Selected Poetry, 1937–1990

Preface

Preface This bilingual anthology is the first comprehensive selection in English ofJoao Cabral de Melo Neto's poetry. Cabral's poetic career spans more than half a century. Literary historians generally consider Cabral the most significant poet of the post—World War II generation in Brazil. For the past twenty years, Englishspeaking readers' acquaintance with him has been primarily through the score of poems gathered by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil in the anthology and translationssponsored by the Academy of American Poets and published by the Wesleyan University Press as An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). The present collection takes the Cabral poems in that anthology as its core. The impetus for the expansion of that core into a full-fledged volume came from the poet's selection as laureateof the Neustadt International Prize for Literaturein 1992, a prize previously won by Elizabeth Bishop herself and sponsored by World Literature Today, the oldest continuously published international literary quarterly in the United States. Joao Cabral de Melo Neto was born on 9January 1920 in Recife . His first extant verses date from the late thirties. Inspired by the minimalist theatrical settings of Pirandello and goaded by the formal preoccupations of the fledgling poet, particularlyupon his initial encounter with the surrealism of Apollinaire, these poems were not published until 1990 and are presented here in translation for the first time. These are auspiciousexercises that already evince the poet's career-long devotion to the rigors of his craft. They intimate as well his suspicion of inspired states and of poetic lyricism . "Poetry seems to me something much broader," he would IX Preface This bilingual anthology is the first comprehensive selection in English ofJoao Cabral de Melo Neto's poetry. Cabral's poetic career spans more than half a century. Literary historians generally consider Cabral the most significant poet of the post-World War II generation in Brazil. For the past twenty years, Englishspeaking readers' acquaintance with him has been primarily through the score of poems gathered by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil in the anthology and translations sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and published by the Wesleyan University Press as An Anthology cifTwentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). The present collection takes the Cabral poems in that anthology as its core. The impetus for the expansion ofthat core into a full-fledged volume came from the poet's selection as laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1992, a prize previously won by Elizabeth Bishop herself and sponsored by U0rld Literature 7Oday, the oldest continuously published international literary quarterly in the United States. Joao Cabral de Melo Neto was born on 9 January 1920 in Recife . His first extant verses date from the late thirties. Inspired by the minimalist theatrical settings ofPirandello and goaded by the formal preoccupations of the fledgling poet, particularly upon his initial encounter with the surrealism of Apollinaire, these poems were not published until 1990 and are presented here in translation for the first time. These are auspicious exercises that already evince the poet's career-long devotion to the rigors of his craft. They intimate as well his suspicion of inspired states and of poetic lyricism . "Poetry seems to me something much broader," he would IX declare in a speech to Brazil's Academy of Letters (of which he has been a member since 1968) on the occasion of his acceptance of the Neustadt Prize in 1992. "It is the exploration of the materiality of words and of the possibilities of organization of verbal structures , things that have nothing to do with what is romantically called inspiration, or even intuition." Cabral is often referred to as "a difficult poet." No one can appreciate that difficulty in the same way as those who have been chastened by the trials of translating his works. Fortunately for the present collection, a good many of the translators are distinguished poets themselves, with their own chastening difficulties as poets. Certainly this is the magnetic relationship Cabral has always had with Elizabeth Bishop. And it is also the challenge that has attracted other first-rank poets and veteran translators, such as W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and, more recently for the purposes of this expansion, Alastair Reid and younger poets such as Richard Zenith and Ricardo Sternberg . Finding oneself in such company is indeed humbling. Were it not for the opportunity to check my own translations with the poet himself (his English is graceful), it...