My English version (that means all the faults are mine) of Fernando Pessoa´s poem "Gato que brincas na rua"
Cat who play on the street
As if you were in bed,
I envy your fate
Because I can´t even call it that.
Good servant of fatal laws
That rule over rocks and people,
You have general instincts
And your only feelings are what you feel.
You are happy because you´re like that,
All the nothing you are is yours
I see myself but I´m not in my own body,
I know myself but I´m not who I am.(Gato que brincas na rua,Como se fosse na cama,Invejo a sorte que é tua,Porque nem sorte se chama. /Bom servo das leis fatais,Que regem pedras e gentes,Que tens instintos gerais,E sentes só o que sentes./És feliz porque és assim,Todo o nada que és é teu.Eu vejo-me e estou sem mim,Conheço-me e não sou eu.)
5 comments:
Lu,
I can relate to this poem. I especially enjoy watching cats in warm afternoon. Their eyes close. They stretch their bodies. Why can we be the way they are? I think about that, too.
Your cat is gorgeous.
I like the translation: simple and direct like the original. And I like this poem like all of Pessoa's. This one is an example of that comment you made on my blog about the mystery of things: "the mystery of things is within the very things themselves for, in being things, they know nothing about mysteries".
Things I write about I remember, and because I wrote about it, I remember clearly the cat which lay down on the footbridge in the sun, that I wrote about in this post: “I could be [this or that person] or this yellow and white cat with a wounded tail that sprawls soaking up the warmth on this footbridge.”
Thanks Keiko! He is a gorgeous feline, indeed. As I write this he´s sleeping by my feet. :-)
I think we can be a little like them when we are honest to our feelings like they are to theirs. I think that´s the closest we can get to the complex simplicity of being.
Glad you liked it, Vincent!
Isn´t it amazing how those images can put us in touch with our deepest feelings? I love to observe cats in the sun. It seems they are storing pieces of sun in them, like in Maurice Carême´s poem:
http://cp.lakanal.free.fr/poesie/lechatsoleil.htm
“I think we can be a little like them when we are honest to our feelings like they are to theirs. I think that’s the closest we can get to the complex simplicity of being.”
Yes, well personally I wouldn’t want to be like a cat. All I crave now is empathy with other beings. I can even emmpathize with Alexander Korda, the great Hungarian/English film magnate, whose widow said of him (in the book by his nephew that I've just finished, Charmed Lives):
“He didn’t lead a charmed life, you know.”
[nephew] “I always thought he did.”
[widow] “I know, but you also know perfectly well it wasn’t true. ... He was a very interesting man, but he wasn’t a happy man. In fact he was quite proud of not being happy.”
It’s that last sentence which I find memorable. It strikes a chord somewhere. For me, I cherish my own happiness, discovered late in life, but I can conceive of more seductive things. And that is why I don’t care about getting close to the complex simplicity of being; or if I get any closer, I could easily see myself wandering off again, in full sanity and with eyes wide open.
And in this I admire Pessoa too, who admits to not being in his own body, to knowing himself but not being what he is. That is what makes him an artist, to escape the limitations of his selfhood. It sounds like a Faustian contract I know. I’m sure it’s dangerous too. But when things get too cosy, it’s only human to seek a little danger.
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