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The State of Things in the Poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto

Author(s): Richard Zenith and João Cabral de Melo Neto's
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 66, No. 4, The Rigors of Necessity: João Cabral de Melo
Neto, 1992 Neustadt Prize Laureate (Autumn, 1992), pp. 634-638
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
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The State of Things in the Poetry of Joao Cabral
de Melo Neto
By RICHARD ZENITH Virtually every critic of
Joao Cabral de Melo
Neto's poetry has noted
the privileged status it accordsto things, and one of the
best panoramicstudies of the poet's work is simply and
significantly titled Poesia com Coisas (Poetry with
Things). Cabral'sthings include obsessively recurring
images- stone, knife, wind, water- and subject matter
that proceeds from around the world (Cabral having
served as a career diplomat on four continents) but
especially from northeasternBrazil, where the poet was
born, and from southern Spain, whose dryness and
austerity he came to identify with his homeland. Per-
nambuco is the setting for poems about sugarcane,the
drought, the city of Recife, the CapibaribeRiver, and
the sea, whereas the Andalusian landscape featuresthe
bullfight, flamenco, Seville, and Seville's women. These
may strike us as cliche-ridden visions, and with good
reason,for the poet seeks out the most stereotypical,the
most ordinary,the most obvious. And transformsit. Or
transcendsit. So that when he writes a poem ("Torea-
dors") describing the various techniques of famous
toreadors- the "sweet precision" of Manolo Gonzales,
the "spontaneousyet strict" style of Julio Aparicio, the
"anguishedand explosive"manner of Miguel Baez- he
is speaking not only of bullfighting but of the act of
making poetry and, by extension, of various stances one
may assume before any kind of artistic endeavor. This
becomes explicit in the poem's final stanzas,which tell
of Manuel Rodriguez, "the most mineral" of all
toreadors,
the one who knew to calculate
the steely fluid of life,
who with the greatest precision
brushed with death on the fringe,
who gave a number to tragedy,
decimals to feelings,
to vertigo a geometry,
and height and weight to fear.
Yes I saw Manuel Rodriguez,
"Manolete," the most ascetic,
not only nurture his flower
but demonstrate to poets:
how to tame the explosion
with a quiet, restrained hand,
being careful not to spill
the flower it holds fast,
and how, then, to fashion it
with sure hand, soft and remote,
without perfuming the flower,
without poetizing the poem.
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But is this really a poetry of things? The second of
the cited stanzas mentions tragedy, feelings, vertigo,
and fear, all more or less abstract notions, but the
toreador-poet brings them down to earth by giving
them a mathematics and a height and weight. Bull-
fighting, meanwhile, which is the truly concrete
thing at hand, is abstracted,becoming a metaphor for
the creative process. A poetry of things, yes, but these
may be emotions, ideas, and humanity itself, which
the poetry forces into thing form, whereas if the
things start out as physical entities, they risk being
endowed with a philosophy, a psychology, and the
tragic sense of life. Cabral'sproject is to re-create the
world, taking the things- both abstract and concrete
- that are common to all men and turning them
around, making them uncommon, conferring on
them the dimension they lacked.
From early on Cabral called the poet an engineer
and the poem a machine (in "The Lesson of Poetry"),
and more recently he explained his motivation, writ-
ing (in "Renewed Homage to Marianne Moore")
"that poetry is not on the inside / but is a house in
which to reside, / and before one lives inside it / it
must be built- this something / one makes to make
oneself able, / this crutch for the one who is lame."
The poem is a machine that turns out building blocks
to construct the house in which the poet takes shelter,
but the blocks are not mere clay. The machine gives
form to what is ethereal and indefinite, but it also
gives soul to what is (or has seemed to us) flat and
lifeless. All kinds of "things" go into this poet's
machine, and all emerge as building blocks that are
more than three-dimensional, for a house that is
dynamic, super-real, made of doors and windows and
no walls.
