Cecília Meireles: "Canção Póstuma"

Bom dia, folks. I've got another Brazilian poem in translation for you. Along with the João da Cruz e Sousa poem I posted the other day, I read this during the event this past Sunday at the BAF, "O Brasil Secreto". The event went pretty well; attendance was good, and people seemed to enjoy the work presented. I look forward to doing it again in a few months' time.

Today's offering to the gods and muses of literature is by Cecília Meireles, one of Brazil's most widely known poets. I've got another translation of one of her poems in the works, so look for that in the near future, along with renewed efforts to practice my classical Chinese (via translation, of course).

Até breve!

DAS

Canção Póstuma

Cecília Meireles

Fiz uma canção para dar-te;

porém tu já estavas morrendo.

A Morte é um poderoso vento.

E é um suspiro tão tímido, a Arte...

É um suspiro tímido e breve

como a da respiração diária.

Choro de pomba. E a Morte é uma águia

cujo grito ninguém descreve.

Vim cantar-te a canção do mundo,

mas estás de ouvidos fechados

para os meus lábios inexatos,

— atento a um canto mais profundo.

E estou como alguém que chegasse

ao centro do mar, comparando

aquele universo de pranto

com a lágrima da sua face.

E agora fecho grandes portas

sobre a canção que chegou tarde.

E sofro sem saber de que Arte

se ocupam as pessoas mortas.

Por isso é tão desesperada

e pequena, humana cantiga.

Talvez dure mais do que a vida.

Mas à Morte não diz mais nada.

Posthumous Song

Cecília Meireles

translated by D.A. Smith

I wrote a song to give to you;

however, you were already dying.

Death is a strong wind.

And Art is such a weak sigh...

It is a brief, timid sigh,

like that of everyday breathing.

The cry of a dove. And Death is an eagle

whose cry nobody can describe.

I came to sing you the song of the world,

but your ears were deaf

to my fumbling lips,

—tuned to a deeper song.

And I am like someone who has come

to the middle of the sea, comparing

that weeping world

to the tears on your face.

And now I close the massive doors

on the song that arrived late.

And I suffer not knowing which Art

dead people concern themselves with.

That is why you are so desperate

and small, human song.

Perhaps you will last longer than life.

But you have nothing to say to Death.

João da Cruz e Sousa: "Vida Obscura"

Last year I mentioned to Maurício, who runs the Brazilian Arts Foundation, that there should be some kind of Brazilian or Portuguese-language literary event sometime. This past November he put me in touch with some like-minded folks, and this coming Sunday, February 25, we're having our first public reading of Brazilian poetry in translation and short fiction in English by a Brazilian writer, along with artist Tony Paraná discussing his work. If you're in Houston, come on by, check out some Brazilian literature, drink a Topo Chico. The fun starts at 4 PM and wraps up around 5:30.

One of the poems I've translated for the event is by João da Cruz e Sousa, who I believe was Brazil's first black poet. I initially ran across his name on a list of Symbolist poets on Wikipedia, and after reading a little more about him I hunted down his collected works. Not only is he a fascinating figure—the son of freed slaves, a polyglot, and an abolitionist—but his poetry is quite good, and his prose poetry (or whatever the proper name for it is, if it has one in Portuguese) seems far ahead of its time. I look forward to reading, and translating, more of his work, which I don't think has received any exposure in English.

Enjoy, and maybe I'll see you Sunday.

Vida Obscura

João da Cruz e Sousa

Ninguém sentiu o teu espasmo obscuro,

ó ser humilde entre os humildes sêres.

Embriagado, tonto dos prazeres,

o mundo para ti foi negro e duro.

Atravessaste no silêncio escuro

a vida prêsa a trágicos deveres

e chegaste ao saber de altos saberes

tornando-te mais simples e mais puro.

Ninguém te viu o sentimento inquieto,

magoado, oculto e aterrador, secreto,

que o coração te apunhalou no mundo.

Mas eu que sempre te segui os passos

sei que cruz infernal prendeu-te os braços

e o teu suspiro como foi profundo!

An Obscure Life

Nobody felt your dull spasms,

Oh lowly among the lowly.

The world, drunk and giddy with pleasure,

was black and hard for you.

You passed through in dark silence,

your life chained to tragic duties

and arrived at the highest wisdom

humbled and purified.

Nobody saw in you the uneasy feeling,

hurt, hidden and terrifying, secret,

which your heart pierced in the world.

But I, who always followed in your steps,

know what infernal cross bound your arms

and how deeply you sighed!

MMXVIII

Salvēte, dudes, and welcome to 2018!

This year (March 24, to be precise, a date I'll probably miss) marks the 15th anniversary of your humble Corpse's presence on the World Wide Web, at least in blog form, as blogs are understood today, or were in 2003. Whatever. The Internet sucks. Except when it doesn't.

Anyway, things are quiet on the cadaverous front. The usual stuff's happening: translation, hanging out with cats, cooking, meditation, reading, etc. I don't make New Year's resolutions, but this year I'd like to establish a habit of studying a little Latin and/or classical Chinese each week, and start assembling the skeleton of  a book about Camilo Pessanha. In the case of the former pseudo-goal, a couple dedicated hours per week should suffice; as for the latter, I first need to figure out what kind of book I want to write, then amass the necessary materials and, you know, start writing.


I'd also like America, shambolic mockery of democracy as it may be, not to be choked to death by the cowards, flag-suckers, bootlicking sycophants, capitalist vampires, fascists, and assorted other wretched fucks currently howling in a nightmarishly confusing chorus of glee and despair as yet another global empire enters its long, painful senescence and History grinds on (but, mind you, not necessarily Forward).

It'd also be nice if the rest of the world didn't have to fear nuclear (or, far more likely, since it's already happening, conventional) death at the hands of a certain idiot in the White House and his bargain-basement administration. (Christ, what would Hunter Thompson, who so despised Nixon, have thought of our current shitheel-in-chief? No wonder the good doctor cut out early.)

Then there's the desire for the planet itself not to be rendered uninhabitable by humans, courtesy of climate change and our species' addiction to short-term thinking, but I'm trying to not let my usual pessimism sink its claws into me too deeply, so I'll pass on thinking too much about that at the moment.

With regard to all these things, a dude can hope, but hope has never been, and never will be, enough, so, to paraphrase Laxmanrao Sardessai:

Avante, camaradas! Avante!


DAS

An overdue update.

Jesus, it's been a weird few months.

Even if you somehow leave out the grotesque, incompetent bevy of swindlers, Bible-thumpers, and authoritarian lickspittles that passes for the US government these days, and which is eagerly leading the charge toward a future that'll be as devoid of the aesthetics of a proper cyberpunk dystopia as it rich in the genre's inherent misery, 2017 has been a deeply weird, deeply fucked year for much of the world.

Since I last wrote, Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston and much of the Texas Gulf Coast. I was lucky to be spared, though for a few days there I spent a lot of time on the porch, sleep-deprived, rekindling my old smoking habit, watching the water creep up the steps. When the floodwaters receded, I put in some time with the Houston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, gutting houses that had been flooded and getting direct aid to folks who needed it- and still need it. This shit ain't over, and won't be for a long time. Houston DSA is still helping out, so if three months after the fact isn't too late for you to want to visit the link above and donate a few bucks, know that it'll go to those in need, which means folks that the state of Texas and/or the federal government hasn't gotten around to helping, assuming they ever do.

But even events as hellacious as Harvey, and the subsequent ruin visited upon Florida and Puerto Rico by its tempestuous siblings, are incapable of hindering the human race's drunken stumble toward extinction- though I sincerely hope we trip and fall face-first into some sort of late-species glory on the way there- and so here we are in the middle of November. Let's take stock of what your humble Corpse has been up to, and/or thinks about things.

With the first draft of the Santa Monica translation done, I'm working regularly on the Sita Valles translation. The weather here is typically schizophrenic, which is to say that it's never actually cold for more than a few days at a time. I've lived here most of my life now, and this still pisses me off. I went to the Texas Renaissance Festival this past weekend, something I haven't done since 1999, and had a great time. I've set aside the cigarette habit I was far too eager to take up again when Harvey gave me a rationalization to do so. I visited the city of Québec in September, where I ate a lot of delicious food, learned that I can read French passably (and speak it horribly), used H.P. Lovecraft's history/travelogue as a guidebook of sorts, and pondered the legacy of Europe in America.

