Tag: translation

Landlocked mid poetic subject and poet, mid experience and body, mid reality and the act of writing, lies an indubitable reflective surface lightly swiveling as the halo of a flame.
Mário Lugarinho illustrated Al Berto “between the poetic and the experimented, installed as a bridge — the mirror itself, recurrent metaphor in his oeuvre. Between poetry and experience, the subject, incontestable mediator between the real and the written and establishing between them the flagrant coincidence.” In a sensory blossoming of ontological experience, Al Berto carries the brutalism of existence as one does scars in one’s own body, exhibiting those elements of suffering with timid thrusts while words cannibalise their own element of sincerity. The body, in his poems, rises as a monolith of subjectivity laved in the hemorrhage of experience; it is cumbrous with sensuality, hatred, speech, infancy, shards of things-in-themselves in a scenery of mournful abandonment:

I sleep
within a disheveled body
fear encroaches the somber hall
I find a water scintillating in plaster
a scar of mossy crystals opens
porous to my touch, indicating
there shall be no forgetting or breeze
to clean the immemorial time of this home

of this simulated sleep, it left but bitter iodine
the waxed woods covered in dust
dried herbs in rain sheafs of rosemary,
jonquils, snapdragons, campions, clover
yet no escape has been restarted
my infancy remains sad where I abandoned it
nearly does not live
yet I still hear it breathing within me.

now all is different
I restart life from the emptiness
of dark days in silence
in-between skin and a beam of magnificent veins
I feel the bird of age dragging its wings

where it develops a calm lunar flight

I enumerate objects thoroughly, classifying them
by sizes and textures, by functions
I want to leave everything tidy when madness comes
from the sharpened extremity of my winged body
and my face is intruded by a shard of wing

so shall life collapse unto a sheet of paper
where verse by verse
I illuminate and wear myself out.

“Vigílias” – Al Berto

The stark provocation of image — which binds itself both cruel and ethereal in a procession of memory — is not merely symbol, but a counterpoint to denotation; the wound is palpable, as each verse widens its longitude with unstinting force where the absence of breath is not merely a quality of form but a proxy to restlessness. A frondsome garden is thus woven and hydrated in white obscurity: reality is held in a crystalline distance, writing cannot approximate it, regardless of eloquence, of thought, of philosophies, we lie in open sight and sketch an estimated geography, and, from time-to-time, an embodiment of placid light befalls our lips and we are disfigured by castrated toponymies; our place in the universal lie unfurls. Al Berto carries out his death in poem successively, both the wanting of his death and the pestilent, modern malaise of the death of wanting, inherited from a legacy of weighted dichotomies and promises–too long has the poet promised, too epic was the oneiric journey of poetics, too arduous the return. Thus, his poetry is a summon for a corpse, the buoyant corpse of his infantile yearn, the mossy corpse of his lyrical dreams, the winged corpse of his light, yet merely a corpse: the gallows of his life plaintively whistle within, and in reality lies a frigid inheritance of death. Our body, lush with herbs and snapdragons and rosemary positioned as a reflective vessel of both, a world of unbearable cruelty made of particles and waves of synthesized beauty.
There is, yet, an ethereal release from anguish in his mirror of corpses that, even if still anguished, serves to lighten the breath:

I write to you feeling all of this
and in an instance of lucidity I could be the river
the goats shrouding the tinkle of sleigh-bells in the silver crystals of a photograph
I could rise as the chestnut-tree of those tales whispered by a fire
and wander, trembling with the birds
or accompany the sulfuric butterfly revealed by humid lips
I could mimic that shepherd
or mistake myself for the dream of a city which little by little bites its own immobility

I inhabit this world of water by error
I’m required radio-graphic images of bones
unfocused faces
hands on bodies printed in paper and mirrors
notice
I have nothing else
if not this note stained with fine arils of pomegranate I sent today
notice
how a heart of paper is yellowed by the forgetfulness of loving you.

“Trabalhos do Olhar” – Al Berto

Passion, even in passing, is an effusing stroke, and a world perhaps collapsed is reshaped (albeit perfunctorily) only to support that florescence, as loving is the most human of all Arts,
notice
we have nothing else.