Cabral's first professional ambition was to be a
critic, and so it is not surprising that many of his
poems comment on art and artists, literary works and
writers. Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge are two
twentieth-century poets by and large renowned for
their parti pris on behalf of things, and both are
important references for Cabral,who succinctly char-
acterized their treatment of things in "Yes Against
Yes" and in so doing revealed the essence of his own
poetic practice. About the meticulous editor of The
Dial he wrote:
Marianne Moore, refusing a pen,
writes her stanzas
with a cutting edge,
a common jackknife or scalpel.

She discoveredthat the clear side
of things is the obverse,
and thereforedissects them
to make texts read more honestly.
Moore's cutting quality appears very literally in a
poem such as "The Fish," in which "shafts" of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselveswith spotlight swiftness
into the crevices-
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoisesea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron throughthe iron edge
of the cliff; whereuponthe stars
Three stanzas down we find "dynamite grooves,
burns, and hatchet strokes."
Knives and other cutting instruments, found often
enough in Moore's poetry (there is even an early
poem titled "Those Various Scalpels"), are a com-
monplace in Cabral's,the most conspicuous example
being his long and poetically tense poem Uma Faca so
Lamina (1956; Eng. A Knife All Blade). More impor-
tant than these literal sharp edges for the present
discussion, however, is the trenchant attitude both
poets take toward their subjects. In "The Fish"
Moore reports that the ocean-assailed cliff bears "all
external marks of abuse" (namely, the "dynamite
grooves, burns and hatchet strokes") and that its
"chasm-side is dead." But it is a "defiant edifice,"
which "can live on what can not revive its youth. The
sea grows old in it."
A similarly wry optimism makes discreet but regu-
lar appearances in Cabral's own work, particularly
when the impoverished Brazilian Northeast is his
theme. In the first stanza of O Cdo sent Plumas (The
Dog Without Feathers; 1950) the city of Recife is
crossed by the Capibaribe River like "a fruit by a
sword," and this slicing image announces not only
the harsh reality of the river but also the poet's
unrelenting objectivity, which will cut all the way
through fifty stanzas, anthropologically describing
the stark misery of those who live on the river's
shores, to arrive- in the final, fifty-first stanza- at
"the life which is fought for / day by day, / the day
which is won / hour by hour / (as a bird / which
second by second / conquers its flight)."
Cabral'smature poetry, like Moore's, does not pile
on images in the way of the surrealists (among oth-
ers), preferring instead to plumb but a few well-
chosen images to exhaustion. Dissection rather than
accumulation. This approach implies the subjection
of poetic material to a scientific method of investiga-
tion- hence the predominance of strict verse pat-
terns. In the case of Moore, if preservation of the line
length (which is determined syllabically in her early
work) requires hyphenating a word, then she is happy
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ZENITH 635
to comply, so that dissection occurs even at the level
of the individual word. Cabral, for his part, will
discard the troublesome word and search for another:
from the midfifties on, his poems' metric and asso-
nantal rhyme schemes (perfect rhymes being more
rarely employed) are almost never violated. Dissec-
tion, in these poets, does not preclude intuition, but
it demands formal procedure, so that once the poem
is set in motion it carries itself forward like an
independent organism, according to its own logic,
with what would seem to be minimal intervention on
the part of the poet.
This apparentabsence of the poet becomes extreme
in Cabral, who willingly "reduces" his role to that of
a behind-the-scenes technician. Moore is more in-
clined to step into the poem with a direct quote of
something she has read or heard, and she never
regarded poetry as a machine. "Were not 'impersonal
judgment in aesthetic matters, a metaphysical impos-
sibility,' you might fairly achieve it," she wrote in the
poem that mocks a steamroller for crushing "all the
particles down into close conformity." Cabral,on the
other hand, extols the canefield for "the horizontal
style of its verse" and the sea for "the meticulous
spreading of water on land, / filling every hollow,
wherever it passes" (in "The Canefield and the Sea").
This action sounds rather like that of the steamroller,
and "impersonal judgment" is an ideal that Cabral
would not necessarily eschew, though he knows per-
fect detachment is impossible. The poet is not, after
all, dispensable, but when he or she is a Marianne
Moore (we are told in "Yes Against Yes"), then the
scar of the poem "is clean, sparse and straight," so
that "more than the surgeon / one admires the surgi-
cal blade."