I've read some good books, among them Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, and Philip Hoare's The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea. I continue to practice 形意拳 xingyiquan and 八卦掌 baguazhang, the two Daoist internal martial arts I started studying earlier this year. I spend a lot of time with cats, but never enough. The desire to write a novel about Macau and a book about Camilo Pessanha still floats around in my mind, ever closer to realization as ideas pile up and get written down.

Mostly, though, I'm just living. Not in the sense of getting by, but in the fullest sense of the word, replete with positive and negative aspects. The more time passes, the more I appreciate just living, and the more I understand how much that concept encompasses, especially when the world around you seems boring enough to make you scream, or when it's Accept-level balls-to-the-wall overwhelming.

All right, off to martial arts class. Catch y'all soon- hopefully not four months later soon.


微臣
史大偉

The Corpse lives.

It should be pretty evident, dear readers, that your humble Corpse has been bereft of things to say for the past couple-three months. The 千字文 / Thousand Character Classic project is as dead in the water as 李白 Li Po. When I can browbeat myself into writing heavy metal reviews, they're earmarked for Enslain magazine, though I haven't exactly been cranking those out, either.

Since I last posted, much of my time has been spent translating an 18th-century letter of complaint written by nuns of the Convent of Santa Monica in Goa. "Letter" is not really the word for a rambling and often repetitive document of 40-odd handwritten pages, mind you, but it's been a fascinating process, mainly due to the fact that working with the excellent dude who roped me into it has been fun, educational, and promising in terms of future collaboration. I've learned to read old Portuguese handwriting, delved into the lives of Catholic nuns (who were not there because their cruel parents decided to dump them at the convent door, as is so often believed), and I'm helping to make available to the world a document written by, and about, women at a time when women's voices were only fleetingly heard.

More recently, I've started translating Leonor Figueiredo's biography of Sita Valles, the Angolan communist executed after the grim events of May 27, 1977. Valles' parents were from Goa, which is why I first heard of her. Figueiredo's written a good book, and I think making it available in English will prove useful. I'll discuss this project, as well as the Santa Monica convent one, in further detail at a later date.

That's it for now, alas. I've gotta eat dinner and get to Portuguese class. Later this week, perhaps, I'll find some time to write some more. Later, folks.

The Terrible Something

If in search of what's wrong with the world today- a phrase I despise, because the slightest brush with history shows us that the past is hardly laudable, but I'll stick with it for now-  one need not turn to the grotesque buffoon in the White House and his coterie of reactionaries, bootlickers, and bipedal leeches. An examination of one's immediate surroundings and internal state will suffice to demonstrate that the world around us is currently in the grip of something terrible, and that we ourselves are microcosmic hosts of whatever that terrible something is. Best not to look too closely, lest the contours and details resolve themselves and the terrible becomes overwhelming. Yet a failure to investigate is exactly what has led us here.

The terrible something devours minds, hearts, time, and space. It lends the grinning ghouls of the ruling class masks of respectability, and tells us they are true faces, trustworthy and wholesome. It bears down upon our souls, or whatever passes for them, and allows them to collapse under the weight of their very existence. It robs us of our days, which it feeds to the ravening demiurges of the economy and "progress," and fills our nights with a dreadful silence that is unconducive to slumber. It stalks the globe, snatching corners of heaven and earth from their rightful inhabitants and uprooting the human being from its surroundings. The terrible something does not live in the world, but dwells upon it, like an extradimensional horror might a threshold.


So: what is this terrible something? Is it capitalism, currently grinding its teeth, and us between them, as it attempts to force its way through yet another crisis? Is it the rot eating away the veil of democracy with which the West covers itself? Is it a spiritual malaise, some species-wide ennui and self-loathing immune to the pathetic variety of cures we have dreamed up? Or is it an absence of some kind, a void in our social relations, our collective lack of imagination coming back to haunt us from whatever astral graveyard we banished it to? Perhaps it's something else entirely, detectable only by what it doesn't do or where it isn't.

Me, I'd venture to say that the terrible something is all of the above and then some. It has probably always been with us. Maybe it simply is us, and we've contorted ourselves into such a mockery of being human that the terrible something has manifested itself fully.  I don't know what all this means, or how it can be combated, assuming it can be combated at all. I doubt it can be, at least not in the sense of pushing back against a defined foe, but we can study ourselves, stand in solidarity with our fellow humans, and dream, as the terrible something wends its way through our lives and settles into the cracks of the cosmos. It ain't much, but it's all we've got.

Sleep - Jerusalem/Dopesmoker

After years of worshipping at the altar of the riff, I'm finally gonna see Sleep on Saturday. Sleep, dude. The dudes who wrote Jerusalem, AKA Dopesmoker, which received three different releases (so far) and all of which have commendable properties. Personally, the latest release, under the name Dopesmoker (the album's original title during recording), does a great job of highlighting the dynamic range of what skeptics, amateurs, and squares might call a boring exercise in repetition, but I still prefer Jerusalem, truncated as it is. The unity of sound lends to the religious/meditative quality that, I think, forms the backbone of the whole album.

I'd be willing to admit that my preference could be a matter of familiarity, but shit, I've spent a whole lot of time listening to this record in its various incarnations, and this ain't mere nostalgia. But it doesn't matter. All that matters is the riff, or rather the Riff, and Sleep has perfected it in our lifetime. A thousand other stoner rock or doom bands could write hour-long songs and none of them would approach the unwittingly orthodox masterpiece that is Sleep's Dopesmoker. This probably ain't the first time I've talked about this record, and I hope it won't be the last; maybe next time I'll have something more interesting to say.

Anyway, adios for now, folks. Get high, listen to Jerusalem/Dopesmoker, and act accordingly. Or don't, and just experience the music. It's your life, after all. Don't let some random dude tell you how to live it.

千字文 / O Texto de Mil Caracteres, parte 16

No espírito de Luís Gonzaga Gomes e outros sinólogos de língua portuguesa, e para praticar a minha escrita, apresento-lhes hoje o estudo do 千字文 em português.

菜重芥薑
cài zhòng jiè jiāng

"Dos vegetais, a mostarda e o gengibre são estimados."


菜 é um caracter muito conhecido pelos aficionados de comida chinesa, porque significa, além de "vegetal/vegetais," prato no sentido de "prato principal", e também cozinha, como 四川菜, cozinha de Sichuan.

重 tem duas leituras, zhòng e chóng. A primeira significa uma coisa pesada ou grave, ou que tem importância; a segunda, duplo ou repetido, e pode ser um verbo tambem- repetir ou dobrar.

Acho que o texto não trata dos grãos de mostarda, mas sim as folhas dela. Mostarda refogado com gengibre, alho, e molho de soja (ou um pouco de vinagre preto) é um prato simplicíssimo e quase perfeito; concordo com o(s) autor(es) do Texto de Mil Caracteres na sua avaliação destes legumes.

Nossa, agora estou com fome. Até breve, leitores!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 15

When I started this project, I thought that I'd post maybe three times a week and finish in a couple or so years, but now I'm not so sure. Life has a way of interrupting one's plans, but it's not as if failing to crank out brief remarks on the Thousand Character Classic on a regular basis is a cause for despair. The other things I'm doing these days - more translations from Portuguese, learning some Latin, revising my historical novel, and, most dauntingly, fixin' to start tutoring ESL to adults - are all pretty fulfilling. That said, I do enjoy parsing the ol' 千字文, and even the handful of characters I've covered have proven useful to reading other Chinese texts, so let's check out the next four characters.

果珍李奈
guŏ zhēn lĭ nài

"As for fruits, the plum and crabapple are highly prized."

