Ana Luísa Amaral
trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
Two POEMS
The Breath
The woman sitting opposite me
plays with her handbag—
distractedly
She flips the handle-cum-wing
of the bag
back and forth
twines it around her fingers
Like a small
dancerly bird,
the wing-cum-handle comes alive
between the woman’s fingers
The bag is blue and the zip yellow,
the woman is old,
her skirt faded, her blouse tired
and old like her, she’s wearing slippers
But she plays with the wing
of that handbag
with the blithe air of a child or a sparrow,
unconcerned about the serious people—
hands serenely,
seriously resting on their laps—
who sit, motionless, reading the paper
The woman sitting
opposite me
plays with her handbag,
distractedly
Is she distracted? Or the handbag?
performing pirouettes,
elegant somersaults, brief dance steps,
with the sun lighting one side of her face,
the woman is almost pretty
with her absorbed child-like air
as she breathes life into that handbag,
which dances
distractedly
in her lap
Symptoms and Syndromes
Spring-on-repeat syndrome. There
they are again, those intruders on the
morning. They won’t let me think.
The cat wants to go out, trembling
at the sight of them perched on the
branches, singing. I need to think.
Silence as syndrome. Wood creak-
ing, time tolling, it’s half past ten.
Intruders on my sleepy thoughts. I need
air. But they’ve grown louder now
the day is up and about, they’ve grown
in number. An opera all in blue. Wagner
in a major key. A Ghost Ship.
How cloyingly sweet the air is. I need
to think. But they keep singing. Singing.
A song that doesn’t leave me a single
branch to think on. Spring again and
every morning the same spring
symptoms. The cat is in a frenzy,
trembling ever more to see them
jump from branch to branch. It’s
spring and they’re singing: illegal
liaisons, the nest all abuzz. Only a
hawk with black, fringed wings
who has his house nearby and doesn’t
sing. Only he would allow me to think.
Only he could give me air to breathe,
a roof. (And the cat still not daring
to make the leap, but still, riveted to
that spot by the window, revealing
clear symptoms of delirium tre-
mens.)
Ana Luísa Amaral published her first volume of poetry, Minha Senhora de Quê, in 1990, and has since published seventeen 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 Emily Dickinson and the sonnets of William Shakespeare. A collection of her poetry, What’s in a Name, was published by New Directions in 2019.
Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over thirty years and has translated works by novelists and poets such as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago, Javier Marías, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, and Ana Luísa Amaral. 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.