Llansol

Tonight, re-reading Clarice Lispector, I suddenly remembered Maria Gabriela Llansol, and couldn't help regretting having resisted her writing for so long, perhaps because I intuitively felt it was too close to the bone for safety (that is, when safety was something I treasured, alas. Not anymore.)

It's no surprise that Llansol's amazing work has remained accessible only to a small, very small readership and to a coterie of academics, who haven't as yet seemed to have found the time nor the will to make her texts more widely available in English, as she deserves - in the same way that Llansol herself beautifully and generously translated - or trans-figured - into her native Portuguese language texts by Rimbaud, Verlaine, Rilke, Apollinaire, Eluard, Emily Dickinson, and many, many others.

Here's a tiny contribution, from a book I read on my last trip to Portugal. I only wish I had the desire to translate more on the trip this summer. Portuguese is such a painful language to me, though...


VIII. under her veil

I very intimately think to those who read __________ the legentes, I desire.

I expose ourselves.

Yet, if you who think do not offer your body,

what will you think?

XLII. nothing

if I don't listen to the leaves' oxygen,
music is blind to me.

[...]

«it is between hammers that our heart survives.»


(translated from Maria Gabriela Llansol, Amigo e Amiga: Curso de silêncio de 2004. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2005).