I don't think I've ever eaten a crabapple, though I do have a specific childhood memory of a crabapple tree outside a public indoor pool I visited with a class or daycare program or something. (Guess it ain't that specific after all.) It's not so much the tree or its fruit that stands out in my memory as the heat and harsh light of the moment. Anyway, there's not a lot to say about these characters. Paar's edition of the 千字文 is equally silent as to the particular value of these fruits, and I'm too lazy to consult any other sources at the moment, so we'll assume that 李奈 were merely tasty, which is a fine reason to prize any comestible.

I'd like to take the opportunity to mention a couple other things that my translation brings to mind.

1/甲: I frequently use the term "classical Chinese" to translate 文言文, which is also, and more rightly, called "literary Chinese." Classical Chinese, AKA 古文, is temporally bound to the written language used up until the 漢朝 Han dynasty, whereas 文言文 is the written language used up until the early 20th century. (There's a late 20th-century writer whose name escapes me who still used it, too.) My point is that much of the Chinese I've translated on this blog isn't strictly classical Chinese, but literary Chinese- for example, the 千字文, which was compiled after the classical period, technically counts as 文言文 and not 古文. Naturally, even the term 古文 has historically narrower literary applications than that which I'm assigning it for comparative purposes, but that's beyond the scope of this note.

2/乙: Literary Chinese loves to imply things. If you were to literally translate 果珍李奈, you'd more or less get "fruit valuable plum crabapple," which at first glance is ridiculous but, with a little effort, somewhat comprehensible. Ignoring the potential for 珍 to be used as an adjective or a verb (or, to put it into more linguistic terms, that we're looking at the perennially popular Chinese topic-comment structure), it still appears to be a phrase devoid of context. Why did the author(s) of the Thousand Character Classic suddenly bring up tasty fruit? Because, in the previous two lines, they'd started delineating the names and natures of specific things. Recall the 剑 sword and 珠 pearl: now we're onto a broader class of things, 果 fruit. When 文言文 brings up a topic, especially in sequence, there's an implied "as for X" or "regarding X." I'm unable to explain the nuance of this fully, in part because I tend to forget it myself when I'm reading literary Chinese, and because there are more dimensions to it based on context, but it's an ingrained part of reading 文言文.

More later, folks! Hope this helped, or was interesting, or entertaining. Preferably all three.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 14

珠稱夜光
zhū chēng yè guāng

"A pearl called Ye Guang."

Unlike the name of the sword in the last entry, 夜光 makes sense on its own: it means something that shines at night.

Paar says that the story of this pearl comes from a book called 搜神記, or the Record of Searching for Spirits (my translation; my phone's dictionary calls it, in a much more modern fashion, In Search of the Supernatural), published during the 兩晋 Jin dynasty (the first one(s), from the third to fifth centuries CE): "[t]he Marquis of Sui rescued a wounded snake, who in gratitude brought him a pearl that shone brightly at night."

I don't have a problem with snakes. Like a lot of things in life, as long as they're left alone and not hassled, they're usually content to reciprocate. I especially like this snippet of a tale for demonstrating that not all snakes of yore get a bum rap, like the one in the Bible, and that everyone, even presumably busy Chinese noblemen, can do right by their fellow sentient beings. Of course, the full story may end badly, but I'm gonna leave it as it is for the time being.

Until next time, folks!

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 13

Today the Thousand Character Classic gives us an oblique history lesson, and reminds us that all kinds of things can be used as names in Chinese.

劍號巨闕
jiàn hào jù què

"A sword named Juque."

Paar's edition of the 千字文 says that Juque was one of several famous- or, perhaps more accurately, legendary- swords made by 歐冶子 Ou Yezi during the Spring and Autumn period, of which more can be learned here. The characters that make up the sword's name are interesting in that one way of reading them together produces "massive flaw," which is not something I'd look for in a weapon. Another reading could be "gigantic watchtower," which to my ears may sound odd, but, unlike the other reading, at least tries to sell the would-be wielder of the sword on some sort of martial virtues.

It appears that the Juque sword makes an appearance in a famous Qing dynasty 武俠 wuxia novel titled either 忠烈俠義傳 (The Tale of Loyal and Upright Heroes) or 三俠五義 (Three Gallants and Five Righteous Ones). Based on the Wikipedia description of it, it sounds like a neat read, but one that's far beyond my skill and patience. Better to stick to the Thousand Character Classic and the occasional poem for now, I think.

Until next time, take it easy, dear readers.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 12

Today's is a brief lesson in geology and geography, fields in which your humble Corpse is no expert (though I'm pretty good at finding places on a world map).

玉出崑岡
yù chū kūn gāng

"Jade comes from the Kunlun Mountains."

The two varieties of gemstone collectively known as jade, nephrite and jadeite, come from a number of sources, not just the Kunlun Mountains. Jadeite, for example, can be collected on the beaches of Big Sur in California, which I may or may not have done. (It's unclear because I never had the greenish rocks I collected there properly identified.) China's historical and ongoing love of jade is well-known and, in my opinion, righteous, because jade is amazing. There are a number of characters for jade of different kinds: 玉， 翠， 翡， 玖, and plenty more, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

崑 is a reference to the Kunlun Mountains that run through central Asia; their western end is in Tajikistan (Chinese: 塔吉克) and their eastern/Chinese terminus is in 青海 Qinghai province. There's also a lot of mythology surrounding 崑崙山 Kunlun Mountain, which is not necessarily related spatially to the Kunlun Mountains themselves. I leave it up to you, dear reader, to delve into this mythology on your own.

岡 means "hill" or "ridge", and thus is a metonym of sorts for 山, the usual Chinese character for "mountain."

So now you've all been given the general locations of precious stones and metals in China. If a couple thousand years' exploitation hasn't utterly exhausted these sources, which it almost certainly has, you might be in luck if you go to China seeking a fortune in gold and jade. If, you know, the locals, 仙人 immortals, or the Chinese government don't mind.

Later, dudes!

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character classic, part 11

Today's characters bring good news for fortune-seekers.

金生麗水
jīn shēng lì shuĭ

"The river Li bears gold."

麗 means "beautiful" or, as Kroll puts it, "beauty that is outwardly or sensually striking." In this case, paired with 水, the character for water, it refers to the Li River in 雲南 Yunnan province.

I'm much obliged to Francis Paar for pointing this out, because like seemingly every other thing I come across reading classical Chinese, it's not something I'd have guessed on my own (though this use of 水 is fairly common). Another good example is 玉箸, which appeared in my last post. It translates literally to "jade chopsticks" - it's not the usual character for chopsticks, either! - but it's used as a stand-in for tears, as well as being the name of a form of small seal script. As a literary language, Classical Chinese has no monopoly on layered meanings, but damn if it doesn't get a prize for being especially obtuse. It's enough to make a dude want to weep jade chopsticks sometimes.

And there you have it. Paar says you can pan for gold in the Li River, so go west*, young wo/man!


微臣
史大偉


*Or east. Your choice. From the USA, it usually makes more sense to go west these days.

國際婦女節： 薛濤的"春望詞四首" / International Women's Day: Xue Tao's "Four Ways of Looking at Spring"

If I'd thought it through, I would've been better prepared to commemorate International Women's Day, which is to say I would have started work on these poems by Xue Tao a lot earlier. I hope my hasty translation does her a modicum of justice.

薛濤 Xue Tao was a Tang dynasty poet, courtesan, and, later in life, Daoist nun. Wikipedia uses the term "adept," which is probably more accurate since "nun" implies her taking on a monastic life, which doesn't seem to have been the case. A collection of her poetry, the 錦江集 or Brocade River Collection, was published in her lifetime, but apparently only part of it has survived. Her work has been translated by an inevitably more skilled hand than mine: Jeanne Larsen's Brocade River Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao can be purchased here.

Xue Tao's Daoist phase strikes me as particularly interesting, and informs my translation, insofar as I opted to refrain from personalizing the poems. I think this makes for an aesthetically useful juxtaposition of the wistful romance of the poems' subject matter and the featureless nature of the Dao.

Of course, that's just me. I've included her original for anyone who reads Chinese, and I consulted Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping's version of these poems, if readers want another take on these 1200-year-old examples of poetry written by Chinese women. Enjoy!


微臣
史大偉
D.A.S.




