Mário Cesariny

[Heteronym]

Portuguese poet (1923-2006), one of the founders of surrealism in Portugal. He was also a celebrated painter and a talented pianist, but his father didn't allow him to pursue his lessons. In 1947 Cesariny travelled to Paris, where he met André Berton. Returning to Portugal, he founded the Portuguese surrealist movement in opposition to Salazar's regime and also to the neo-realist current in Portugal's literature at the time. A homosexual who didn't make a secret of it, he was regularly persecuted by the police during the regime. In the '80s he was rediscovered by readers thanks to new editions of his work, and by the time of his death he was considered one of the greatest Portuguese poets.

To a Dead Rat Found in a Park

Here this creature ended its vast career
as a dark and living rat beneath the starry expanse
its diminutive size only humiliates
those who want everything to be enormous
and who can only think in human or arboreal terms
for surely this rat used as well as it knew how (or didn’t know)
the miracle of its tiny feet – so close to its snout! –
which were after all just right, serving perfectly
for clawing, scurrying, securing food or beating a retreat, when necessary

So is everything as it should be, O “God of small cemeteries”?
But who knows who can know when a mistake has been made
in hell’s central offices? Who can be sure
that this creation so disdained by the world
but with a world inside it
wasn’t initially conceived to be a prince or judge of nations?
The worries it aroused in housewives and physicians!
Who are we to play at good and evil when they’re beyond us?
Some lad understood the uniqueness of its life
and ran over it with the wheel by which, eye to eye,
the vicitim and the executioner love each other

It had no friends? It deceived its parents?

It ran all about, a tiny body that had fun
and now just lies there, gooshy, smelly.

What sort of conclusion does this poem,
without exaggeration, merit?
Romantic? Classical? Regionalist?

What end belongs to a brave and humble body
killed at the height of its lyrical powers?

Poem

Light occurs when
shadows are eliminated
Shadows are what exist
shadows have their own exhaustive life
not on this or that side of light but in its very heart
intensely loving insanely beloved
and they spread over the ground their arms of gray light
that enter human eyes at the corners

On the other hand the shadow called light
doesn’t illuminate objects really
objects live in the dark
in a perpetual surrealist aurora
which we cannot contact
except the way lovers do
with eyes closed
and lamps in our fingers lamps on our lips

Voice from a Stone

I don’t adore the past
I’m not three times a master
I made no pact with the underworld
that’s not why I’m here
sure I saw Osiris but at the time he was called Luiz
sure I was with Isis but I told her my name was João
no word is ever complete
not even in German which has such big ones
and so I’ll never succeed in telling you what I know
unless by an arrow from the wind’s blue and black bow

I won’t say as someone else did that I know I know nothing
I know that I’ve always known a few things
and that this counts for something
and that I hurl whirlwinds and see the rainbow
believing it to be the supreme agent
of the world’s heart
vessel of freedom purged of menstruation
living rose before our eyes
The future city where “poetry will no longer give rhythm
to action since it will march ahead of it”
is still far far away
Will there be an end to the preachers of death?
An end to the reapers of love?
An end to the torture of eyes?
Then pass me that jackknife
because there’s a lot we need to start pruning
pass it don’t look at me as if I were a wizard
entrusted with the miracle of truth
“the swinging of an ax and the goal of not being sacrificed won’t build anything under the sun”
nothing is written after all