; he may have continued writing privately in the language.)

In addition to the Muse India translations, I hope to have news of a related project sometime in the next month or two, but for now I'm keeping my lip buttoned, lest I jinx it. That said, in the course of my readings Dr. Melo e Castro was kind enough to send me the photos he took of Sardessai's poems as they first appeared in the Portuguese-language Goan newspaper A Vida. Not only has this allowed me to fix typos and such, but it's allowed me a brief glimpse into life in Lusophone Goa in the 1960s. (When was the last time you saw a poem in a newspaper?*).

Below is the original text of "O Mistério Aclara-se", published on 15 April 1966. The sharp-eyed among you may note that it contains different punctuation than the version I used in my translation, which will necessarily result in revisiting my initial effort.

Muito obrigado to Dr. Paul Melo e Castro for putting in the work in Goa's archives and sharing his findings with the wider world. Lengthening Shadows, his two-volume collection of Goan short stories translated from Portuguese to English, will soon be available from Goa 1556, and I wholeheartedly suggest you check it out. There is another project of his in the works, but I'll discuss that at a later time.

Hope all is well, dudes. Take it easy.

D.A.S.

*I can think of an example, actually, and one I saw as recently as this past summer, at that. Like A Vida above, it too is a Lusophone paper published in a territory where the use of Portuguese faces an uncertain future. I refer to Plataforma Macau 澳門平台, a bilingual weekly I enjoyed reading over coffee at Caravela in the afternoons.