Adelia Prado: Heaven, Gothic and on Fire [by Jeffrey Levine]

If it begins in the quotidian, it ends in a place as peculiar and mystical as any Emily Dickinson, where, much like the dead, the speaker of the poem has its own business to do. And the poet owes it to the speaker to dissolve into the speaker, where the wild, peculiar, unexpected leaping takes place.

And so, that astonishing Brazilian poet Adelia Prado. Her first book in English, The Alphabet in the Park, stunned the world 29 years ago with its utter freshness and originality. (Both it and the new one, Ex-Voto, are translated from the Brazilian by Ellen Doré Watson.)

CHAMBERPOT

At midnight, José dos Reis

—my secret boyfriend—            

comes to serenade me.

Papa coughs

and rattles the chamberpot.

Lord, how embarrassing—

his little waterfall,

collards in the garden

icy with dew and fear.

I make like a dead saint.

My heaven is gothic

and on fire.

Here’s a synthesizing and transformative imagination that is attuned to the details of the physical world while seeking realms beyond the visible, beyond what can be said but is well worth trying to say, 'spreading/ a strange, unutterable music' onto the page.

What you want from every poem is some kind of miracle. But of course you can't will the miracle to happen; you can't make a miracle happen by hard work or good works. But you want to be in the presence of the miracle when it happens, like that time at the Bay of Fundy when I hadn’t heard about it, no news or radio, and there was an eclipse of the sun happening right there, over the water, and like the Neanderthals without a weather report, there’s nothing to do but to recognize it for what it is, and accept it and leave it alone. Or establish a religion. Or paint it out of manganese and rust, and thus preserve that moment as a first entry in “The Book” to which we all aspire.

 

The Shaft Scene in the Lascaux Caves in France. It’s one of the world’s most famous examples of ancient cave art, featuring a dying man and several animals. Researchers now say artwork might commemorate a comet strike around 15,200 BC. Animal symbols represent star constellations in the night sky.

 

It is the attempt to contextualize that which cannot be contextualized that makes things happen in Prado’s poem. It is in the way the poem fails to accomplish this contextualization—with what trusting relaxation of the reins—that it releases something, and that something is revealed, and there—whatever it is—is. Something discovered. This is where the poem’s power lies, where the pen longs to find itself, searching for what Wallace Stegner calls the angle of repose. [Where, at this angle, the material on the slope face is on the verge of sliding, but doesn’t quite.]

Poetry is show business, within italicized show. The showing exists in an unsteady balance, where energy is released in the incident of collapse\no collapse, and both the poet and the reader may simultaneously descry that moment the sail appears on the horizon.

I know, I know; there are perhaps more qualified others who argue, perhaps persuasively, for a Platonic balance within the poem, all of its elements combining just so. But I don’t buy it, and never have. Give me the heaven, gothic and on fire.

Comments

[Ira Sadoff]

Like your agenda this week Jeffrey, in praise of the irrational and mysterious, which is at the heart of almost all great lyric poetry. The transformational line for me here is "I make like a dead saint," raising and changing the stakes of the poem. The embodied spirit. I'm assuming this Prado poem is translated by Ellen Watson. She's a wonderful translator of Prado, one of my favorite poets too.
Ira

[Jeffrey Levine]

Thanks, Ira. It's the many ways that of "saint" that work for me, with implications of innocence, blessedness, getting away with it, and the feint of death. Yes, it's Ellen Watson. We (Tupelo) published her translation of Ex-Voto (really, a collection of poems from various sources), and Adelia Prado came to Williamstown for a launch and dinner party. Extraordinary woman. Extraordinary women. Adelia read everything in Brazilian Portuguese, and Ellen, her English translations. Two embodied spirits. Anyway, not a day goes by when I don't think fondly and gratefully about what you've meant to me, Ira, as mentor and friend. Treat yourself to some Mozart today. No. 22 isn't heard enough, the adagio utterly transcendent.