If Cabral's description of Moore's method is in-
sightful, his sixteen lines about Ponge, the French
poet of things, are astonishing, telling us more about
his poetics than do many essays of sixteen pages or
more.
FrancisPonge, also a surgeon,
uses a differenttechnique,turning
in his fingers the things he operates
and turning himself aroundthem.
He handles them with all ten
thousandfingers of language;
his is not a straightscalpel
but one with many branches.
With it he so wrapsup
the thing, he almost winds it
into a ball and loses
himself, wound up inside it.
And just when it would seem
he can no longer penetrate,
he enters without cutting,
througha crack that went unseen.
Ponge's method is meditative, firsthand observation,
best exemplified by his long prose poems, which read
like the notebooks of certain pre-twentieth-century
636 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
scientists, who over the course of weeks and months
would patiently record the identifying traits and de-
velopmental changes in the organism, mineral, or
system under study.
In "Introduction to the Pebble," probably his own
best ars poetica, Ponge says his ambition is "to write
a kind of De naturarerum It is not poems I want to
write, but one single cosmogony." He realizes, how-
ever, that it would take many lives to study all the
books of all the sciences that exist, and so "the best
procedure is to consider all things as unknown, to
stroll or stretch out among the shrubs or on the grass,
and start all over again from the beginning."
Another paragraphfrom the same "proem" (quot-
ing still from Paul Bowles's translation) points the
way in this new science.
I suggest that every person open an interior trapdoor,
that he negotiate a trip into the thickness of things, that
he make an invasion of their characteristics, a revolu-
tion, a turning-over process comparable to that accom-
plished by the plough or the spade, when suddenly
millions of particles of dead plants, bits of roots and
straw, worms and tiny crawling creatures, all hitherto
buried in the earth, are exposed to the light of day for the
first time. O infinite resources of the thickness of things,
restoredto us by the infinite resources in the semantic
thickness of words!
In "Rain," "The Orange," "Snails," "Notes on a
Shellfish," "The Prawn," "The Pebble," "The
Horse," "The Goat," and dozens of other essay-
poems, Ponge's "ten thousand fingers of language"
explore common objects as if they were strange, not
by means of dissection but by a quiet inventory of
their qualities and their relationships with other ob-
jects. And every now and then, as if (and perhaps
truly) by accident, there is a revelation, a phrase in
which the poet-scientist has touched the core of what
we are tempted to call the object's soul.
There is not space enough here to include an
example that would do justice, but the following
short piece (in Raymond Federman's translation) will
give some idea of Ponge's method:
The Candle
Night sometimes revives a curious plant whose light
decomposes furnished rooms into clumps of shadows.
Its golden leaf, held by a very black peduncle, stands
unconcerned in the hollow of a little column of alabaster.
Shabby moths attack it, preferably at highmoon which
dissolves the woods. But quickly burnt or beaten in the
scuffle, all of them shudder on the edge of a frenzy close
to stupor.
Yet the candle, by the flickering of its brightness on
the book with abrupt eruptions of original smoke, en-
courages the reader to go on- but then bends over its
plate and drowns in its own nourishment.
The description is entirely original, with the candle
being regarded as a nocturnally active plant, the
candlestick as an alabaster column, and moths as
attacking rather than merely being drawn to the
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candle. This is to see for the first time. And the
decomposing effect of the flame, its frenzying effect
on the moths, and its own drowning in the very wax
that feeds it are all invitations to take a fresh look at
ourselves, the readers, who depend on the candle for
illumination and for the subject matter of the very
text (i.e., "The Candle") that lies before us and
nourishes us.
