Midnight Pub

My Untitled Portuguese poetry

~dsilverz

Se eu vivo ou se eu morro

Eu ainda recebo esporro

O mundo nunca se satisfaz

Com o cadáver que nunca jaz

/

Eu não escolhi nascer

Mas eu ainda devo ser

A posse dum capataz

Que nunca me quer na paz

/

O homem se acha rei

Daquilo que usurpou

Eu nunca me entreguei

Mas o mundo me roubou

/

Eu não quero viver nem morrer

Mas eu fui preso nesse corpo

Coagido à morte temer

(Serei levado por seu sopro)

/

Eu não escolhi nascer

Mas eu ainda devo ser

Culpado por mim mesmo

Por existir à esmo

/

Eu me cansei de ser escravo

Minha cova eu quem escavo

Tudo que quero é descanso

(Ao meu próprio fim eu me lanço)

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(Non-Portuguese readers: there's a musicality that can't be translated from the Portuguese version. Translations will lose the original Portuguese literary devices, such as rhymes and fixed syllabic metrics.)

Características:

- Influências literárias: trovadorismo e literatura de cordel, onde estrofes possuem padrões silábicos fixos (no caso do poema, as métricas alternam entre septilhas e novessilábicas (9-7-7-9-7-9), criando uma cadência).

- Influências de correntes filosóficas: niilismo (Schopenhauer e Nietzsche) e existencialismo (Sartre e Camus)


thebogboys

This is cool, thanks for sharing. I'm sure it is my American ignorance speaking here, but it's impossible for me to read Portuguese verse without thinking of Joao Gilberto. I can totally see what you mean about a lot being lost in translation if you attempted to convert into English. Not only doing a word-for-word but also a characteristically accurate translation of the music is very hard. I once looked up the English translated lyrics of "Para machucar meu corocao" (please excuse the lack of accents) and while I thought they were a nice rendition, I had to question how much of the original meaning was lost.

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dsilverz

I wasn't aware of João Gilberto (partially because its musical genre, "Bossa Nova", doesn't really fit my personal tastes). Some of his songs (such as "Lobo Bobo", which is Portuguese for "Fool Wolf" and plays some pun with the story of Big Bad Wolf) do indeed contain rhythm and regular metrics.

As for the phrase you mentioned, "Para machucar meu coração", it depends heavily on the surrounding context. For example, "Você fez de tudo / para machucar meu coração" would translate to "You did everything / to hurt my heart", while "Para machucar meu coração / Bastou não pedir perdão" would roughly translate to "In order to hurt my heart / not asking for forgiveness was enough" (the latter example contains the rhyme "coração/perdão" which was lost during translation). Plus, there are several ways to translate the same text/sentence as well: "You've gone too far / hurting my heart" would be a valid translation alternative to the first example (although it would slightly change the verb tense from the original).

There's also the Portuguese interchangeability of subject and predicate, verb and adjective, etc, the "word order" (which for English is often SVO, Subject+Verb+Object). Something like "No meio do caminho havia uma pedra, havia uma pedra no meio do caminho" (a famous quote from Carlos Drummond de Andrade) has a direct English translation "In the middle of the road there was a stone, there was a stone in the middle of the road" which sounds okayish for an English-speaker, but literally translating phrases such as (I just invented this one) "Caminhava pela ponte o senhor do meu destino" to "Walking across the bridge (was) the lord of my fate" probably sounds "weirder" than the non-literal translation "The lord of my fate walked across the bridge".

It's worth mentioning that there are some English things that Portuguese cannot translate, either. For example, "hopefully" is a word that I can't really find a proper Portuguese synonym ("Esperançosamente" sounds too weird). "Enshittification" is another example: a neologism that often gets "enportugueseficated" as "enshitificação". Some phrases specific to the English language also tend to have no direct translation (e.g. "Every cloud has a silver lining" seems to be a frequently-used English idiom which has no direct Portuguese idiom, and its literal translation "Toda nuvem tem um forro de prata" is not really meaningful to a Brazilian context).

Finally, there are things that neither language can really convey, a phenomenon I mentioned in my post entitled "Ineloquibilis" from January. Things like "non-existence" and "lack of spatial characteristics" are hard to be put into words, be it English or Portuguese, because language implies "time" (hence the presence of tenses for verbs) and "existence" (hence the verb "to be"). So a sentence such as "The eldritch entity, full of devoid non-beingness, shone its darkness unto me, from forever till the neverness, its non-existence is awesome and ominous" sounds really weird and implies something ("Eldritch entity") being not-a-thing (thus not existing), yet the original meaning is something that "exists in the non-existence", a paradoxical statement... and it's only paradoxical because of the intrinsic nature of human language. Portuguese doesn't help here, either: "A entidade sobrenatural, cheia da vazia inexistência, iluminou sua escuridão sobre mim, desde sempre até o nunca, sua inexistência é maravilhosa e ameaçadora" also sounds weird.

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dsilverz

Due to the Gemini markup formatting, individual verses ended turning into paragraphs (I even tried the markdown trick of adding a double space at the end of each line, but it doesn't work) so I added a slash symbol between the real paragraphs, indicating which verses belong to which stanza.

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