From In America, I Discovered I Was European:
Ode to the Camel Cigarette Man, by Natália Correia
Translated by Katharine F. Baker and Emanuel Melo
During her first visit to the United States in June 1950, budding author and poet Natália Correia spent part of her stay in New York City. In her 1951 travelogue recounting the trip — Descobri Que Era Europeia, translated by Katharine F. Baker and Emanuel Melo as In America, I Discovered I Was European (Tagus Press, 2025) — Correia recalled her fascination with the city’s famous mechanical billboard that simulated a man puffing a cigarette. N.B. She composed this poem 14 years before the Surgeon General’s report linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease.
Times Square billboard with steam simulating cigarette smoke. Willem van de Poll. Dutch National Archives.
* * *
Sitting in a drugstore on Times Square the next day, I felt overtaken by a strange passion for the mechanized smoking man on the giant Camel cigarettes billboard. He was up above, I down below, but we connected in the type of entanglement that distance makes sweeter and closer.
Intoxicated by the lyricism of that unexpected idyll, I murmured a ballad to him sotto voce:
The Camel cigarette man
is, beyond a doubt, the most human
person in Manhattan.
If he were more serious, if he smoked
less
he’d be a dead ringer for Rodin’s Thinker
or the lithograph of a considerably
less theological Christ.
He could just as well be everything that it feels
good to think he could be,
everything
less the human ants he looks down upon from on high
glad to be different.
In addition, he is the only man who smokes
uninterrupted
without getting poisoned.
Besides, he’s the only man on
Broadway who has the
privilege of moonlight,
which has an authentic sky, above
this other heaven, perchance much more
real,
technically perfect,
with neon announcements for each
of the cabarets of paradise.
If there were no
drugstore in front of him,
I would be a ridiculous Juliet without
balcony or rope ladders to
infinity.
And maybe the Camel cigarette man
did not exist
because I was not here
to give him the life he was hoping for
that dawns in my eyes.
If this drugstore did not exist,
we would be two stray motives
in the same city,
solitary like snakes coiled up
on themselves, swallowing their tails
in the fever of a destiny.
Likewise,
the lighted train of the news ticker from the
New York Times
can continue to run smoothly
on the rails
to its imaginary station
or have an accident
like a bull frightened of his
own horns.
The breasts of the bra girl
for Exquisite Form
can be loosed like golden apples
and the crowd below
in Times Square
would swear it saw flying saucers.
Nothing,
nothing will disturb this quiet idyll
of a public garden
these soft gestures like autumn fruits
that do not need to conquer time.
When the sleepy eyelids
of the last employee at this drugstore
landed on my thoughts
like weary birds,
(sorry, we are going to close!)
Camel cigarette man
will think I didn’t go away.