薛濤

春望詞四首


花開不同賞，花落不同悲
欲問相思處，花開花落時

攬草結同心，將以遺知音
春愁正斷絕，春鳥複哀吟

風花日將老，佳期猶渺渺
不結同心人，空結同心草

那堪花滿枝，翻作兩相思
玉箸垂朝鏡，春風知不知




Xue Tao
"Four Ways of Looking at Spring"

1
Flowers blossom, but can't be enjoyed together
Flowers fall, but grief can't be shared
If you want to ask where love dwells
It's when flowers blossom and flowers fall

2
Gather grass and tie heart-shaped knots
Pass them on to the dearly departed
Spring sadness has just broken
Spring birds sing mournfully again

3
Blossoms on the wind, the day wanes
It's as if good times are ever more distant
If people can't bind their hearts together
It's pointless to knot grass hearts

4
How does one endure branches full of flowers?
Write a couple of love songs.
Tears fall onto the mirror
But does the spring wind know?

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 10

露結爲霜
lù jié wéi shuāng

"Dew crystallizes and becomes frost."


I'm not nearly as clever as I thought I was, but I'm certainly as lazy as I know myself to be. If I'd bothered to read any of the brief introductory material to Paar's edition of the Thousand Character Classic, I'd have seen that it includes a brief summary of the primer, broken down into themes; the first of which is "Heaven, Earth, and Man." Oh well. At least I didn't think I'd discovered something heretofore unknown about a text that's been in use for roughly 1500 years.

Anyway, today's characters continue to deal with nature. 露 skilfully encapsulates the semantic and phonetic aspects embedded in many Chinese characters: the upper part is 雨, "rain" or "precipitation," while the lower is 路, "road," but it's the pronunciation, not the meaning, that this element lends to the entire character. I think I've mentioned before, and I'm sure I'll mention again, that knowing the semantic and phonetic content of both elements is no guarantee of parsing the whole character's meaning, even if in some cases one can do so in reverse.

結 in the second tone, as it's used here, usually means "knot" or "bind," but this can be extended in a broad sense, hence "crystallize." 爲, in addition to being a common and polyvalent character, is also written a couple different ways: 为 in its simplified form, and the traditional variant 為, which I particularly like. My Firefox pop-up Chinese dictionary, the life-savingPerapera, notes that other modern meanings for 霜 include "frosting" and "skin cream." As a result, we have a humorous alternative reading of this entry's 千字文: "Syrup binds and becomes frosting."

We've reached 40/1000 characters! 加油， 看官們!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 9

雲騰致雨
yún téng zhì yŭ

"Mounting clouds bring rain."

I'm starting to notice a potential pattern among the topics addressed by the 千字文. So far (which isn't very far- today's four characters make for a total of 36 out of 1000 unique characters), readers have been treated to statements about time and nature, both terrestrial and celestial. Some of these read like simple facts: 天地玄黃, for example. (Though, as previously noted, the "yellow" earth is specific to the part of China where the Thousand Character Classic was probably compiled.) Others, like 律呂調陽, relate to philosophy, which still influences daily life in China. Given the number of characters presented in the book, I imagine the variety of topics will expand, but even at this point the armature upon which the book's value as a primer hangs is visible. Not only are you learning characters, you're learning facts about, and concepts of, the world.

Today's characters fall into this pattern. Paar translates 騰 as "ascend," but among Kroll's definitions I also found "pile up" and "accumulate." On a visual level these work much better, because one can watch clouds amass overhead and bring rain, whereas the creation of clouds (via "ascension" in the water cycle) is less immediate. 致 is used as a sort of catch-all for "cause" or "bring about," as seen in Paar's transliteration, "clouds ascend, cause rain."

More first-millennium education soon. Later, folks!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 8

Today's four characters irk me.

律吕調陽
lü4 lü3 tiáo yáng

"Yang and Yin pitch-pipes harmonize together."


First things first. I've gotten good at typing Portuguese diacritical marks, and I'm learning how to type the tone marks for 漢語拼音 Hanyu pinyin , the most common romanization system these days, but I have no clue how to add tone marks over letters like ü. That's why there are numbers next to the pinyin above. Expect this in the future, unless I get around to figuring out the double-diacritical issue.

Second, I don't like my translation of this, and I don't like Paar's, either: "The two sets of tones bring the Yang in harmony with the Yin". One of the alternate English translations he offers is just barely okay: "Music harmonizes the two principles of nature." My problem with all of these is that the first two characters, 律吕, denote two sets of pitch-pipes, the former six of which are yang 陽 and the latter six of which are yin 陰. I don't know shit about musical theory or structure, which makes the division of musical tones into yin and yang (roughly speaking, feminine/masculine, positive/negative, etc.- y'all know the symbol; this is more or less what it represents) even more meaningless to me.

But that's not what really annoys me. The final character is 陽 yang, and to me, if the pitch-pipes being discussed are going to harmonize, then 陰 yin needs to be present as well, but it's not. The yin-yang implied by 律呂 doesn't feel completed, via the verb 調, in 陽 alone. This is the first time I've seen this in the 千字文, and it probably won't be the last. My guess is that one day I'll run across a grammatical or semantic explanation for phrases such as this and all will be made clear, or as clear as classical Chinese gets (which is a somewhat unfair statement, because sometimes you can look at an old Chinese phrase and its meaning falls into place not just immediately, but beautifully).

律 appears in the modern Chinese word 律師, or "lawyer," which has stuck with me for years- when I learned it, I was dating a lawyer, and now I'm married to her.

Speaking of the 太太, I'm off to cook dinner for her. Later, folks!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 7

Today's 千字文 characters, like several of their predecessors, deal with time.

閏餘成歲
rùn yú chéng suì

"The extra intercalary month completes the year."

The Chinese traditionally used the lunar calendar, the twelve months of which don't add up to the solar year now in use. In order to make up for this, Paar tells us they added "an extra or intercalary month every 2 or 3 years (22 extra months per 60 yrs., or about 7 per 19 yrs.)" 閏 is also used for intercalary days, though I don't know how those were assigned.

歲, according to A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese is a year, measured by the movement of Jupiter. It's the character for Jupiter itself, too, but these days Jupiter is usually 木星. 木 is also used for Jupiter in classical Chinese, as one of the five visible planets and part of the 五行 wu xing system. What I typically associate 歲 with is asking someone's age: 你幾歲? I seem to remember that phrasing being only used for kids, though.

The way the characters 餘 and 歲 are written in Paar's Ch'ien Tzu Wen aren't standard, or at least don't look the same as the versions that appear when I type them here or look them up on my phone. This isn't that uncommon, but it can be confusing, and I'm never quite sure which is the preferred version.

That's all for now. 再見！


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 6

Today's line of the Thousand Character Classic reads:

秋收冬藏
qiū shōu dōng cáng

"Autumn harvest, winter storage."

Alternately, "harvest in autumn, hoard in winter."

I want to focus on the final character, 藏. It's used, with a different pronunciation, in 西藏, Xizang, the Chinese name for Tibet. Taken literally, the characters can mean "Western storehouse," which sounds like a reference to Tibet's long Buddhist history, since 藏 can also mean "Buddhist scripture" (e.g., the Chinese Tripitaka, or collection of Buddhist sutras, is 大藏經). Hence Tibet as "the western depository of Buddhist sutras."

But nope, the etymology is totally different. According to Endymion Wilkinson's monumental Chinese History: A New Manual, the Mongols divided Tibet into three areas: Tsang, U, and Ngari, and "the Zang in Xizang comes from Tsang (short for gTsangbu meaning river), the valley of the upper Yarlung river."

Incidentally, the Dalai Lama's title comes from the Mongolian language, and means "ocean lama."

There's a lesson for anyone studying Chinese- just because something sounds logical (or worse, logical and cool) doesn't mean it's at all accurate.

Later, folks!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 5

Today's characters are:

寒來暑往
hán lái shŭ wăng

"Winter cold comes, summer heat goes."


