Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Seven Songs of Decline and Other Poems by Mário de Sá-Carneiro

2022; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 105; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hpn.2022.0023

2153-6414

Renato Alvim,

Literature, Culture, and Criticism

Reviewed by: Seven Songs of Decline and Other Poems by Mário de Sá-Carneiro Renato Alvim Sá-Carneiro, Mário de. Seven Songs of Decline and Other Poems. Francis Boutle Publishers. Pp. 132. ISBN 978-1-8380928-4-9. Seven Songs of Decline and Other Poems, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Ana Luísa Amaral, and edited by Ricardo Vasconcelos, is a bilingual Portuguese-English selection of representative poems by Portuguese poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro from 1913 to 1916 while living in Paris. The many relevant aspects of this selection start with a detailed, although not lengthy, contextualization of the significance of the poet for Portuguese literature, and as a prominent production of poetry in the first decades of the twentieth century by a Portuguese poet. The relationship between Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Fernando Pessoa is pinpointed by Vasconcelos and represents the like-mindedness and complicity of those two young artists facing a tumultuous world—both inside and outside of their heads—and in a process of transformation and ebullition clearly noted through their literary productions. As for the translators, besides bringing to light the ideas interpreted from some of Sá- Carneiro’s most significant poems, Jull Costa and Amaral decide to free themselves from the methodologically put together rhymes in the original poems, opting to honor the poetic rhythm instead. Such an approach evidenced to the readers that most of the struggles that Sá-Carneiro voices in these poems are related to finding a place for the self outside of stationary marks of simple dichotomies. As a result, rhymes could be regarded as containing walls that add tension to a foreseen and inevitable burst, which is well organized and lead by the selection of the poems by the translators. The selection starts with the poem “Departure” leading the reader to share with the poetic voice moments of identification and differentiation as it becomes a solitary crossing journey of a sentiment of mismatch. The poetic voice will be claiming for a stable position or, rather, will be agonizing with the sensation of not being able to belong in the now: past and future seem to be the best settling time to be. Thus, the present becomes the trapping time of realization of all this wrong and incomplete presence. Furthermore, it is not only time that causes such a sensation of imbalance between the self and else—nature, actions, daily routine, objects, persons, [End Page 163] places, smells—all the input received from various sensations seemingly exist to prove that. They all point to a different direction and position other than the one the voice recognizes to inhabit at the moment. Chronologically positioned, the subsequent poems generate a path the readers can follow by experiencing various senses that will support this continuous search. By provoking the senses, the challenge is to add a form, to circumscribe some shape to the thoughts those senses triggered. If “Departure” asserts a sense of non-belonging, it is the poem “Manucure” that represents the epitome of the mismatch and imbalance between the sensation of self and else. Here, the poetic voice incorporates the otherness when compared to any other what, whom, where, how, when, and why in the world. At the same time, it is the moment when the boundaries of the fixed rhymes are overcome by a visual burst from within the poem—which reinforces the appropriate maneuvering by Jull Costa and Amaral in not privileging the external rhymes used originally in Portuguese. “Manucure”’s visual experimentation can be identified, for example, as the embodiment of onomatopoeias, yet another attempt by the senses to transcribe and represent the impossibility of the interspace occupied by the poetic voice. The movement itself promotes creation as a promise to fulfill such an exasperation. The selection ends with the poem “Feminine”—the final expression of a desire that is unapologetically repeated and reinforced in every other stanza of the poem: Eu queria ser uma mulher. There is no questioning, no “ifs” any longer; the poetic voice seems to have achieved a definition—if not of time, or of place, or of reason, but of self. At least to a certain extent an...