Two poems from Ana Marques Gastão
Ring of flames
It goes to sleep beside me, the sulphurous rose,
sulphur yellow, auriferous, metallic.
Firm in its dense, thick capitula,
its stalk is elated in a lover’s
insecure resolve and hidden matters.
It keeps the heat from fire, from amber the painless
path. You, prostrate veronica,
mysterious in your pulsating nature, be
artery, docile colour, before shape, be essence,
before the end, the beginning, ring of flames.
© Translated by Ana Hudson, 2010
«Be firewood»
While the knife cuts the food
the mouth delays the cut, the taste,
the chance, the child devours what you’ve got
and your will demands: ‘be firewood’.
Go on, carry your body with wound
scar or name, you are wild bone
flesh and hunger, a tolling bell
that deafens and flattens you.
From the sea, the earth, from the earth the water,
from the fire, the air, only the internal is external
dissolving into an iodine solution,
stifling you in the metallic smoke and shaping
a shadow, the shoulder, the hand. But look,
see, listen to the impatient sound of the firewood
sunk into salt, tell the story,
tell again the only story that makes you live.
© Translated by Ana Hudson, 2010
We are not talking of feminine sensitiveness in the most obvious sense of the term, but of a refinement of the soul and a capacity for poetical evocation, a sublimation of feelings through a fresh, clean, purified look within its (minimal) simplicity.
Yvette K. Centeno
Ana Marques Gastão, who trained as a lawyer, is a poet, a journalist and a literary critic. She is currently the assistant editor of Colóquio Letras, the literary journal published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Poetry books since 2000: Terra sem Mãe (2000), Três Vezes Deus (in collaboration with António Rego Chaves et Armando Silva Carvalho) (2001), Nocturnos (2002), Nós/Nudos (Noeuds) (translated into French by Catherine Dumas) (2004), Nós/Nudos, 25 poemas sobre 25 obras de Paula Rego (2007), Lápis Mínimo (2008), Adornos (2011), L de Lisboa (2015), O olho e a mão (com Sérgio Nazar David) (2018), Oníricas (2023).
Here is the link to the superb site where you are able to read all of the translated poems and the original in Portuguese: