Lídia Jorge
trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
THREE POEMS
The Gentle Guard
We are heading for that brightly lit house,
with no lantern to light our way. Sometimes, often,
we will sing.
It will be a land covered in bones
but they will never be our bones.
There someone will sow
weeds, but they
will never be my weeds.
Besides, an angel will always appear
to stand gentle
guard over us—with, in one hand, a heart,
in the other a sword. When the time comes,
she will give us a horse and the secret
of how to ride it.
We are heading for that brightly lit house, with no lantern
to pierce the darkness. What a prodigiously dark night
the future is.
Happening
Before, I was a stone in the mountains
and everything contained everything else—
Silence and darkness, voice and light.
Before, I was a stone.
Then the animal emerged from that sphere of dust
compressed by the millennia, and rolled about on the grass.
A bright light came and said—
This is your life, for a time at least.
And I wanted joy to clap its hands
and say—This is my life.
I sat down on the grass and I ate it three times a day.
It’s so vast, this sea of flowers, the world.
They can say what they like about death
or whatever it is that lies beyond that door—
I knew the taste of all the green grasses, I gave them names,
I will never go back to being that stone in the mountains.
The bright light might declare—Your life was of no value.
That and many other things. But it cannot say—You never happened.
I happened, and that, for me, is an honour beyond measure.
The World’s Childhood
When the ships fell from the sky and the oars
cut through the green of the earth, we advanced
through the water gathering in nets.
The fish leapt up from the waves and when they showed
their scales, clouds of every colour appeared.
The storms came and made the seagulls’ beds.
From those eggs were born clumsy birds
that we held in our hands and stroked.
No serpent ever emerged from them
threatening to bite the young of other species.
Poison did not exist. The great danger flew past us,
over our heads, and we were quite oblivious.
In our paradise we never once met Adam and Eve.
On the contrary—the Sea invaded the Land, forming
six Continents, all the rivers of the Globe, and we didn’t even notice.
In our ignorance, we sat on the sand, eager
to know what a storm would be like,
and thus childhood passed.
Every night we can go back to being two years old.
Lídia Jorge is one of Portugal’s foremost writers. She has written eleven novels, two children’s books, five short story collections, and, in 2019, a book of poems. Her work has brought her many prizes, most recently, the 2020 Premio de la Feria del Libro de Guadalajara for writers in Romance languages.
Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over thirty years and has translated such writers as Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Javier Marías and Bernardo Atxaga. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was made an OBE for services to literature.