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This Thursday, Louise Glück became the sixteenth woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The writer is the third American to receive the award and the first poet from the United States of America to receive it. Considered one of the most important American poets, the importance of his work has also been outside his native country, but it has received little attention in Portugal, where none of his books are published.
Some of his poems, however, have been published anonymously in anthologies and magazines, as happened with “O Poder de Circe” and the third part of “Paisagem”, published in the anthology. Rose of the World. 2001 Poems for the Future (2001), by Assírio & Alvim, and in number 12 of the magazine Glass ceilings, from Averno, respectively.
The Observer reproduces the two poems in their Portuguese translation:
I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
they look like pigs.
I’m sick of your world
that allows the exterior to disguise the interior.
Your men weren’t bad;
an undisciplined life
did that to them. Like pigs
under my care
and my helpers,
he became more docile.
So I reversed the charm
showing you my goodwill
and my power. Saw
that we could be happy here
how are the men and women
simple requirements. At the same time,
I anticipated your departure,
your men, with my help, submitting
the sea noisy and startled. Think
that a few tears disturb me? My friend,
every sorceress has
a pragmatic heart; nobody
see the essential that cannot
face the limits. If only I wanted to have you
I could have caught you.
* Poem originally published in the collection. Meadowlands (1996), with the title “Circe’s Power”. Published in Portugal in anthology Rose of the World. 2001 Poems for the Future (2001), by Assírio & Alvim, in a translation by José Alberto Oliveira. The anthology is currently out of print
In late autumn a girl set fire
to a wheat field. Fall
it had been very dry; field
it burned like straw.
Then there was nothing left.
If we went through it, we didn’t see anything.
There was nothing to harvest, to smell.
Horses don’t understand
Where is the field, they seem to say.
Like you or me asking
where is our house.
Nobody knows how to answer them.
Nothing remains;
we can only hope, for the sake of the farmer,
insurance pays.
It is like losing a year of life.
How would you lose a year of your life?
Later he returns to the old place –
only ashes remain: blackness and emptiness.
You think: how could I live here?
But at that time it was different
even last summer. The earth acted
as if nothing bad could happen to him.
A single match was enough.
But at the right time, it had to be at the right time.
Or ridge field, dry –
death ready
so to speak.
* Third part of the poem “Landscape”, by Hell (2006), translated by Rui Pires Cabral. The verses were published in No. 12 of the magazine Glass ceilings, from Averno, in May 2009
