From In America, I Discovered I Was European:
Ode to the Ghost of Edgar Allan Poe, by Natália Correia
Translated by Katharine F. Baker and Emanuel Melo
During her first visit to the United States in June 1950, twenty-six-year-old budding author, journalist and poet Natália Correia spent part of her stay in Washington, D.C. Afterwards, on a sweltering, steamy day she rode a Greyhound bus with broken air conditioning up to New York City. In her 1951 travelogue — Descobri Que Era Europeia, translated by Katharine F. Baker and Emanuel Melo with the title In America, I Discovered I Was European (Tagus Press, 2025) — Correia described her ride up U.S. Route 1 through Baltimore, adopted home of renowned author and poet Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49).
* * *
Baltimore announced itself to me with a string of churches, large and dark, like smoked hams. They were Baltimore’s celebrated monuments. To a European with an exuberance for architectural tradition, these edifices look like touching naivete.
Block after block of low-standing row houses possess a characteristic detail of Baltimorean architecture: stoops consisting of a half dozen or so white steps — whether painted wood, cement, or marble — at whose threshold sat the front door. Lord Baltimore’s old fiefdom, ugly and sad, was a blight on the state of Maryland. In that timid ugliness of an ugly and unhappy girl, in the leaden stain of buildings, in that melancholy suggestion of cypresses, Edgar Allan Poe had strewn stars.
I closed my eyes, and surrendered myself to the painful pleasure of imagining strange encounters with the poet’s errant soul. I enjoyed feeling predestined for the love of the dead. Finally he came to meet me:
The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe
was late to the interview
that neither of us had agreed upon.
He entered through the window of my room,
shiny as a gold-bug,
so the night’s darkness might be darker,
so the silence might more silent,
so the roots might be more rooted,
probing the great depths.
He said that men and stars
were the only divine combination.
Therefore the morning star
always dawned too early.
Then he lay down on my bed,
because I was the only lyric prostitute
capable of perverting him.
He laid his head on my sex,
because it reminded him of Berenice’s grave.
And he slept for a long,
long time,
until the blue flower of dawn
opened over night’s icy hand.
When I woke up, affected by the reality of an excessively suffocating atmosphere that allowed my passion for lyrical abstractions, Baltimore had long since been left behind.
