Portugal e Gana na POESIA

PORTUGAL
Garras dos sentidos (Agustina Bessa-Luís)


 Não quero cantar amores,
Amores são passos perdidos,
São frios raios solares,
Verdes garras dos sentidos.

São cavalos corredores
Com asas de ferro e chumbo,
Caídos nas águas fundas,
não quero cantar amores.

Paraísos proibidos,
Contentamentos injustos,
Feliz adversidade,
Amores são passos perdidos.

São demências dos olhares,
Alegre festa de pranto,
São furor obediente,
São frios raios solares.

Dá má sorte defendidos
Os homens de bom juízo
Têm nas mãos prodigiosas
Verdes garras dos sentidos.

Não quero cantar amores
Nem falar dos seus motivos.



***


GANA
Homesick (Ama Ata Aidoo)

This afternoon,
I bolted from
the fishmarket:


my eyes smarting with shame
at how too willingly and sheepishly
my memory had slipped up
after the loss of my taste buds.


- Just like an insecure politician creaming up
to his boss.


Familiarly in an unfamiliar land,
so strong and so sweetly strong,
the smells of the fish of
my childhood hit hard and soft,
wickedly musky.


All else fall into focus
except the names of the fish.


While from distant places in my head
The Atlantic booms and roars or
calmly creeps swishing foam on the hot sand.


But I could not remember their Fantse names.


They were labeled clearly enough
- in English -
which
tragically
brought no echoes…


One terrifying truth
unveiled in one short afternoon:


that
exile brings losses like
forgetting to remember
ordinary things.


Mother,
when next we meet,
I shall first bring you
your truthspeaker’s stone:


the names and tastes of fish are also
simple keys to unlock
secret sacred doors.


And I wail to foreign far away winds:


Daughter of My Mother and My Father’s Orphan,
what is to become of me?


And Those like me?

Alemanha e Gana na POESIA

ALEMANHA
Uma palavra (Gottfried Benn)

Uma palavra, uma frase -jorra dos signos
vida reconhecida, abrupto sentido,
o sol nasce, esferas em silêncio
e tudo choca-se nisso.
Uma palavra, um brilho, asa e fogo,
uma faísca em chama, uma estrela no breu -
e de novo o escuro, monstruoso,
no espaço vazio entre o mundo e eu




Tradução: Viviane de Santana Paulo


***


GANA
To The Widow (Adjei Agyei-Baah)


You are the sleepless duck
Who rests on a single leg
Keeps vigil over a silent compound
And wait upon the ancestral spirits
To come for the last morsel of the day

You are the abandoned lover
Who plies the memory lane in acidic tears
Walking the footpath that closes in with weeds
And mull over multiple mouths meowing to be muted

Your bed is that of a bamboo
Denied of warmth by the icy hands of fate
Its discomfort turning you into an early morn bird
That wakes to catch no worm

You are the quivering lamb at the kangaroo court
Around you the predatory pride prowl
The ripen pawpaw by the roadside
That the wayfarer chances upon with joy

You whom tradition mocks with hyena’s laughter:
The wicked witch who killed the breadwinner
The half dark moon that must be caged in the murky skies
And forced to take an oath of innocence
By gulping down bath water from your husband corpse

But you are now the desert cactus
Who once nursed your seeds in the hooves of the passing caravan
And prayed for the rains to water them anywhere they fell
For now your children have returned through the stormy weathers
With a tearful joy for your crackled lips

Gana e EUA na POESIA

GANA
The weaver bird (Kofi Awoonor)


The weaver bird built in our house
And laid its eggs on our only tree
We did not want to send it away
We watched the building of the nest
And supervised the egg-laying.
And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner
Preaching salvation to us that owned the house
They say it came from the west
Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls
And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light
Its sermon is the divination of ourselves
And our new horizons limit as its nest.
But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the communicants
We look for new homes every day,
For new altars we strive to re-build
The old shrines defiled from the weaver's excrement.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yNlrkiiJnE


***



EUA
EM SUMA (Doroty Parker)

Navalhas doem,
ácido mancha,
o rio molha,
drogas dão cãibra;
arma é ilegal,
laço desfaz-se,
gás cheira mal.
Viva: é mais fácil.

Tradução: Nelson Ascher


RÉSUMÉ

Razors pain you – ,
Rivers are damp:
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.