Cabral employs the Pongean method in poems
such as "The Egg," "On a Monument to Aspirin,"
and "The Word Silk," but his use of strictly mea-
sured verses in these and most of his poems suggests
the punctilious manner of Marianne Moore; in fact,
much of his poetry is marked by the two techniques
of "naive" contemplation and exacting analysis. This
is particularly evident in the forty-eight two-part
poems of A Educagdopela Pedra (Education by Stone;
1966). The first part of "For the Book Fair" seems to
have been made by Moore's scalpel and expert stitch-
ing, with the opening lines reading:
When leafed, the leaf of a book retrieves
the languid plantiness of green leaves,
and a book is leafed or loses its leaves
as in the wind the tree that made it;
when leafed, the leaf of a book repeats
fricatives and labials of ancient winds,
and nothing feigns wind on a tree leaf
as well as wind in the leaves of a book.
To relate the book leaf to its material origin (tree
cellulose) and etymological origin (tree leaf) would
be just as likely in Ponge as in Moore, but the tone
and development of the stanza are much closer to her
style. In the second part of the poem, however, the
voice more nearly resembles Ponge's.
Silent: whether closed or open,
what shouts inside included; anonymous:
it shows only its spine when on the shelf,
which annuls all the spines in a dull brown;
modest: it would never open itself -
as different from a hanging picture,
open all its life, as it is from music,
alive only while its lines are flying.
But despite this and despite its patience
(lets you read it wherever you like), severe:
requires that you dig in, interrogate it;
and even when open, closed: it never gives vent.
The rhythm has slowed, the tone is less tense, more
contemplative, and the book is considered in relation
to the reader, as was Ponge's candle.
To identify influences (some of which may be no
more than affinities or coincidences) is not to suggest
that Cabral'swork is derivative. The shift in voice in
"For the Book Fair," for instance, is certainly not an
intentional shift from Moore to Ponge mode; it
occurs, rather, in function of the content. The relent-
less motion of the verses in the first part evokes the
wind that moves through the tree and through the
book's pages; the more relaxed, quieter tone of the

second part reflects the book's fundamental silence
and discretion.
The celebration and elevation of things, in poetry
as in culture at large (and this is true not only for
natural phenomena in primitive, animistic cultures,
but also for the manufactured objects of our techno-
logical civilization), is often achieved through an-
thropomorphization. This is not especially frequent
in Marianne Moore's poetry, where objects and ani-
mals are more apt to be described in terms of other
objects or animals, so that the mussel shells in "The
Fish" are "crow-blue," the sun is "split like spun
glass," and the crabs are "like green lilies," whereas a
reindeer in her poem titled "Rigorists" has "a neck
like edelweiss or lion's foot" and antlers described as
a "candelabrum-headedornament." In Ponge's writ-
ing, anthropomorphization tends to be indirect, by
analogies that are suggested without being affirmed,
as when a human reader appears in the last stanza of
"The Candle."
Cabral, on the other hand, freely humanizes many
of the things presented in his poems. Sugarcane is
variously seen as a shy Andalusian girl ("Sugarcane
Girl"), as an encyclopedist ("Sugarcaneand the Eigh-
teenth Century"), and as a crowded public square
("The Wind in the Canefield"). The ocean, in "Ceme-
tery in Alagoas," is called a hospital scrubwoman.
Other objects are assigned typically human traits or
even body parts, so that the fortress in "Fort Orange,
Itamaraca"possesses the "hard fingers" of cannons,
whose rotting metal is called "widowed iron," which
is being overrun by "vegetable guerrillas."
The second paragraphof this essay makes the point
- and it seems to be one of the most original points
of his poetry- that Joao Cabral de Melo Neto not
only invests things with a psychology (if this word be
allowed to mean something like "nonmaterial dimen-
sion") but takes the psychological and gives it physi-
cal substance. This latter process is most flagrant in
the Brazilian poet's consistent dehumanization of
people. A poetry of things? In fact people appear left
and right in Cabral's verses, certainly with much
greater frequency than in Marianne Moore's or Fran-
cis Ponge's work, but the people are objectified,
reified, treated as things. In the poem about bullfight-
ers cited above, Manuel Rodriguez is introduced as
"the most mineral of all toreadors, / the sharpest and
most vigilant, // the one with wooden nerves, / whose
fists are dry and fibrous, / with a figure like a stick, / a
piece of dried-out brush." This poem is taken from
Paisagens com Figuras (Landscapes with Figures;
1955), a collection in which persons typically embody
the landscapes they inhabit; and Miguel Hernandez,
mysteriously present in a desert region of Castile (in
"Encounter with a Poet"), has a voice "of tortured,
beaten earth," with "blades of stone, / like an ampu-
tated tree."
