Paulo Mendes Campos he is considered as one of the greatest writers of Brazilian literature. The miner who was born in Belo Horizonte in 1922 belonged to a generation of big names, among them Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Fernando Sabino and Rubem Braga, all excellent poets and chroniclers. Even alongside renowned names, it was he who best translated the chronicle genre into texts permeated with lyricism and beauty.
The writer began his literary life at the age of twenty-three, when he moved from Minas to Rio de Janeiro. His chronicles attracted the attention of literary critics as soon as they began to be published in newspapers such as Correio da Manhã and Jornal do Brasil, as well as in Manchete magazine. The Written Word, his first book of poems, was published in 1951. Later, two other titles with texts of the genre were published, Testament of Brazil, in 1956, and O Domingo Azul do Mar, a collection of poems, in 1958. He dedicated a large part of his work to the chronicle, however, his poetry also deserves a prominent place, given the delicacy and uniqueness of his verses.
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In order for you to get to know better the poetic work of one of the most important chroniclers of Brazil, the website Escola Educação selected ten poems by Paulo Mendes Campos so that you can contemplate the poetic prose of the writer; a poetry that carries with it the lyricism and the beauty scattered in everyday themes. Good reading.
THE TIME
Only in the past is loneliness inexplicable.
Bunch of mysterious plants the gift
But the past is like the dark night
over the dark sea
Though unreal the vulture
It's bothersome my dream to be real
Or are we fantasy apparitions
The vulture of the rock is strong and true
Those who remember bring it to their faces
The melancholy of the dead
Yesterday the world exists
The now is the time of our death
IN THIS SONNET
In this sonnet, my love, I say,
A bit like Tomás Gonzaga,
How many beautiful things the verse asks
But few beautiful verses I manage.
Like the meager spring of the desert,
My emotion is a lot, the shape, little.
If the wrong verse always comes to my mouth,
Only in my chest lives the right verse.
I hear a voice whisper to the harsh phrase
A few soft words, however,
I don't know how to fit the lines of my song
Inside easily and securely.
And I praise here those great masters
Of the emotions of heaven and of earth.
TIME-ETERNITY
The instant is everything to me that is absent
of the secret that chains the days
I abyss myself in the song that shepherds
the infinite clouds of the present.
Poor of time, I become transparent
in the light of this song that surrounds me
as if the flesh were alien
to our discontented opacity.
In my eyes time is blindness
and my eternity a flag
open to the blue sky of solitude.
No shores no destination no history
the time that passes is my glory
and the fright of my soul without reasons.
SONG FOR DJANIRA
The wind is the apprentice of the slow hours,
brings its invisible tools,
your sandpaper, your fine combs,
carves her little hair,
where counterfeit giants do not fit,
and, without ever correcting its defects,
already growls disgruntled and guaia
in distress and goes to the other beach,
where maybe I can finally settle down
your sand moment—and rest.
THE DEAD
why heavenly disorder
the cosmos of blood takes me long
the thick oil of the dead?
Why see through my eye?
Why use my body?
If I'm alive and he's dead?
why inconsent pact
(or miserable deal)
Has the dead man snuggled up to me?
What a most decomposed pleasure
make my middle chest
from the dead man's absent chest?
Why the dead man's weight?
is to insert your skin
between mine and the other body.
If it's to the taste of the dead
what I eat with disgust
eat the dead in my mouth.
What a secret disagreement!
just be the warehouse
of a living body and a dead one!
He is full, I am hollow.
FEELING OF TIME
Shoes aged after being worn
But I went by myself to the same desolate
And butterflies landed on my toes.
Things were dead, very dead,
But life has other doors, many doors.
On earth three bones lay
But there are images that I couldn't explain: they surpassed me.
The running tears could bother
But no one can say why it should pass
Like a drowning man among the currents of the sea.
No one can say why the echo wraps the voice
When we're kids and he runs after us.
They took my picture many times
But my parents couldn't stop
May the smile change into mockery
It's always been like this: I see a dark room
Where there is only the whitewash of a wall.
I often see it in port cranes
The baleful skeleton of another dead world
But I don't know how to see simpler things like water.
I fled and found the cross of the murdered
But when I came back, as if I hadn't come back,
I started reading a book and never had a rest.
My birds fell senseless.
Many hours passed in the cat's gaze
But I didn't understand time then as I do now.
I didn't know that time digs in the face
A dark path, where the ant passes
Struggling with the leaf.
Time is my disguise
three things
I can not understand
The time
The death
Your look
Time is too long
Death is meaningless
Your look makes me lost
I can't measure
The time
The death
Your look
Time, when does it cease?
Death, when does it begin?
Your gaze, when it expresses itself?
I'm very afraid
Of time
Of death
from your look
Time raises the wall.
Will death be the dark?
In your gaze I look for myself
The Hands That Seek
When the look guessing life
Clings to another creature's gaze
Space becomes the frame
Time strikes uncertain without measure
The hands that look for each other get stuck
Narrowed fingers resemble claws
From the bird of prey when it grabs
The flesh of other defenseless birds
Skin meets skin and shivers
It oppresses the chest, the chest that shudders
The face the other face defies
The flesh entering the flesh is consumed
Sighs the whole body and faints
And sad comes to his senses thirsty and hungry.
Amor Condusse Noi Ad Una Morte
dismiss your modesty
Get rid of your modesty with the shirt
And leaves ala crazy without memory
A nakedness born for glory
Suffer from my look that heroizes you
Everything your body has, it doesn't humanize you
An easy blindness of victory
And since perfection has no history
Your plots are light like the breeze
slow constant combined
An angel in you is opposed to fighting and mourning
And I fall like an abandoned sun
As love fades, peace rises
Your feet rubbing against my feet I hear
The breath of the night that takes you.
to a ballerina
I want to write my verse right now
Where the extreme edge of the footlights
Silence your feet, and a god exalts himself
As if the body were a thought.
Beyond the stage, there is the pavement
That we never imagined aloud,
Where your pure step startles
The subtle birds of movement.
I love you with a love that asks for everything
In the sensual moment when it is explained
The infinite desire of sadness,
Without ever explaining or unraveling,
Moth that lands but does not stay,
The joyous temptation of purity.
Luana Alves
Graduated in Letters
