Imagine making poems the way an architect designs buildings or an engineer builds bridges. Such was the ambition of João Cabral de Melo Neto. Though a great admirer of the thing-rich poetries of Francis Ponge and of Marianne Moore, what interested him even more, as he remarked in his acceptance speech for the 1992 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, was "the exploration of the materiality of words," the "rigorous construction of (. .) lucid objects of language." His poetry, hard as stone and light as air, is like no other.
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Joao Cabral de Melo
Education by Stone
About the Selection and Translation
João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poetry was at its strongest between 1950 and 1980, and the selection presented here is weighted accordingly. His last book,
Rather than offering excerpts from the author’s various long narrative poems, two such poems are presented in their entirety. Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of sections from
The Afterword examines João Cabral’s poetics and discusses a number of the poems translated here. Lest readers imagine that some words were accidentally left out, let it be noted that a few poems —“The Dog without Feathers,” “Weaving the Morning” and “Banks and Cathedrals” are examples — employ syntactical ellipses, a device that I have usually tried to replicate in the translation.
Ten of the translations in this volume were first published, with some significant differences, in the Wesleyan
Acknowledgments
I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting this project with a translation grant in 1985. I also thank the Endowment for its patience. The John Anson Kittredge Educational Fund kindly provided a supplementary grant. It was David Haberly who encouraged me to do an entire book and to apply for funding.
Dora Feiguin, Elizabeth Marques, Manuela Rocha and Marcia Rodrigues graciously clarified difficult passages. Several people who provided practical help or moral support are no longer with us: Frank MacShane, Haroldo de Campos, and the poet himself, João Cabral de Melo Neto, who said he hated to see translations of his poetry into languages he knew. He tolerated me anyway.
Education by Stone
Selected Poems
from Pedra do sono / Stone of Sleep 1942
from O engenheiro / The Engineer 1945
from Psicologia da composição / Psychology of Composition 1947
from Paisagens com figuras / Landscapes with Figures 1956
from Quaderna / Four-spot 1960
from Dois parlamentos / Two Parliaments 1961
from Serial / Serial 1961
from A educação pela pedra / Education by Stone 1966
from Museu de tudo / Catchall Museum 1975
from A escola das facas / The School of Knives 1980
from Agrestes / Rough & Rude 1985
from Crime na Calle Relator / Crime on the Calle Relator 1987
Notes
Manuel Rodríguez, “Manolete,” perhaps the most legendary matador of the twentieth century, was born in Córdoba in 1917 and died, gored, in 1947.
Although the Portuguese word for silk,
Only the first half the poem is included here. Two more poets — Portugal’s Cesário Verde and Brazil’s Augusto dos Anjos — and two more painters — Juan Gris and Jean Dubuffet — are considered in the second half.
The Sertão is the arid and impoverished hinterland of Northeast Brazil.
In primitive, unmechanized sugar mills, clay was added to the sugar as part of the bleaching process.
The Mata is the fertile coastal region of Pernambuco where sugarcane is grown. In the fourth line of the second stanza, the word
Itamaracá is an island off the coast of Pernambuco.
The Sirinhaém is a river that empties into the Atlantic in southern Pernambuco.
Chimborazo is the highest mountain (20,561 feet) in Ecuador, where the poet served as the Ambassador of Brazil from 1979 to 1982.
Afterword
“A stone is a stone is a stone” could not be a poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto, but it could be an epigraph to his poetry, a notice at the gates that the language within is plain and direct and that the subject matter is mineral, touchable, weighable, thingish. A stone is preferable to a rose for the simple reason that it is harder. This poet never liked what was easy. In “The Unconfessing Artist” he recognized that doing something is as useless as not doing anything, yet he insisted that it’s better to do. Why? Because it’s harder than not doing. It was only hard things like stones that held any poetic attraction for João Cabral. He considered poems made out of flowers to be, at best, a redundancy. Whereas poems made out of what’s harsh, rugged and lifeless might add a new sliver of something — perhaps beauty — to the world and might even, in a slight way, change how we see.