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ZENITH 637
Back in Cabral's homeland, the poor of "The Dog
Without Feathers" embody the landscape, or river-
scape, in rather less flattering ways. They have "pain-
ful hair of shrimp and hards" and become indiscern-
ible from the mud of the Capibaribe River.
In the river landscape
it is hard to know
where the river begins,
where the mud
begins from the river,
where the land
begins from the mud,
where man,
where his skin
begins from the mud,
where man begins
in that man.
Cabral establishes a similar kind of physiological
equivalence between the poor and their barren envi-
ronment in two other long narrative poems: O Rio
(The River; 1954) and Morte e Vida Severina (1956;
Eng. "Death and Life of a Severino"). The central
subject is again the Brazilian Northeasterner's rela-
tion to the CapibaribeRiver, and in the former poem
the river itself is the first-person narrator, man hav-
ing lost even the right to state his own wretched case.
In "Party at the Manor House," on the other hand, it
is the plantation owners who gather around to tell the
morphology of the sugar-mill worker as if she or he
were a lower species of animal, hardly distinguishable
from the sugar which is the beginning, middle, and
end of her or his exploited life. The sugar-mill work-
er "in child form" is "cane that is weak / from
overharvesting, / - A degenerate breed / of the fourth
or fifth cutting." The female sugar-mill worker is
"essentially a sack / - Of sugar without / any sugar
inside." The sugar-mill worker, when on the job, "has
a heavy rhythm: / - Like the final molasses / from
the final vat." There is no inner "spiritual man" that
can remain untouched by the outer condition of
"sugar-mill worker." After the worker dies and the
worms and dry earth have already gnawed his body
away, finally the wind of the canefield arrives, to
sweep away "the gases of his soul."
Such a ruthlessly objective poetry- objective in the
sense that all subjects receive equal consideration,
humans being dealt with in the same terms as stones,
coconuts, sugarcane,whatever- has some obvious ad-
vantages that may be summarized as follows: 1) it
prompts reaction; 2) the ordinary and the abject are
lifted to the status of poetry; 3) since there is no pity,
there is no condescension; 4) to consider the world
from radically new angles- things as if they were
animate, people as if they were not- is to "make it
new."
There is yet another advantage which is closer to
home, and perhaps for that reason less obvious.
Ponge alluded to it in "Introduction to the Pebble,"
affirming that the "entire secret of happiness for the
638 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

contemplator lies in his refusal to object to the taking exhilaration but its contrary. It is the plain realiza-
over of his personality by things," and Moore ac- tion of an essential tranquillity in our organic sub-
knowledged it in other terms when she wrote (in stantiality.
"What Are Years?"): "He sees and is glad, who Lisbon
accedes to mortality." Cabral illustrates the thought
and takes it a step further in the poem "The Sand- Works Cited
bank at Sirinhaem." Cabralde Melo Neto, Joao. (All translationsfrom this poet's
work herein quoted were made by Richard Zenith.) The
1.
following list includes poems collected in PoesiasCompletas,
If you let go and you lie down Rio de Janeiro, Olympio, 1968. From O Engenheiro(The
under the steady eastern wind Engineer), 1945: "ALicaode Poesia"(The PoetryLesson).O
Cdosem Plumas(The Dog Without Feathers), 1950. O Rio
of a beach in Northeast Brazil,
(The River), 1954. Mortee VidaSeverina,1956 (Eng. "Death
more than letting go, you lie; and Life of a Severino," excerpts translated by Elizabeth
if you give yourself up to the sea, Bishop in her Complete Poems:1927-1979, New York, Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1983). From Paisagens com Figuras
your body closes in, isolates
itself inside of its own cage, (Landscapeswith Figures), 1956: "O Vento no Canavial"
and less than existing, you are; (Eng. "The Wind in the Canefield,"ModernPoetryin Transla-
tion, Spring 1992); "Encontrocom um Poeta" ("Encounter
if furthermore the trade wind with a Poet,"PartisanReview,Summer 1987); "AlgunsTou-
stirred by the wind (or stirring it) reiros" ("Toreadors,"ModernPoetryin Translation,Spring
makes the coconut field 1992). Uma Faca so Lamina (Eng. A Knife All Blade), 1956.
