TRANSLATION

“Opening” and Other Poems

Translated from Portuguese by Alexis Levitin and Ricardo Vasconcelos

By LUÍS MIGUEL NAVA  |  17 OCT 2023

Opening

The body is too close to the habitual, we must initiate between the two an opening, a few inches of intense freedom. Our skin certainly has something to say in all of that. To get there, we must, in any case, first off, cross the snow that beneath our thinking falls upon what we have thought, entering then into a space where, with all the nails of my spirit pounded into memory, at times I’ve had to crawl my way.

 

A River   

Now and then, without our knowing really how or why, a river passes through our house, its banks quickly beginning to dispute the space normally occupied by our furniture and all the other objects that surround us. All-powerful, the mounting waters feed upon them in a torrent of whose cause and destination we know nothing. Our own bodies, with a special emphasis on certain parts or certain organs, seem to serve as banks and riverbed to those waters, the same occurring, and on a deeper level, with certain feelings from which at all cost we try to free ourselves before, entering through them into our spirit, the waters, as though possessed, completely drown us. Using clocks or some other more subtle method that our thoughts cannot quite grasp, they end up penetrating time itself, where we feel them rising willfully, foaming against one or another instant whose consistence, which distinguishes it from the rest and isolates it on the threshold of our lives, nobody would in any other way perceive. There exists in these waters something dispersed or intermittent which at certain times allows us, for example, to hold out our hand to touch one of the doors without our fingers even getting wet, though the strength of the waters on both sides dissuades us from any attempt at opening it. Soon enough, due to the moisture that now insinuates itself everywhere, nature breaks upon our furnishings, takes possession of our books, and seeks after the allusions they make, as if the pages where this is happening were already connected to the natural world and, since, in fact, they refer to a meadow, one could find them ready to house roots that in a short time would proliferate amongst dictionaries and one or two long-forgotten botanical compendiums. And, as if the river were making its way through the mirror, suddenly we realize we already have it in our memory.

 

The Blueness of the Sea       

The blueness of the sea breaks free of water.
From the bones I drove into reality, from which I thought
the sea would gain support and from which I always
imagined, as well, the sea would seek its nourishment (so much so that
at times we sense
it filling with reality) not a single one, not even painted,
survives now,
as time erases everything around me.

Luís Miguel Nava’s Poesia, consisting of four completed collections and eighty pages of posthumous publications, came out in 2020, twenty-five years after the young poet’s shocking death. Nava’s poetry relies on a fearless visceral depiction of the body, accompanying surging seas of memory and desire. His work, well-known in Portugal, has also appeared in French and Spanish translations. He seems most reminiscent of Francis Bacon and Paul Bowles. Poems drawn from his forthcoming collection in English have been accepted by eighteen magazines, including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, Bitter Oleander, The Dodge, Hollins Critic, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Metamorphoses, Mid-American Review, Osiris, Plume, Poet Lore, Puerto del Sol, Rosebud, and Spoon River Poetry Review.

Alexis Levitin has published forty-eight books in translation, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent translations from Portugal include Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press, 2015) and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord (Milkweed Editions, 2016). He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal, The Catholic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil and has held translation residencies at the Banff Center, Canada, The European Translators Collegium in Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Ricardo Vasconcelos is a 2020-2021 Fulbright U.S. Scholar and Professor of Portuguese at San Diego State University. His scholarly work and critical and literary editions, on modern and contemporary Portuguese literature, including authors such as Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós, among others, has been published in the USA, Portugal, Brazil, Colombia, England, France, Germany, Italy and other countries. He is the author of Campo de Relâmpagos — Leituras do Excesso na Poesia de Luís Miguel Nava [Lightning Field — Readings in Excess in the Poetry of Luís Miguel Nava], the first book on the poet, and in 2020 he published a long-awaited critical edition of Luís Miguel Nava’s Poesia.

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