Not a whole lot to this line, really. Together, 往來 can mean "come and go," as both verbs imply movement, and we've already seen that Chinese is fond of using paired nouns or antonyms to create a new word. Actually, "word" isn't quite right; "concept" is more like it. I haven't found 寒 and 暑 used together in such a manner, but their counterparts, 冬 and 夏, are, at least in modern Chinese, where they mean, unsurprisingly, "winter and summer." 春秋, or "spring and autumn," is the more famous seasonal pair: the "Spring and Autumn Annals" supposedly written by 孔子 Confucius about the state of 魯 Lu is the first thing that comes to mind. The phrase is also, as Kroll puts it, a "synecdoche for a year."

寒 and 暑, while signifying winter and summer, can represent their effects (i.e., cold and heat) alone, so another reading of this line is "cold and heat come and go." Either way, the emphasis on cycles and transience is something I've always appreciated about Chinese thought.

再見，看官.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 4

The fourth line of the 千字文 reads:

辰宿列張
chén xiŭ liè zhāng

"The stars are aligned, the lunar mansions arranged."

One of the many ways the Chinese traditionally used to tell time was the 地支, or "earthly branches." 辰 is the fifth earthly branch (out of a cycle of twelve, a number that made it useful for tracking months as well as hours). In this instance the character stands in for celestial bodies as a whole, per Kroll, which I've rendered as "stars".

宿 is more commonly pronounced sù, where it can mean "to stay the night," "lodging", or even "the previous day/year." In its alternate pronunciation it's used for "constellation" or "lunar mansion."

列 is used fairly straightforwardly here. 張 is something I don't recall ever using as a verb; it's much more familiar to me as a measure word for flat things, such as sheets of paper, or as one of China's most common family names.

The sidereal nature of this line allows for an alternate, if somewhat incomplete, reading, which as an H.P. Lovecraft fan came to mind almost immediately: "the stars are right." Of course, now I'm wondering what a sinicized Cthulhu mythos (the Chinese transliteration of "Cthulhu" is 克蘇魯, by the way) would look like. The Internet being what it is, I'm sure a cursory search engine query would yield several hours' worth of results, but do I have time for that right now? Eh, who am I kidding- of course I do.

Later, dudes.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 3

日月盈昃

rì yuè yíng zè

"The sun and moon wax and wane."

The third quartet of characters in the 千字文 was tricky to understand. 日 and 月 are "sun" and "moon", or "day" and "month". 盈 implies fullness, plenitude, and abundance, and 昃 signifies the period after noon, or, as both Kroll and the 遠東漢英大辭典 (Far East Chinese-English Dictionary) like to put it, when the sun is in the west. Paar calls it "the declining afternoon sun", and the key word here is "declining".

The combination of "full" and "after noon"/"declining" threw me off, though once I read Paar's translation, it made more sense. 盈 functions as a semantic opposite to 昃, even though the connection wasn't immediately clear to me. The topic, 日月, is what makes the characters comprising the comment, 盈, work together in this context.

I don't think 昃 sees much use these days, which is a shame, as I find it evocative. When broken down and reassembled into two separate characters, 仄日, it can mean "setting sun", which is cool, but not the same thing.

Later, folks.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic， part 2

Here are the next four characters of the 千字文.

宇宙洪荒
yŭ zhòu hóng huāng

"The universe is vast and desolate."

In modern Chinese 宇宙 means "universe" or "cosmos", and it was used that way in older forms of Chinese as well. On their own, however, the characters 宇 mean "roof", "eaves", or "firmament", while 宙 can signify "ridgepole", "central beam", or, get this, time itself. This latter definition is used by Paar (as "infinite time"), but not the former two. The image of time being the ridgepole holding up the celestial canopy and thereby forming the universe is pleasing in more ways than one.

洪 evokes vastness, but among its other uses are "flooding" or "overflowing", which makes sense given the character's 水 shuĭ water radical. 荒 can involve neglect, overgrowth with weeds, and desolation, but can also mean "expansive", "unrestrained", or "dissolute". (These meanings can be guessed at from the character's components, though I reckon it's easier the other way around, i.e., once you have an idea of what the character means, you can see some of that meaning in the written components.)

Aside from reinforcing the spatial and destructive aspect of 洪, the other uses of 荒 open up some neat alternative readings of this line. This, of course, is both the blessing and curse of classical Chinese: you could read 宇宙洪荒 as "the cosmos overflows with neglect", for example, and while it might not be the most logical or commonly agreed-upon reading, it wouldn't be unequivocally wrong, either.

Man, I haven't given this much thought to Chinese in a while. I'm enjoying it, and I hope you are too, 看官.

微臣
史大偉

千字文, The Thousand Character Classic

 The other day, while indulging in one of the greatest pastimes known to man, i.e., browsing the shelves of a used bookstore*, I ran across a wonderful 1963 edition of the 千字文, or Thousand Character Classic, edited by Francis W. Paar, that features the original Chinese text in several different scripts along with translations in English, French, German, and Latin. The 千字文 is probably the oldest extant primer for learning Chinese characters, and dates back to the sixth century A.D. There are versions available online, including the very same edition at Hathi Trust.

For my own edification, and hopefully that of anyone reading this, I think I'm going to try and post something about each verse of the 千字文 regularly. This version has a page for every four-character verse, which means 250 posts. We'll see how that pans out.

That said, here's the first four characters of the 千字文, AKA the Qiānzìwén or, in the old and aesthetically appealing but otherwise annoying Wade-Giles romanization system, Ch'ien Tzu Wen, along with some brief commentary by yours truly. Any statements that aren't mine are taken from the Paar edition I'm using as a source, and any other sources are noted accordingly. Let's learn Chinese like it's circa 1000 A.D.!

天地元黃
tiān dì yuán huáng

Well, this is a hell of a way to start. I transcribed the characters directly from this book, and 元, according to Paar and Kraal (in the latter's A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese), is a "taboo-substitute" for 玄, given the latter character's use in the names of 宋 Sòng and 清 Qīng emperors. I wonder how many more substitutions there'll be where the replacement character's meaning bears no resemblance to that of the character it's replacing.

So, returning the line to its original form, we have:

天地玄黃
tiān dì xuán huáng

Or, literally, "heaven earth dark yellow." Since nobody talks like that, let's say "heaven is dark and the earth is yellow." The earth is yellow in this case because much of the soil of northern China is yellow loess.

Kroll notes that 玄黃 is an analogue to 天地, since 天 is 玄 and 地 is 黄. Dark and yellow=heaven and earth.

One down, 249 to go.

微臣
史大偉


*The Portuguese word for a person or shop that deals in used books, alfarrabista, not only has a wonderful ring to it, but, according to the Dicionário Priberam, has its etymological roots in Al-Farabi, a medieval Muslim philosopher and polymath. I dig that.

Excuses in the form of books

Good God, it's been over two months since I've posted. Fortunately, I have excuses other than laziness. Two excuses, to be precise, and they're pretty good ones.

The first excuse is that I spent a good part of the autumn translating Orlando da Costa's novel O Signo da Ira from Portuguese to English. Frederick Noronha, the head of the publishing house Goa1556, asked me over the summer if I'd be interested in doing so. I said sure, why not, sounds interesting- about what you'd expect for a request with no deadline attached. Little did I know that Frederick wanted the book in time for António Costa's visit to India in early January. António Costa is Orlando da Costa's son and the Prime Minister of Portugal, and my translation of his father's book was given to him as a gift during an official meeting with Narendra Modi, India's PM.

While it's an unexpected honor to have produced something relatively high profile- not only was the book a diplomatic present, the Portuguese original has quite a reputation in the world of Goan literature- the version given to the Portuguese PM isn't as polished as I'd like, and at some point there should be a better edition coming out. That said, I'm pretty proud of what I managed to pull off, and the response so far has been positive.

My second excuse is Avante, Goeses, Avante!: The Portuguese Poetry of Laxmanrao Sardessai. I've been working on this book for a while, and it was released a couple weeks ago. It's published by Goa1556 (it was while working on this project that Frederick Noronha brought up O Signo da Ira), and I recently went to Goa to launch the book with a talk at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research and give a presentation on Sardessai's poetry at the II Simpósio Internacional: "Goa: Culturas, Línguas, e Literaturas", which was immensely gratifying to attend. At the book launch I even had the honor of meeting one of Laxmanrao's sons, Shashikant, and several of his grandchildren, as well as Sérgio Carvalho, who as a young man ("o tornatto", as Sardessai called him) had a poem dedicated to him.