intone its single syllable, From Quaderna(Four-Spot), 1960: "Cemiterio Alagoano
(Trapiche da Barra)" (Eng. "Cemetery in Alagoas,"New
you may be able to hear OrleansReview,Summer 1988);"APalavraSeda"(Eng. "The
in this way cut, and empty, Word Silk,"ParisReview,Spring 1988). FromDoisParlamen-
by merely being, the whistling tos (Two Voices), 1961: "Festana Casa-Grande"(Partyat the
of time flowing, your flowing. Manor House). From Serial(Serial), 1961: "O Sim contra o
Sim" (Yes Against Yes); "O Ovo de Galinha"(Eng. "The
Egg," Chelsea, Summer 1988). From A Educacdo pela Pedra
2. (Educationby Stone), 1966:"OCanaviale o Mar"(Eng. "The
Canefield and the Sea," WebsterReview,Fall 1988); "Num
If you let go and you lie down Monumentoa Aspirina"(Eng. "Ona Monumentto Aspirin,"
under the steady eastern wind ModernPoetryin Translation,Spring 1992); "Paraa Feira do
of a beach in Northeast Brazil, Livro"(For the Book Fair).
more than lying, you let go, . A EscoladasFacas.Rio de Janeiro.Jose Olympio. 1980.
Includes "Forte de Orange, Itamaraca" (Fort Orange,
you feel with your body that Itamaraca);"Barrado Sirinhaem"(Eng. "The Sandbankat
the Earth turns round your axis, Sirinhaem,"NewOrleansReview,Summer 1988);"ACana-de-
and you can even feel Ac.ucarMenina"(SugarcaneGirl); "A Cana e o Seculo De-
that your legs are lifting, zoito" (Sugarcaneand the Eighteenth Century).
that the horizon is rising, .Agrestes.Rio de Janeiro. Nova Fronteira.1985. Includes
"Homenagem Renovada a Marianne Moore" (Eng. "Re-
that higher than your mind newed Homage to MarianneMoore,"Translation, Fall 1987).
your body also rises, Moore, Marianne.Collected Poems.New York. Macmillan.1951.
covered by the furthest sea. Includes all poems cited.
These beaches make it possible Peixoto, Marta.PoesiacomCoisas.Sao Paulo. Perspectiva.1983.
for the body to feel its time, Ponge, Francis.Le partipris des choses.Paris. Gallimard.1942.
Includes "Pluie"(Rain);"Labougie"(Eng. "The Candle,"tr.
space in its slow turning, RaymondFederman,in TheRandomHouseBookof Twentieth-
your life as revolution. CenturyFrenchPoetry,ed. Paul Auster, New York, Vintage,
1984);"L'orange"(The Orange);"Escargots"(Snails);"Notes
Giving in to things, and to our own humanity as a pour un coquillage" (Notes on a Shellfish); "La crevette"
thing, allowing the body to rise higher than our mind (The Prawn);"Le galet" (The Pebble).
. Pieces. Paris. Gallimard. 1962. Includes "Le cheval"
(as occurs in the crucial penultimate stanza), we may
be able to touch- at least in certain moments- the (The Horse); "La chevre" (The Goat).
. Proemes.Paris.Gallimard.1948. Includes"Introduction
physics of time and space, feeling ourselves physically au galet"(Eng. "Introductionto the Pebble,"tr. Paul Bowles,
a part of the universal rotation. This is not mystical French Poetry).
in The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century

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