Artwork by Jamil Afridi. Image Courtesy: ArtChowk Gallery
Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Click here to read the original poem
Last night, just before sleeping
the purest of joys
a sky
came slipping into my almost-sleep, a solemn
feeling the pure joy
of a day when I was half-child half-grown
in the village it was
waking at half past six in the morning,
eyes fixed on the wooden shutters, the sound
they made when opened, the shutters
of a room not mine, the smell
its name absent
but a smell
between cool and just-beginning
light it was the summer heat,
pure joy
a sky so blood red
that even today, even yesterday before sleeping
the tears come as they did then, and suddenly
the sun like a spreading fire
and the smell the colours
But it was being there, being so young
and death so far off,
when there were no dead no funeral processions,
only the living, the laughter, the smell
the light
it was life and being able to choose,
or so it seemed:
the bed and the cool cascades of sheets
soft as strangers arriving in a new land,
or the wooden shutters open
and the fire of the sky
This was last night,
this splendour in the dark, before sleeping
…….
Today, the newspapers on this sunless morning
speak of things so brutal
and so flagrant, like peoples without names, without light
to bring them dawn colours and times,
of dead people who did not pass through life
but had their lives cut short the violence of standing
on this earth on others who have died
scarce remembered or remembered not at all
And I wonder where it is, where it fits
the pure recollected joy
that met me on the corridor into sleep,
and lay down beside me last night
remade made motion,
beautiful merchandise to fill a very beautiful wicker basket,
as beautiful as the sky that day
Where does joy recollected fit
face to face with the fire I saw last night?
and where the colours of joy? its shape as clear
as if fed by some atomic
explosion
And what of time? How make mock of time?
………..
And yet different times coexist
And the same corridor gives them space
and light.
~ Ana Luísa Amaral
Ana Luísa Amaral published her first volume of poetry, ‘Minha Senhora de Quê’ in 1990 and has since published fifteen collections. Translated into several languages, her work has brought her many prizes, including the 2008 Grande Prémio from the Portuguese Writers’ Association. She is also a translator, notably of the poetry of John Updike and Emily Dickinson.
Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated works by such writers as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago and Javier Marías. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded an OBE for services to literature