It was a fantastic trip. Everyone I met was incredibly welcoming and gracious, the Goan landscape was all kinds of enchanting, and I got to speak Portuguese regularly with folks from around the world. I look forward to not only strengthening my ties to Goa and the community built around Goan Lusophone literature, but simply returning and getting to know the place better. Brief as it was, my time there opened all sorts of doors; once I know what's behind some of them, I'll let y'all know.

That's about it for now. If you're interested in getting hold of either book, let me know, or contact Goa1556 directly. I suspect they'll be available on Amazon or via other channels, especially in India, soon, but for now it's old-fashioned word of mouth and individual delivery.

Later, dudes!

"no dream. no dreamer."

nary an hour passes when some fragment of me
doesn't range back across the years - decades now -
in search of communion with hours lauded even then.
this high ceiling is not the same as that
of those liminal years, cannot even
pass itself off as such.
the trappings are all wrong, the bodies
(mine included)
bear no resemblance to those imagined
or dreaded or anticipated.

the fanged, tartared maw of history
stretches wide, cold as midsummer AC
and unforgiving as the thousands
and thousands
and thousands of cigarettes
this corpse in waiting has consumed.

no remorse, as metallica taught me:
not just for the smokes, but the carpeted nights
and the internet searches,
the sleep terrors and the shiner bock, the
extension of consciousness beyond
what speech and flesh and warm concrete
could only point to ("god" bless them all).

nary an hour passes when some fragment of me
doesn't range forward in time - entire minutes and hours -
in search of the new liminal,
moments when words like lucid dreams
arise among the living, the awake
and inevitably point back to the past,
beyond ceilings,
beyond bodies, beyond concerns,
beyond AC.
as if such a simple horizon was all there was to it.

Muse India: Goan Literature in Portuguese

At long last, the issue of Muse India dedicated to Goan literature in Portuguese has been released, and I'm pleased to announce that several of my translations of Laxmanrao Sardessai's poems have been included. You can, and should, check it out here.

In late summer 2015 Dr. Paul Melo e Castro, one of the editors of this particular issue, contacted me after reading my translation of Laxmanrao Sardessai's "O mistério aclara-se" and asked if I'd be interested in contributing. I was, and what started as a handful of translations for Muse India has become a much larger project: I've translated what I believe to be all of Sardessai's poetry, and the collection should see the light of day soon. I'll provide more details once they're nailed down, but suffice to say I'm excited. (Have I posted this before? It feels like I have. Apologies for any redundancy.)

There's another project in the works, too, but that one hinges on some complicated issues, so I'll refrain from doing much more than acknowledging its existence at the moment.

Well, back to work. Enjoy the new issue of Muse India. Portuguese-language writing in Goa, even before 1961, was rather sparse, and time certainly hasn't changed that. Nevertheless, I think it offers a pretty fascinating glance not just at daily life in the oldest European colony in Asia before and after Liberation, but the relationship between colonist and colonized, and how identities- religious, national, ethnic- are formed and, ultimately, brought to the brink of extinction.

Obrigado, caro/a leitor/a!

DAS

李長吉的 ”龍夜吟" / Li Changji's "Dragons at Night"

Once more I return to 李長吉 Li Changji, AKA 李賀 Li He. This poem was particularly difficult: it's somewhat longer than what I'm used to, and I made the mistake of reading a lot of characters according to their modern, or sometimes merely different (in classical Chinese terms), usage. Fortunately, J.D. Frodsham's translation was there to put me on the right track, only for me to deviate from it when I felt doing so benefited the translation.

Some notes on the poem follow, but first I want to discuss the title. Frodsham's "Song: Dragons at Midnight" works well enough in the context of his naming convention for Li's poems, but 夜 encompasses more than just midnight, and I can't imagine beginning a recital of this, or any, poem with a phrase dependent on a colon. Since Li has a considerable number of poems that he refers to as "songs" (喑， 曲， 歌， 樂) because they're probably meant to accompany popular tunes of his day, I've opted to put that element of the title aside. Doing so raises the issue of just how musical my translation is, or rather isn't, but I'm more concerned with conveying the poem's palpable feeling of being trapped by emotion and environment.

By the way, today (September 7) is Camilo Pessanha's birthday. I don't know if he ever read Li Changji, but I suspect he would've liked his work immensely.

Enjoy, dear reader/看官/caro leitor!

微臣
史大偉

-----


李長吉
龍夜吟


鬈發胡兒眼晴綠，高樓夜靜吹橫竹
一聲似向天上來，月下美人望鄉哭
直排七點星藏指，暗合清風調宮徵
蜀道秋深雲滿林，湘江半夜龍驚起
玉堂美人邊塞情，碧窗皓月愁中聽
寒砧能搗百尺練，粉淚凝珠滴紅綫
胡兒莫作隴頭吟，隔窗暗結愁人心


Li Changji
"Dragons at Night"



A curly-haired foreign boy, green-eyed
Plays the flute in the still night amidst tall buildings

Each note approaches the heavens
In the moonlight, beautiful women long for home, weeping

Lined up across seven holes, fingers conceal stars
Unnoticed, gong and zhi notes merge with the cool breeze

On the road to Shu, deep autumn, forest thick with clouds
At midnight dragons rise from the Xiang river, startled

For beautiful women the imperial harem feels like a frontier fortress
Bright moonlight through jade windows, gloom in the audience hall

A hundred feet of silk beaten upon cold blocks
Tears form pearls on face-powder, drop onto red thread

There are no foreign boys to play the hilltop song
Behind dark lattice windows, somber hearts bound together

-----

What I've translated as "foreign", 胡, is used to describe Turkic peoples from west and north of China. 宮徵 Gong and zhi are the first and fourth notes, respectively, of the pentatonic scale, which wouldn't have taken so long to find out if I'd bothered to read Frodsham's notes sooner. 蜀 Shu is one of the Three Kingdoms, about which there's been a certain well-known romance written; it's also the abbreviation for its present-day descendant, 四川 Sichuan province. The Xiang river runs through 湖南 Hunan province, and 湘 is the abbreviation for Hunan.

玉堂, literally "jade hall", showed up in one dictionary as "imperial harem", which seemed a fitting counterpoint to 邊塞, "frontier fortress" - I read a lot of uneasy relationships between people (especially women) and architecture in this poem. The bit about silk and blocks refers to the fulling of cloth; Frodsham says "the sound of silk being beaten on the fulling-blocks in autumn, to make winter clothes, is a familiar symbol of parting and sorrow." He also calls 隴頭吟 the "Long-tou tune" without explaining what "Long-tou" might mean. I've chosen to translate it as "hilltop" because 隴 can mean hillock or mound (or even "burial mound"), and 頭 head or top. Of course, that doesn't help if one wants to know what the "hilltop song" is.

I've made the decision to treat most of those referred to in the poem in the plural, rather than as individuals. Doing so deepens the poem's wistfulness, and makes sense in the context of the imperial harem and its occupants. While this poem's far from uplifting, it's definitely given me a better appreciation of Li's skill. There's a lot going on here, and one day I'll understand more of it.

Tesouros deixados nos livros

Há uns dias, recebi o primeiro volume do que espero seja uma obra-prima, nomeadamente "A Ditadura Envergonhada" de Elio Gaspari. O livro (e os seus quatros volumes acompanhantes) conta a história da ditudura militar no Brasil entre 1964-1985, um assunto do que não sei nada. Que sorte que tenho milhares de páginas para ler.

Mas não estou aqui a fim de falar da ditadura, ou do trabalho de Gaspari. Preferiria fazer uma breve menção das coisas, além do texto, que se pode encontrar dentro de um livro. No caso de "A Ditadura Envergonhada", há uma dedicatória, de uma Senhora C. ao Senhor G. (Não vou escrever os seus nomes completos, porque o livro foi um presente, e quando um presente afasta-se para o sertão do mercado, sempre existe a possibilidade bem incómoda do doador o descobrindo.) Também achei um marcador das páginas, feito de um pedaço de cartão com as palavras "Pharmacia & Upjohn"- antiga fusão das empresas Pharmacia e Upjohn, hoje em dia parte de Pfizer- impresso nela.