Stones have no fragrance, but they are heavy with substance and endure. João Cabral, whose second book was titled
Yet another quality of stone, besides its hardness and resilience, is its sheer and utter stoniness. What you see is what it is, the same material throughout. There is no “inner stone” to probe, ponder, or dress with theories. João Cabral was suspicious of whatever was invisible. He was not a strict materialist, but he preferred solid matter, because it is surer, clearer, and common to all. When he was 32 years old he published an essay criticizing the Brazilian poetry of his own generation for being “made of super-realities, made with exclusive parts of man,” with no greater ambition than “to communicate extremely subtle details, for which the only useful writer’s tool is the lightest and most abstract part of the dictionary.” Cabral preferred “the prosaic word” that is “heavy with reality, dirty with the coarse realities of the outside world.”
One possible explanation for João Cabral’s poetic preference is simple: he was writing out of what he knew. His education by stone was the one he received growing up in Northeast Brazil, the country’s poorest region, largely taken up by the dry and desolate hinterland known as the Sertão. João Cabral was not from the interior but from Recife, on the coast, where thousands of Sertanejos (people from the Sertão) poured in during the drought years. To get there, many of the migrants would follow the path of the Capibaribe River, settling along its shores when at last they reached the city outskirts. The Capibaribe and the poor who inhabit its banks became recurring and indissociable topics in Cabral’s poetry. So destitute were these people — destitute of material means and of any real hope — that their existence was almost wholly defined by the muddy river, making it hard to know “where man (…) begins from the mud” or even “where man begins / in that man” (
Another long poem,
It was on the family’s sugar plantations that João Cabral spent his early childhood and received much of his tough “education.” However green and lush the Mata may be, life for those who cut and milled the sugarcane was as gray and meager as in the arid Sertão. A son of privilege, João Cabral never suffered any privation, but he saw it close up, every day, and he remembered what he saw. In the evening the sugar mill workers would gather around and hear the little boy recite popular verse narratives, published in pamphlet form and sold in the marketplace. This kind of versified storytelling — traceable to the narrative poetry traditions of medieval Iberia — became the major vehicle for what could be called Cabral’s “socially engaged” poetry. If this term is used here with reservations, it is because the poet himself never employed any such epithet. The great originality of his poetry in this vein is its absolute objectivity, not only in its dispassion but also in the way it objectifies the poem’s subject.
In “Party at the Manor House,” the plantation owners and their politician friends talk about the sugar mill workers as subhuman creatures, hardly distinguishable from the sugar which is the beginning, middle and end of their exploited lives. Like the poor of Recife who stagnate along the banks of the Capibaribe River, the sugar mill workers have no inner “spiritual man” that can remain untouched by the condition that defines them. The twenty stanzas of this poem amount to a biology of their species, matter-of-factly described “in child form,” “in female form,” “in the form of an old man,” and so forth. In fact there is no “engagement” with the mill worker’s condition. The poet merely reports; let the reader react. Cabral’s childhood contact with those workers, acting as a vaccine (see “Plantation Boy”), gave him a permanent immunity to facile emotional responses. His poetry displays no pity, and hence no condescension.
João Cabral moved with his family to Recife when he was ten years old, and in his late teens he began to frequent the Café Lafayette, where the city’s intellectuals met. A voracious reader, he was especially fond of certain French authors, including Mallarmé and Valéry. He was twenty years old when he met Murilo Mendes and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, probably the two Brazilian poets who most influenced his work, and they helped him publish his first book,
Shortly after his first book was published, João Cabral moved to Rio de Janeiro, and in 1945 he was admitted into the Brazilian foreign service. In that same year he published
in his efficient machine.
Always the same twenty words
he knows so well: how they work,
their evaporation, their density
less than the air’s.
(“The Lesson of Poetry”)
Those twenty words mark the limits of inspiration; even if the poet produces more words, they still weigh less than air. But Cabral will put them into his poem-machine, where they will become the indispensable components of taut, interlocking verse structures. Eschewing verbal effusion and the piling on of images, he exploited to exhaustion the single word, the single image: water, wind, knife, stone. From their being used so insistently and in such varying formulations, these words acquired functional weight and substance, independent of whatever weight their literal meaning carried.
In “Antiode,” published in 1947, the poet tells how he rejected the word “flower” in favor of the unpoetical “feces.” To rehabilitate the flower for use in poetry, he had to strip away all its lyrical overlay, reducing it to a “verse / inscribed in verse,” an “explosion / made to work / like a machine, / a vase of flowers.” In a process analogous to the Freudian sublimation of sexual energy into the creative forces of civilization, Cabral reined in direct emotion as well as aesthetic or intellectual exaltation, harnessing their energy to generate his smooth-running poetry, which depended not so much on the words — or flowers, emotions, images, ideas — themselves, but on their dynamic arrangement. The machine functioned on its own, with no need for the reader to relate to the man who created it.
