Education by Stone

from Crime na Calle Relator / Crime on the Calle Relator 1987

O ferrageiro de Carmona
Um ferrageiro de Carmona
que me informava de um balcão:
“Aquilo? É de ferro fundido,
foi a fôrma que fez, não a mão.
Só trabalho em ferro forjado
que é quando se trabalha ferro;
então, corpo a corpo com ele,
domo-o, dobro-o, até o onde quero.
O ferro fundido é sem luta,
é só derramá-lo na fôrma.
Não há nele a queda-de-braço
e o cara-a-cara de uma forja.
Existe grande diferença
do ferro forjado ao fundido;
é uma distância tão enorme
que não pode medir-se a gritos.
Conhece a Giralda em Sevilha?
Decerto subiu lá em cima.
Reparou nas flores de ferro
dos quatro jarros das esquinas?
Pois aquilo é ferro forjado.
Flores criadas numa outra língua.
Nada têm das flores de fôrma
moldadas pelas das campinas.
Dou-lhe aqui humilde receita,
ao senhor que dizem ser poeta:
o ferro não deve fundir-se
nem deve a voz ter diarréia.
Forjar: domar o ferro à força,
não até uma flor já sabida,
mas ao que pode até ser flor
se flor parece a quem o diga.”

The Ironware Shop in Carmona
In an ironware shop in Carmona
the man at the counter answered me:
“That thing there? It’s cast iron,
made by a mold, not the hand.
“I only work in forged iron,
the kind of iron that’s wrought;
body against body I subdue it,
bending it into what I want.
“Cast iron requires no struggle:
you just pour it in the mold,
without any of the face-to-face
or arm-wrestle of a forge.
“There’s a vast difference
between cast iron and forged;
the distance is so great
that no shouting can bridge it.
“Do you know the Giralda in Seville?
No doubt you climbed to the top.
And did you notice the iron flowers
in the vases on all four corners?
“Well, they are made of forged iron.
Flowers created in another language.
Not at all like cast-iron flowers
molded after those of the fields.
“Let me give a bit of advice
to you whom they call a poet:
iron should never be cast,
nor your voice be diarrhea.
“Forge your iron; shape it by force,
not into a flower you already know
but into what can also be a flower
if you think it is and say it is so.”

Notes

A Few Matadors

Manuel Rodríguez, “Manolete,” perhaps the most legendary matador of the twentieth century, was born in Córdoba in 1917 and died, gored, in 1947.

The Word Silk

Although the Portuguese word for silk, seda, seems like it could be related to sedante, “sedative” (third stanza), in fact there is no etymological connection.

Yes Against Yes

Only the first half the poem is included here. Two more poets — Portugal’s Cesário Verde and Brazil’s Augusto dos Anjos — and two more painters — Juan Gris and Jean Dubuffet — are considered in the second half.

Rivers for a Day

The Sertão is the arid and impoverished hinterland of Northeast Brazil.

Psychoanalysis of Sugar

In primitive, unmechanized sugar mills, clay was added to the sugar as part of the bleaching process.

The Kingdoms of Yellow

The Mata is the fertile coastal region of Pernambuco where sugarcane is grown. In the fourth line of the second stanza, the word sarro does not mean “pus” but refers to the white coating (or “fur”) on the tongue resulting from hunger or sickness.

Fort Orange, Itamaracá

Itamaracá is an island off the coast of Pernambuco.

The Sandbank at Sirinhaém

The Sirinhaém is a river that empties into the Atlantic in southern Pernambuco.

In the Páramo

Chimborazo is the highest mountain (20,561 feet) in Ecuador, where the poet served as the Ambassador of Brazil from 1979 to 1982.

Afterword

“A stone is a stone is a stone” could not be a poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto, but it could be an epigraph to his poetry, a notice at the gates that the language within is plain and direct and that the subject matter is mineral, touchable, weighable, thingish. A stone is preferable to a rose for the simple reason that it is harder. This poet never liked what was easy. In “The Unconfessing Artist” he recognized that doing something is as useless as not doing anything, yet he insisted that it’s better to do. Why? Because it’s harder than not doing. It was only hard things like stones that held any poetic attraction for João Cabral. He considered poems made out of flowers to be, at best, a redundancy. Whereas poems made out of what’s harsh, rugged and lifeless might add a new sliver of something — perhaps beauty — to the world and might even, in a slight way, change how we see.

Stones have no fragrance, but they are heavy with substance and endure. João Cabral, whose second book was titled The Engineer, wanted each of his poem-building words to “weigh as much as the thing it tells.” By fusing “the loose word” to “the body of its referent,” it would become, according to the “Catechism” he attributed to Berceo (p. 201), the first poet known by name to have written in Spanish, “a solid, dense thing, / able to clash with the one next to it.”

Yet another quality of stone, besides its hardness and resilience, is its sheer and utter stoniness. What you see is what it is, the same material throughout. There is no “inner stone” to probe, ponder, or dress with theories. João Cabral was suspicious of whatever was invisible. He was not a strict materialist, but he preferred solid matter, because it is surer, clearer, and common to all. When he was 32 years old he published an essay criticizing the Brazilian poetry of his own generation for being “made of super-realities, made with exclusive parts of man,” with no greater ambition than “to communicate extremely subtle details, for which the only useful writer’s tool is the lightest and most abstract part of the dictionary.” Cabral preferred “the prosaic word” that is “heavy with reality, dirty with the coarse realities of the outside world.”

One possible explanation for João Cabral’s poetic preference is simple: he was writing out of what he knew. His education by stone was the one he received growing up in Northeast Brazil, the country’s poorest region, largely taken up by the dry and desolate hinterland known as the Sertão. João Cabral was not from the interior but from Recife, on the coast, where thousands of Sertanejos (people from the Sertão) poured in during the drought years. To get there, many of the migrants would follow the path of the Capibaribe River, settling along its shores when at last they reached the city outskirts. The Capibaribe and the poor who inhabit its banks became recurring and indissociable topics in Cabral’s poetry. So destitute were these people — destitute of material means and of any real hope — that their existence was almost wholly defined by the muddy river, making it hard to know “where man (…) begins from the mud” or even “where man begins / in that man” (The Dog without Feathers). If there was any lingering consciousness in this dehumanizing environment, it belonged not to man but to the river, credited with knowing how the river dwellers “wither / even beyond / their deepest rubble.” Rubble — crushed stone — in place of a soul.