Quando leio dedicatórias em livros em segunda mão, sempre tento de imaginar as circunstâncias em que foram escritas. Foi o livro um presente bem escolhido, ou uma escolha de último minuto? E os marcadores das páginas- por que o leitor escolheu este pedaço de cartão em vez de um bilhete, ou uma folha de papel, ou outra coisa? Fez ele leu o livro? Que pensou dele?

As notas marginais, as dedicatórias, os marcadores das páginas, todos são tesourinhos deixados, de propósito ou por acaso, pelos leitores. Tais coisas revelam-nos pequenos detalhes da vida do leitor (o simplesmente dono) anterior do livro, e enriquecem a nossa experiência de leitura. É fácil lembrar que a leitura é uma conversação entre autor e leitor, mas a oportunidade de ouvir (ou, corretamente, ver) o bate-papo entre o autor e um leitor diferente é um único prazer. Por isso, prefiro comprar livros usados, e sempre deixar os meus próprios presentes para os futuros leitores.

Boa leitura, amigos!

Reflections upon the Warrior's Spell: Tasmania's Tarot

On my way back from Macau last summer I had a 15-hour layover in San Francisco. I dropped my bags off at the left luggage desk and took the train into the Mission, where, among other things, I loitered at Borderlands Books (and missed meeting Nick Mamatas by a few scant minutes), ate vegan food and drank beer that wasn't Tsingtao or San Miguel at Gracias Madre, and visited Aquarius Records for the second and equally triumphant time.

As you might expect, I found a number of albums worth purchasing at Aquarius, home of killer poetic album descriptions, and and the staff was kind enough to pack 'em up and ship 'em to Texas for me. Among those albums was Tarot's The Warrior's Spell, a compilation of their cassette-only demos (something I didn't know at the time, but would come into play when, a year later, they'd release their first full-length: see below). Like so many underground metal releases, the album art struck me as what I can only describe as amateurishly perfect. The title itself had the same effect: as a lifelong D&D player, the notion of a "warrior's spell" was just wrong, since spells are strictly within the purview of magic-users and (ugh) clerics, but it sounds cool, so who cares?

Here's the write-up from Aquarius Records:

The wizened seer tentatively flips the last card, her eyes illuminated by the dancing firelight. Her eyes widen as she gasps, before letting out a croaking grotesque cackle. "In your future...I see... MUSTY TASMANIAN WIZARD ROCK!" Well, congratulations! It must be your (Magician's) birthday, because no finer fate can await gods nor men than the prospect of delving into this arcane helping of mystical, mythical, organ-driven heavy folk prog from far off Tasmania. The Warrior's Spell comes hurtling across the astral plane courtesy of Tasmania's Heavy Chains Records (undoubtedly one of our fave new sources for weird & wonderful heavy rock and metal, along with Minotauro, having recently brought us the Outcast ep and latest The Wizar'd album), and conjures all of the torchlit corridor mystery & dusty crumbling aroma of some of our favorite proto-metal, proto-doom & witchy folky proggy rock bands, all swirling Hammond organ, plucked acoustic strums, seriously epic heavy riffing, plaintive flutes & distant nasal vocal prophecies. Uriah Heep is obviously a major touchstone here, the album title and cover clearly paying homage to the technicolor fantasy wonder-realm of Heep's 1972 opus The Magician's Birthday specifically. But just us clearly one can hear the sepia-toned Medieval echoes of Rainbow and the crackly mournful dirge of Pagan Altar. Tarot also shares their vocalist with another one of our favorite obscure quirky heavy acts, The Wizar'd! And while here he sounds significantly less theatrical and maniacal than in his other wilder doomed project, his more restrained approach in Tarot lends the music a much more sombre, majestick, archaic air. Very highly recommended for fans of all of those aforementioned groups as well as anything from early Wishbone Ash to Witchcraft to Comus to The Lamp Of Thoth to the Darkscorch Canticles compilation. Consider us well and truly... under the spell!!!


The Aquarius dudes nail the feel of the music itself, but like the Astral Rune Bastards record I wrote about a while back, listening to Tarot conjures up more than lyric-related imagery. The Warrior's Spell, less polished than the full-length Reflections (itself quite faithful to the analog sound of its influences, even though it was recorded with modern equipment), is particularly good at evoking the sort of scenes that one might imagine giving birth to the music itself. It's more than nostalgia for the days of '70s metal and hard rock, which neither I nor the members of Tarot ever experienced. It's the feeling of letting your imagination wander deeper and deeper into the fantastic as you kick back in your bedroom or basement with some albums borrowed from your buddy (say, Uriah Heep's The Magician's Birthday, like Aquarius Records suggested, or Reflections, Tarot's newest), a stack of Moorcock and Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks, the first edition AD&D Players Handbook, and maybe a joint or two.

People have been enjoying this kind of experience, with any number of aesthetic tweaks, forever, and it's one I continue to seek out. Heavy metal and the other trappings I mentioned above remain my primary method of doing so, and Tarot's ability to provide a killer soundtrack means that I can spend many an afternoon or evening lost in contemplation of not just wizards, fate, solitude, but a version of the 1970s that never quite was, or maybe just bled across time and space into our present day and the minds of a few dudes from Tasmania.

Check out Reflections here and The Warrior's Spell here, and get your fix of sweet riffs and organ lines. Don't forget to eyeball that album art while you're at it.

Later!

D.A.S.

Laxmanrao Sardessai: "18 de Junho"

The 18th of June is Goa Revolution Day, which has been celebrated since 1980. It marks the day in 1946 that the movement for independence from Portugal came into its own. Public meetings, such as the one addressed by Ram Manohar Lohia and Julião Menezes on 18 June 1946, were illegal under colonial rule, and therefore suppressed. For the next 15 years the Portuguese authorities faced a rising tide of resistance to their rule, in forms ranging from peaceful satyagraha and the formation of anti-colonial political parties to direct action carried out by the Azad Gomantak Dal. In December 1961, the Indian military finished what others had started and launched Operation Vijay, which swept into Goa and, in three days, put an end to 450 years of Portuguese rule. Goa was annexed to India, along with Damão and Diu, the even smaller remnants of the Portuguese Estado da Índia.

The Goan writer Laxmanrao Sardessai was jailed twice by the Portuguese for his involvement in the Goan independence movement. In the early 1960s, the newly-minted union territory of Goa faced the prospect of being merged into the neighboring state of Maharashtra, which Sardessai vehemently opposed and agitated against. While the following poem commemorates the historic actions of 1946, it was published during the period in which Sardessai wrote poems in Portuguese (as opposed to short stories in Marathi, which made up the overwhelming bulk of his literary output) as part of his campaign against merger. These poems were published in the Portuguese-language newspapers A Vida and O Heraldo, the latter of which continues today, having switched to publishing in English in 1983.

Enjoy, folks, and here's to the continuing struggle against colonialism in all its forms!

D.A.S.

"18 de Junho"

Laxmanrao Sardessai

publicado no jornal A Vida, 18 Junho 1966

Porque será, ó 18 de Junho,

Que estás tão desolado?

Será porque vês

Extinguir-se, lentamente,

A chama que te animara

Há vinte anos

E o sonho que teus sequazes

Sonharam

Duma Goa livre e bela?

Será porque tanto sangue

Que teus heróis verteram,

Foi em vão

E só lhes trouxe

Miséria e lágrimas

E nova escravidão?

Será porque medrou nesta terra

O mal e esvaiu-se o bem

E os vermes tripudiam

Sobre a carcassa?

E estertores retumbam

Nos lares?

E terroriza a queda

Dos valores morais?

Será porque corações inocentes

Choram a maldade dos potentados?

Será porque os ídolos de barro

Sorriem para escárneo

Dos bons e pacatos

E os criminosos se arvoram em juizes

E os justos se tornam cobardes?

Não chores, não, ó 18 de Junho,

Tu inspiraste um povo inteiro

A sofrer e morrer

Por um ideal!

