Bati segunda vez e outra mais e mais outra.
Resposta nenhuma.
A casa do tempo perdido está coberta de hera
pela metade; a outra metade são cinzas.
Casa onde não mora ninguém, e eu batendo e chamando
pela dor de chamar e não ser escutado.
Simplesmente bater. O eco devolve
minha ânsia de entreabrir esses paços gelados.
A noite e o dia se confundem no esperar,
no bater e bater.
O tempo perdido certamente não existe.
É o casarão vazio e condenado.
THE HOUSE OF LOST TIME
I knocked on the doors of lost time. No one answered.
I knocked a second time, a third, a fourth.
No answer.
The house of lost time is half covered
with ivy; the other half is ashes.
A house where no one lives, and me knocking and calling out
because it hurts to call and not be heard.
Knocking, knocking. The echo returns
my desperate longing to open, at least a little, this frozen palace.
Night and day become the same haze in my waiting,
in my knocking and knocking.
Lost time surely doesn’t exist.
The imposing house is vacant and condemned.
NOTES ON THE POEMS
Many of Drummond’s poems were published in periodicals before being included in book collections. The notes provide initial publication dates only for the earliest poems, before his first book saw print, in 1930.
Seven-sided Poem
First published in December 1928.
The word gauche, in the third line of the poem in Portuguese, has the French meaning of “clumsy, awkward,” different from what the word usually means in English: “tactless, socially inept.” Much has been written about Drummond’s self-characterization as gauche, which recurs in “A mesa” (“The Table”), here. The Brazilian critic Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna used the notion as his central point of reference for analyzing the poet’s work in Drummond: o gauche no tempo. This book defines the poet’s gauche persona as an “eccentric” who, beset by “the constant disparity between his reality and outward reality,” is condemned to behaving like “a displaced person within the ensemble” (displaced person in English in the original).
Childhood
First published in December 1926.
In the Middle of the Road
In Portuguese the first four words evoke the beginning of Dante’s Inferno: “Nel mezzo del cammin.”
Written in 1924 or 1925 and first published in July 1928, this poem delighted writers and critics with modernist sympathies; it scandalized many others. And it continued to elicit reactions for years to come. In 1967 Drummond published a “biography” of the poem, which compiled all the published criticism on it that he could find. Eucanaã Ferraz brought out an expanded version of this book in 2010.
Square Dance
Published in November 1927.
Multitudinous Heart
Published in August 1925.
The Hotel Avenida, located on the Avenida Rio Branco and inaugurated in 1911, was a landmark of chic, fashionable Rio. It was built by the streetcar and electric company, and there was a streetcar terminal just opposite. The hotel’s ground floor was taken up by the Galeria Cruzeiro, a shopping arcade that included bars and restaurants. Drummond would write a long poem in homage to the hotel in 1957, the year it was demolished.
Social Notes
Published in December 1925.
The poem, whose original title is in the singular, was conceived as one of the “notes” in the Social Notes columns that were a regular feature of newspapers.
BREJO DAS ALMAS / SWAMP OF SOULS
Brejo das Almas was the name of a small municipality in Minas Gerais. Drummond presumably chose it for a title because of its literal meaning. In 1948, the municipality changed its name to Francisco Sá.
Don’t Kill Yourself
Third stanza, third line: In the original the language is directly Freudian and could be translated as “and repressed things, being sublimated.”
Confessions of a Man from Itabira
The Introduction explains the importance of iron for Itabira and the importance of Alfredo Duval for Drummond.
International Symposium on Fear
The poem was originally published under the title “Congresso Internacional de Poesia” [International Symposium on Poetry].
Family Portrait
Second stanza: Brazil became a republic in 1889.
Roll, World, Roll
This poem contains references to World War II. The Brazilian government’s policy of deactivating lighthouses to prevent further attacks from German submarines is referred to in the sixth stanza. The gas in the fourth stanza might be an allusion to the gas chambers.
May Afternoon
The custom of preserving the lower jawbones of deceased relatives was reported by the anthropologist James George Frazer, among others.
Second stanza: May is an autumn month in southern Brazil.
Make-believe Lullaby
The Portuguese title, “Cantiga de Enganar” (literally “Song that Deceives”), is a play on “cantiga de embalar,” which means cradle song, or lullaby.
The Table
First published as a chapbook, in 1951.
The poem narrates an imaginary ninetieth birthday party for Drummond’s father, who died in 1931 at the age of seventy. All of Drummond’s immediate blood relatives — parents, siblings, and offspring, alive or dead — are gathered around the table and described in turn. The deceased sister, Rosa Amélia, was born on her father’s twenty-second birthday. The oldest brother, Flaviano, remained in Itabira and followed in his father’s steps as a rancher. Altivo was the lawyer. José was the brother who never married. Drummond’s younger sister Mariinha, according to the poem, was somewhat estranged from the family. The eight “angels” were the brothers and sisters who died in infancy. The young female described as “my best or only verse” was Drummond’s daughter, Maria Julieta, born in 1928. Drummond’s mother, Julieta Augusta Drummond, died in 1948 at the age of seventy-eight.
FAZENDEIRO DO AR / FARMER IN THE CLOUDS
“Farmer (or Rancher) of the Air” would be a more literal rendering of the Portuguese title. Drummond’s biographer reported that he first used the expression in a letter to the Brazilian fiscal authorities, protesting the high tax levied on agricultural land that belonged to him but that earned him little or no money. He was not a wealthy fazendeiro da terra (farmer of the land), he explained, but a mere fazendeiro do ar (farmer of the air), then living in Belo Horizonte.
Green Library
The original English-language edition of the Library (described in the Introduction to this book) was published in 1898, in twenty volumes. The edition in Portuguese, which reordered the original selections and added a generous amount of Brazilian and Portuguese writing, was produced in Portugal but distributed in Brazil, from 1912 on. One of the translators for the massive project was Fernando Pessoa, still unknown and practically unpublished.
Second stanza: Drummond’s father was not a military colonel. The title Coronel was (and is sometimes still) conferred on wealthy landowners or political bosses in the Brazilian interior. Colonel has been used in a similar way in some Southern states.