Another long poem, O Rio (1954; The River), was narrated by the Capibaribe itself, being a chronicle of the journey it makes from its source to Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, passing first through barren country where the inhabitants “arm themselves / with the qualities of stone” in order to fight against it, and continuing through the coastal region known as the Mata, where sugarcane is grown.
It was on the family’s sugar plantations that João Cabral spent his early childhood and received much of his tough “education.” However green and lush the Mata may be, life for those who cut and milled the sugarcane was as gray and meager as in the arid Sertão. A son of privilege, João Cabral never suffered any privation, but he saw it close up, every day, and he remembered what he saw. In the evening the sugar mill workers would gather around and hear the little boy recite popular verse narratives, published in pamphlet form and sold in the marketplace. This kind of versified storytelling — traceable to the narrative poetry traditions of medieval Iberia — became the major vehicle for what could be called Cabral’s “socially engaged” poetry. If this term is used here with reservations, it is because the poet himself never employed any such epithet. The great originality of his poetry in this vein is its absolute objectivity, not only in its dispassion but also in the way it objectifies the poem’s subject.
In “Party at the Manor House,” the plantation owners and their politician friends talk about the sugar mill workers as subhuman creatures, hardly distinguishable from the sugar which is the beginning, middle and end of their exploited lives. Like the poor of Recife who stagnate along the banks of the Capibaribe River, the sugar mill workers have no inner “spiritual man” that can remain untouched by the condition that defines them. The twenty stanzas of this poem amount to a biology of their species, matter-of-factly described “in child form,” “in female form,” “in the form of an old man,” and so forth. In fact there is no “engagement” with the mill worker’s condition. The poet merely reports; let the reader react. Cabral’s childhood contact with those workers, acting as a vaccine (see “Plantation Boy”), gave him a permanent immunity to facile emotional responses. His poetry displays no pity, and hence no condescension.
João Cabral moved with his family to Recife when he was ten years old, and in his late teens he began to frequent the Café Lafayette, where the city’s intellectuals met. A voracious reader, he was especially fond of certain French authors, including Mallarmé and Valéry. He was twenty years old when he met Murilo Mendes and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, probably the two Brazilian poets who most influenced his work, and they helped him publish his first book, Stone of Sleep, in 1942. The poetic images in these early poems were taken from the world of sleep and dreams or else were wrapped in a dreamy, surrealist aura, but the young poet treated them as hard objects, organizing them with careful deliberation, like a cubist his ensemble of fragmented shapes. One of the poems pays homage to Picasso in his cubist period, and another to the surrealist André Masson. Painting was a lifelong passion of Cabral, who published a book-length essay on Joan Miró in 1950. Mondrian was another painter he held in special regard.
Shortly after his first book was published, João Cabral moved to Rio de Janeiro, and in 1945 he was admitted into the Brazilian foreign service. In that same year he published The Engineer, which set in place his definitive program of poetry as lucid construction. The engineer of the title poem has a dream, but it is of “clear things: / surfaces, tennis, a glass of water” and is surrounded by “light, sun, and the open air.” If poetry in his first book still depended on inspiration from dreams, now it is the fruit of sleepless nights during which the poet agonizes before a blank sheet of paper to generate a mere twenty words to be used
in his efficient machine.
Always the same twenty words
he knows so welclass="underline" how they work,
their evaporation, their density
less than the air’s.
(“The Lesson of Poetry”)
Those twenty words mark the limits of inspiration; even if the poet produces more words, they still weigh less than air. But Cabral will put them into his poem-machine, where they will become the indispensable components of taut, interlocking verse structures. Eschewing verbal effusion and the piling on of images, he exploited to exhaustion the single word, the single image: water, wind, knife, stone. From their being used so insistently and in such varying formulations, these words acquired functional weight and substance, independent of whatever weight their literal meaning carried.
In “Antiode,” published in 1947, the poet tells how he rejected the word “flower” in favor of the unpoetical “feces.” To rehabilitate the flower for use in poetry, he had to strip away all its lyrical overlay, reducing it to a “verse / inscribed in verse,” an “explosion / made to work / like a machine, / a vase of flowers.” In a process analogous to the Freudian sublimation of sexual energy into the creative forces of civilization, Cabral reined in direct emotion as well as aesthetic or intellectual exaltation, harnessing their energy to generate his smooth-running poetry, which depended not so much on the words — or flowers, emotions, images, ideas — themselves, but on their dynamic arrangement. The machine functioned on its own, with no need for the reader to relate to the man who created it.
This freeing of the poem from the poet has its price. The relationship with the author created by a well-made poetry of personal confession or remembrance will more easily captivate and move the average reader. The resolute impersonality of Cabral’s work — in which the word “I” rarely occurs — puts a heavy burden on technical accomplishment, and demands readers who appreciate that accomplishment. “Impersonal” does not mean “unfeeling,” however. The poet’s rigorous configurations placed words in a state of high tension capable of provoking, at certain moments, emotions of a rare order, and these were by no means an accidental by-product of his art. According to Cabral, his constructivist approach to poetry owed its greatest debt not to any of the writers and painters he admired but to Le Corbusier, whose theoretical works he had read already as a teenager. But if the Swiss architect’s most famous proposal was to see a house as a “machine à habiter” (machine to inhabit), Cabral chose another phrase of Le Corbusier for the epigraph to The Engineer: “machine à émouvoir” (machine for stirring emotion).
In 1947 João Cabral took up his first foreign post, as the Brazilian vice-consul in Barcelona. Over the next forty years he held posts in England, Spain, France, Switzerland, Paraguay, Senegal (where he rose to the rank of ambassador in 1972), Ecuador, Honduras, and Portugal. All left explicit traces in his poetry, but Spain — where he spent a total of fourteen years, in Barcelona, Madrid and Seville — became the second geographical pole around which his poetry flourished. This was not a pole of opposition but one that echoed, in a European register, Cabral’s native Pernambuco. The relative socioeconomic backwardness of Franco-ruled Spain, the arid, harshly lit landscapes of Castile, and the stark essentiality of Andalusia’s cante hondo, the singing style typical of flamenco, had their counterparts in Northeast Brazil, which — perhaps not by chance — was never a theme in Cabral’s poetry until he went to Spain.