Do teu seio sairá, em breve,

Outro 18, belo e radiante,

Que verá teus sonhos

Tomar vulto e brilhar

Como minaretes dourados

Nos céus azuis desta terra,

Hoje calcada,

Ó dia glorioso

Somos teus filhos.

Filhos de Revolução

E tu és nosso pai

Pai de heróis,

Que sabem sofrer por um ideal.

***

"18th of June"

Laxmanrao Sardessai

Published in the newspaper A Vida, 18 June 1966

Why is it, oh 18th of June,

That you are so forlorn?

Is it because you see

The flame that animated you

Twenty years ago

Being slowly extinguished

Along with the dream that your followers

Dreamed

Of a Goa free and beautiful?

Is it because so much of the blood

Your heroes shed

Was in vain

And only brought them

Misery and tears

And a new slavery?

Is it because evil has thrived in this land

And good has evaporated

And the worms rejoice

Over its carcass?

And death-rattles resound

In the homes?

And the decay of moral values

Terrifies you?

Is it because innocent hearts

Weep at the wickedness of the rulers?

Is it because clay idols

Smile in mockery

Of the good and peaceful

And criminals pretend to be judges

And the just become cowards?

No, do not weep, oh 18th of June,

You inspired an entire people

To suffer and die

For an ideal!

From your breast will soon come

Another 18th, beautiful and radiant,

That will see your dreams

Take shape and shine

Like golden minarets

In the blue skies of this land,

Today downtrodden

Oh glorious day

We are your children.

Children of the Revolution

And you are our father

Father of heroes,

Who know how to suffer for an ideal.

Feliz Dia de Portugal, de Camões, e das Comunidades Portuguesas!/Tradução do poema "Só Gosto" de Vimala Devi

Aqui no Texas o Dia de Portugal, de Camões, e das Comunidades Portuguesas está quase no fim. Por isso, ofereço-lhes uma tradução de um poema da escritora portuguesa Vimala Devi (o pseudónimo de Teresa da Piedade de Baptista Almeida), que nasceu em Goa e escreveu com Manuel de Seabra a obra-prima dos estudos da língua portuguesa no antigo Índia Portuguesa: A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa. Posso dizer que ela era uma das vozes mais fortes da literatura goesa na segunda metade do século XX. Agora ela vive em Espanha, onde escreve em espanhol, catalão, e esperanto.

Nunca traduzi um poema tão curto. É, num sentido, mais difícil do que um verso mais longo.

Adeus, amigos!
D.A.S.

***

"Só Gosto"
Vimala Devi


Do Céu, com estrelas.
Da Terra, sem gente.

-----

"I Only Like"
Vimala Devi


The sky with stars.
The earth without people.

Camilo Pessanha: "Floriram por engano as rosas bravas"

Apresento-lhes mais um poema daquele homem entre mundos, Camilo Pessanha. Geralmente dizemos que uma pessoa está entre dois mundos, mas no caso de Pessanha temos um homem entre um conjunto de muitos mundos contrários: os do Ocidente e do Oriente, do metrópole e da colônia, dos deveres do funcionário público e do estetismo, do exílio e do integração. Obviamente, esta série de díades não basta para esboçar um retrato completo de Pessanha (ou, na verdade, qualquer pessoa, coisa, ou ideia, porque não vivemos num mundo binário).

Este poema é, espantosamente, um que nunca li até há poucos dias. Pensei que tinha lido todos os poemas de Clepsidra, mas estava enganado. A ortografia é moderna, mas a pontuação da versão portuguesa está em acordo com a versão de 1920 de Edições Lusitânia (que não usa o circunflexo no seu nome!). Como de costume, não ha título próprio, e por isso uso a primeira linha do poema.

Agora, na cúspide do verão, pode-se dizer que um poema sobre a neve do inverno não faz sentido, mas que poderia fazer? Espero que vocês gostem do poema e a sua tradução para inglês. Vou escritar mais em breve, porque o dia de Portugal, de Camões, e das Comunidades Portuguesas (10 de Junho) está a chegar!

Obrigado e adeus, caros leitores!

Abraços,
D.A.S.

-----

I give you another translation of a poem by that man between worlds, Camilo Pessanha. We usually speak of a person being between two worlds, but in Pessanha's case we have a man between a set of conflicting worlds: East and West, homeland and colony, the duties of the public servant and and aestheticism, exile and integration. Obviously this series of dyads doesn't suffice to sketch a full picture of Pessanha (or, really, any given person, thing, or idea, because the world isn't binary).

Surprisingly, I hadn't read this poem until a few days ago. I thought I'd read every poem in Clepsidra, but I was mistaken. The spelling is updated, though the punctuation remains true to that found in the 1920 Edições Lusitânia (which on the book's title page doesn't use the circumflex!) version. As usual, the poem doesn't have a proper title, so I've used the first line instead.

Now that we're on the cusp of summer, a poem about the snows of winter might not make sense, but what can you do? I hope y'all enjoy the poem (in both of its forms), and I'll be writing again soon, as Portugal Day is coming up on the 10th.

Thanks for reading, and take it easy, folks.

Yours,
D.A.S.

-----

"Floriram por engano as rosas bravas"
Camilo Pessanha


Floriram por engano as rosas bravas
No inverno: veio o vento desfolhá-las...
Em que cismas, meu bem? Porque me calas
As vozes com que há pouco me enganavas?

Castelos doidos! Tão cedo caístes!...
Onde vamos, alheio o pensamento,
De mãos dadas? Teus olhos, que um momento
Perscrutaram nos meus, como vão tristes!

E sobre nós cai nupcial a neve,
Surda, em triunfo, pétalas, de leve
Juncando o chão, na acrópole de gelos...

Em redor do teu vulto é como um véu!
Quem as esparze — quanta flor — do céu,
Sobre nós dois, sobre os nossos cabelos?

***

"By mistake the wild roses bloomed"
Camilo Pessanha

By mistake the wild roses bloomed
In winter: the wind came and stripped away their leaves...
What are you pondering, my darling? Why do you silence
The voices with which you fooled me just now?

Lunatic castles! How soon you fell!
Where are we going, lost in thought,
Hand in hand? Your eyes, which for a moment
Looked deeply into mine, how sad they are!

And over us the snow falls, bridal,
Deaf, triumphant, petals lightly
Covering the floor in the acropolis of ice...

It is like a veil over your face!
Who scattered them — so many flowers — from the sky,
Over the two of us, over our hair?

杜甫的“春夜喜雨” / Du Fu's "Enjoying the Rain on a Spring Night"

We've been getting a lot of rain here lately, and I mean a lot. Houston's northern and northwestern suburbs are flooding seemingly every other week, and the city itself is perpetually waterlogged. The combination of El Niño, a local culture with a boundless appetite for more suburbs and their attendant oceans of concrete, and a city government that bends over backward for property developers has made Houston more prone to flooding than ever. The shortsightedness of it all is appalling, but, alas, not surprising.

Anyway, the recent rain inspired me to translate the following poem by 杜甫 Du Fu, the famous Tang dynasty poet. I've been trying to improve my classical Chinese lately so I can read 澳門記略 (AKA "the monograph on Macau", an 18th-century account of the city written by two Qing mandarins). The "brocade city" mentioned in the poem's last line is a reference to the city of Chengdu. None of the translations I've read, such as this one by Brendan O'Kane or Mark Alexander's use 重 quite the way I've chosen to, but I think it works.

Enjoy the poem, stay dry, and demand better flood control and city planning from your elected representatives. May the flowers bloom riotously after the rain, wherever you may live.


微臣
史大衛



春夜喜雨
杜甫

好雨知時節 當春乃發生
隨風潛入夜 潤物細無聲
野徑雲俱黑 江船火獨明
曉看紅濕處 花重錦官城



"Enjoying the Rain on a Spring Night"

Du Fu


Good rain knows its time
It starts to fall when spring comes

Following the wind, it slips into the night
Making things damp with hardly a sound

Black clouds all along the back roads
A lone boat's lamp bright on the river

Dawn finds this place red and wet
And the brocade city heavy with flowers