This freeing of the poem from the poet has its price. The relationship with the author created by a well-made poetry of personal confession or remembrance will more easily captivate and move the average reader. The resolute impersonality of Cabral’s work — in which the word “I” rarely occurs — puts a heavy burden on technical accomplishment, and demands readers who appreciate that accomplishment. “Impersonal” does not mean “unfeeling,” however. The poet’s rigorous configurations placed words in a state of high tension capable of provoking, at certain moments, emotions of a rare order, and these were by no means an accidental by-product of his art. According to Cabral, his constructivist approach to poetry owed its greatest debt not to any of the writers and painters he admired but to Le Corbusier, whose theoretical works he had read already as a teenager. But if the Swiss architect’s most famous proposal was to see a house as a “machine à habiter” (machine to inhabit), Cabral chose another phrase of Le Corbusier for the epigraph to
In 1947 João Cabral took up his first foreign post, as the Brazilian vice-consul in Barcelona. Over the next forty years he held posts in England, Spain, France, Switzerland, Paraguay, Senegal (where he rose to the rank of ambassador in 1972), Ecuador, Honduras, and Portugal. All left explicit traces in his poetry, but Spain — where he spent a total of fourteen years, in Barcelona, Madrid and Seville — became the second geographical pole around which his poetry flourished. This was not a pole of opposition but one that echoed, in a European register, Cabral’s native Pernambuco. The relative socioeconomic backwardness of Franco-ruled Spain, the arid, harshly lit landscapes of Castile, and the stark essentiality of Andalusia’s
The reciprocal relationship of the two regions is demonstrated in
This, Cabral’s most popular work, was not one he cherished, judging it less well crafted than others. But it served, in his overall production, as an antidote to the danger that “work can become exercise, an activity performed for its own sake” and leading ultimately to “the death of communication.” Cabral followed up this warning, issued in a lecture delivered in 1952, with an indictment of poets who don’t take into consideration their readers, “the essential counterpart to the activity of creating literature.” A poet’s richness, he argued, “can only originate in reality.”
Cabral’s more rigorously constructed work, his “poetry of reflective concentration,” reached its highest level of achievement in the 1960s, with the publication of
The play of oppositions is greatest in “The Sea and the Canefield” and “The Canefield and the Sea.” The first line of the first poem, “What the sea learns from the canefield,” is negatively restated in the fifth line, “What the sea doesn’t learn from the canefield,” and then inverted in the first line of the second part, “What the canefield learns from the sea,” which is in turn negatively restated in the fifth line. The poem’s sixteen verses are all repeated in the inversely titled poem, “The Canefield and the Sea,” but in different order, and with the verb “learn from” being replaced by its linguistic counterpart, “teach.” The most famous poem in this collection, “Weaving the Morning,” uses the interconnected cries of cocks crowing at dawn as a metaphor for the human solidarity that enables each day to take shape and proceed smoothly.
The intricately woven poems of
It is hard to imagine how Cabral’s poetry could have developed any further as architecture or engineering, and the poet did not attempt a repeat performance of his achievement but chose instead to explore other paths. The eighty poems of
In 1980
True to his own program but again taking everyone by surprise, João Cabral returned to “poetry for wider audiences” in 1984 with the publication of
The title
In 1987, with the publication of
Reading Cabral’s last two books, we might suspect that he never really needed a crutch; that instead of making all those constructivist, thinglike poems to fill up an inner void, he could simply have spent more time in Seville, which drew out hidden, perhaps repressed facets of his personality. But we might as readily suspect that the city that had such a liberating effect on this poet was not the Seville that lies north of Cádiz and west of Córdoba but the Seville he invented, word-stone by word-stone, over several decades of his writing life.
Whatever the case, the world João Cabral re-created in poetry — a kind of verbal reconstitution of what is — will endure for a long time, both as a highly original artistic monument and as an invaluable didactic example. He has shown us a new way to make poetry and, what is more, a new way to see things. More modestly but no less importantly, he has directed our vision to certain plain and concrete things that we might never have stopped to consider before. “A stone is a stone is a stone” could not have been a João Cabral poem, but it could have been the conclusion to a poem, or to his entire poetic enterprise — hard and heavy, like everything real.