Toward a Poetry & Poetics of the Americas (36): Gregorio de Matos, Brazil, 1636-1696: Two Poems

To the Veritable Judge Belchoir da Cunha Brochado

 Learn’                                   wis                                        noble huma                           afa

                  >d                                >e                                                           >n             >ble

Principle                awar                                                     benig                      amia

 

Differ                                                  singular preci                                                unshaka

                  >ent                                                              > ous                                                      >ble

Magnific                                              ilustri                                       incompara

 

In the worl                               of grave just                                                               inimita

                       > d                                                >ice                                                      >ble

Much love                 lauds                     slu                                            of applause incredi

 

For endeavor             so much work and so tru                                                 terri

        > ing                                                    > ly                                               > ble

Render                                                          readi              executions always indefatiga

 

Your reputa                           sir, true                                                                     noteriet

                              >tion                                                                                                                >y

In that loca                            that never sees                                                                   da

 

Where from Ereb                   there remains only a                                                       memor

                                  >us                                                                                                               >y

So             gracio                 to grant                     such                       energ

 

A      in all thi          land there is            gentle                                                   glor

   >s                 > s                                                                                                                         >y

A      remote a                                         any                                                felicit

                                          Translated from Portuguese by Jennifer Cooper

 SONETO/SONNET

in Portuguese & Tupi

 Is there anything like seeing a Paiaia

So much inclined to be a Caramuru,

Descended from the bloodline of the tatu,

Who speaks a twisted language like Cobepá?                           

 

The female line of which is called Carima

Muqueca, pititing, caruru,

Manioc mush, wine of fermented cashew

Mangled in a mortar from Priraja

 

The male line of which is called the Aricobe, 

Whose Cobe daughter & a pale-faced Paí

Cohabited on Passé Promontory

 

The white man was a Mara-u marauder

She an Indian maiden all the way from Mare; 

Cobepá, Aricobé, Cobé, Paí

                                     Translated from Portuguese by Jennifer Cooper & Jerome Rothenberg

 COMMENTARY

                         If you are fire why do you glow so weakly?

                            If you are snow why do you burn without a break?

                                                            (G.de M.)

(1) Gregório de Matos came to be known as Boca de Inferno – Mouth of Hell – for his searing criticism & satire directed to the evils & hypocrisies of both the Bahian elites & the Portuguese colonial project in general.  After working as a judge in Portugal for thirty years, De Matos returned to his hometown, Salvador, where for his activities & his poetry he was banished by the colonial authorities to Angola. A year after, De Matos was allowed to go back to Brazil, where his publications were banned. 

In his works -- that move from the religious to the laudatory, the amorous to the pornographic -- he not only criticized & caricatured the elites but registered the daily life & the language of marginalized voices, including Tupi-Guarani & Afro-Brazilian, with a burgeoning move toward a new orality.

 (2) The opening piece presented here is from a group of laudatory poems, this one to the judge Belchoir da Cunha, of Bahia.  The form involves a playful construction common to the anagrams & labyrinthian forms developed first in the Iberian & European Baroque. (See below page 000.). In the wordplay here, the last letters or suffixes of various words are shared from one line to the next.

            In “Soneto” the terminal words of each line are from the indigenous Tupi-Guarani & appear, as in the English version, without translation.

 [Commentary by Jennifer Cooper]

 N.B. Another excerpt from the assemblage of the poetry of the Americas “from origins to present,” edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Javier Taboada, scheduled for publication by the  University of California Press.