António Botto: “O mais importante na vida é ser-se criador – criar beleza.” / “The most important thing in life is to create – to create beauty.”

Posted: July 1, 2012 | Author: Zócalo Poets | Filed under: António Botto, English, Portuguese | Tags: Gay poets |Comments Off on António Botto: “O mais importante na vida é ser-se criador – criar beleza.” / “The most important thing in life is to create – to create beauty.”

António Botto (Lisbon, Portugal, 1897-1959)

Selected poems from “Canções” (“Songs”)

In love –

Now don’t question me! –

There were always

Two kinds of men.

*

This is quite true

And greater than life’s self is.

No one down here can deny it

Or dismiss.

*

One kind of man

Looks on, without love or sin:

The other kind

Feels, grows passionate, comes in.

_____

No amor,

Não duvides amor meu –

Dois tipos de homem

Houve sempre.

*

E esta verdade

Que é maior que a própria vida,

Só por Ele – vê lá bem!,

Poderá ser desmentida.

*

– Um,

A contemplar se contenta;

E outro,

Apaixona-se, intervém…

_____

You’re wrong, I tell you again.

*

In love

The only lie we find out in the future

Is that which seems

The best truth now,

The truth that seems to fall in with our fates.

*

Love never really lies:

It simply exaggerates.

_____

Enganas-te, digo ainda.

*

No amor,

– Apenas, é mentira no futuro

Aquilo

Que nos parece uma verdade presente.

*

O amor não mente, nunca!

Exagera simplesmente.

_____

I’ve left off drinking, my friend.

Yes, I have set wine aside.

*

But if

You really want

To see me drunk –

This is between us, you see –,

Take slowly up to your mouth

The glass meant for me,

Then pass it over to me.

_____

Deixei de beber, amigo.

*

Sim, já desprezei o vinho.

*

Entanto,

Se tu afirmas que tens

O prazer de me ver ébrio,

– Que isto fique entre nós dois:

Aproxima da tua boca

A taça que me destinas,

E dá-ma depois.

_____

The most important thing in life

Is to create – to create beauty.

*

To do that

We must foresee it

Where our eyes cannot really see it.

*

I think that dreaming the impossible

Is like hearing the faint voice

Of something that wants to live

And calls to us from afar.

*

Yes, the most important thing in life

Is to create.

*

And we must move

Towards the impossible

With shut eyes, like faith or love.

_____

O mais importante na vida

É ser-se criador – criar beleza.

*

Para isso,

É necessário pressenti-la

Aonde os nossos olhos não a virem.

*

Eu creio que sonhar o impossível

É como que ouvir a voz de alguma coisa

Que pede existência e que nos chama de longe.

*

Sim, o mais importante na vida

É ser-se criador.

E para o impossível

Só devemos caminhar de olhos fechados

Como a fé e como o amor.

 

_____

Translations from the Portuguese:  Fernando Pessoa

_____

António Botto published Canções (Songs) in

Lisbon in 1920.  He was 23.  And he began to rub shoulders

with the city’s intellectual élite during what was to be a short

period of bohemianism leading up to the military coup

of 1926 and the establishment of the Estado Novo (New State),

an authoritarian dictatorship.

A second edition of  Canções was

printed in 1922 – and this time it created a critical furor

as “Literature of Sodom”.   Botto made no secret of his

homosexuality – he flirted in public, and that took guts –

and many of his first-person-voice love poems are

frankly addressed to men.  Though Fernando Pessoa – one

of Portugal’s heavyweights in the Modernist movement (and also

the translator into English of Botto’s poems) – defended Botto in

print,  it was a defence of the aesthetic ideal of male beauty

– a Classical Greek (Hellenic) value that had influenced all

Mediterranean cultures – not a public endorsement of the fact that

Botto was writing about loving men.   Botto was just too ahead of his time;

he was “pushing the boundaries”,  as we call it now.

A conservative university-student league called verses such as

“Listen, my angel:  what if I should kiss your skin,

what if I should kiss your mouth, which is all honey within?”

“disgraceful language” and Botto a “shameless”

author, pressuring the government to take action, which it did,

seizing and burning books by Botto as well as “Decadência” by Judith

Teixeira, a lesbian poet.

*

We thank University of Toronto professor Josiah Blackmore

for re-issuing the Songs of Botto;  he is a poet too little known

in the English language.

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