Multitudinous Heart
Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition
-
- 11,99 €
-
- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
The most indispensable poems of Brazil's greatest poet
Brazil, according to no less an observer than Elizabeth Bishop, is a place where poets hold a place of honor. "Among men, the name of ‘poet' is sometimes used as a compliment or term of affection, even if the person referred to is . . . not a poet at all. One of the most famous twentieth-century poets, Manuel Bandeira, was presented with a permanent parking space in front of his apartment house in Rio de Janeiro, with an enamelled sign POETA—although he never owned a car and didn't know how to drive." In a culture like this, it is difficult to underestimate the importance of the nation's greatest poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
Drummond, the most emblematic Brazilian poet, was a master of transforming the ordinary world, through language, into the sublime. His poems—musical protests, twisted hymns, dissonant celebrations of imperfection—are transcriptions of life itself recorded by a magnanimous outcast. As he put it in his "Seven-Sided Poem": "When I was born, one of those twisted / angels who live in the shadows said: / ‘Carlos, get ready to be a misfit in life!' . . . World so wide, world so large, / my heart's even larger."
Multitudinous Heart, the most generous selection of Drummond's poems available in English, gathers work from the various phases of this restless, brilliant modernist. Richard Zenith's selection and translation brings us a more vivid and surprising poet than we knew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of Brazil's most important poets, the wry, dry, self-deprecating Drummond (1902 1987), claims a respectable American following, and this large, bilingual collection, ably introduced by veteran translator Zenith, should see that reputation expand further. The early poems, puzzle-like and spare, that made Drummond's name ("I will never forget that in the middle of the road/ there was a stone") serve to introduce his friendlier narratives and parables, particularly the long, affectionate, imaginary family reunion entitled "The Table," or an extended comparison of poetry to a stuffed elephant, "ready to go out and look/ for friends in a jaded/ world that doesn't believe/ any more in animals." Readers who make it through Drummond's weaker, more abstract verse of the 1960s and '70s will be rewarded with the sharp recollections of "Oxtime," which describes the poet's mining-town childhood. They will also discover a deliberate, sad poetry of old age. Zenith duplicates the pace, if not the meters, of Drummond's seven-syllable lines and makes careful English from the Portuguese of his free verse: the poet who emerges has one eye on his big country, but he attends first and last to an exemplary "tiny, quiet, indifferent/ solitary life."
