João Cabral de Melo Neto

João Cabral de Melo Neto is arguably the most important poet in Brazilian poetry and poetics ever, but certainly in the period after WWII until the closing of the Millennium. There are, perhaps, poets with a wider range, whose oeuvre may better speak to future generations, but João Cabral’s poems cut like a knife through the fat and rhetoric of Brazilian poetry, and still exercise a brilliant and substantial influence on Portuguese letters. Much of his skill was honed on Iberian poetry, but he also expressed a dry and spare sensibility straight from the sertão of the parched Northeast region he hailed from. Admired by the Concrete poets and the avant-garde, the traditionalists, the sociopolitical, even the writers from antithetical traditions, no one could really refuse his wit, ontological intelligence, and metrical mastery. He received the Neustadt Prize in 1992. He died only recently, but his poems live on, and two poems in particular, A Knife All Blade (Uma faca só lâmina ,1956), and his verse play, Death and Life of Severino the Migrant (Morte e Vida Severina,1954-55) are his masterpieces. These remain major literary works in twentieth-century Brazilian poetry.

A Knife All Blade is a metaphorical and epistemological manifesto of sorts, the equal of Apollinaire’s Alcools, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Octavio Paz’ Piedra De Sol in its impact on its native language. Thomas Colchie had this to say about A Knife All Blade. “Cabral’s most important long poem. It represents a belief in the perfection of poetic production. The poem expresses the poet’s will to aesthetic perfection through the exploration of language to objects and objects to man…His work has already become Brazil’s greatest contribution to twentieth-century poetics."

--Kerry Shawn Keys

Born in the US, Kerry Shawn Keys (IWP 1991 and 1993) has taught in Brazil and India, and now lives in Lithuania where he has been a Fulbright lecturer at Vilnius University. He is a poet, editor and translator, with over 40 books to his credit, including translations from Portuguese, Czech, and Lithuanian. His most recent publications are Conversations With Tertium Quid, Blue Rose Fusion, and Broken Circle, as well as a CD of his poetry readings with the jazz percussionist Vladimir Tarasov. He received the 1992 Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Translation Laureate Award from the Lithuanian Writers Union in 2003 and, in 2005, a NEA Literature Fellowship.

Keys’ translation was first published in a limited edition chapbook, where Mark Strand noted it as “a fine translation of a difficult poet,” and then in the New Directions Anthology. It is re-published here with the author's permission.

A Knife All Blade >

João Cabral
de Melo Neto
Poem

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