Two Excerpts of Odes

II

Ah dusk, nightfall, the lights coming on in the great cities,

And the hand of mystery hushes the hubbub,

And the tiredness of everything inside us that dilutes

An exact and precise and active sense of life!

Each street becomes a canal in the Venice of Boredom

And how strange the uniform backdrop of the streets,

Of the streets at nightfall, Oh Cesário Verde, Oh Master,

Oh you of “The Feeling of a Westerner”!

What a profound disquiet, what a desire for other things.

Which are neither countries, nor moments, nor lives.

What desire for maybe other ways of feeling

Inwardly humects the slow and distant instant!

A somnambulant horror under all these newly lit lights,

A tender and drenched dread, leaning against corners

Like a panhandler begging for impossible sensations

Who has no idea who will give him what he needs… 

When I die,

When I go, ignobly, like everyone else,

Down that road, the idea of which can’t be faced,

Through that door in which, even if we could appear, we wouldn’t appear,    

Into that port of which the Ship’s captain remains ignorant,

Let that be the hour commensurate with all the tedium I’ve ever felt,

At this mystical and spiritual and most ancient hour,

At this hour when maybe, much longer ago than it seems,

Plato saw the idea of God in a dream

Sculpting a clearly plausible body and existence

Exteriorized like a field inside his thinking.

Let this be the hour you carry me off to be buried,

The hour I no longer know how to live,

In which I don’t know what sensations to have or to mimic having,

The hour whose mercy is tortured and excessive,

Whose shadows come from anything other than things,

Whose passage doesn’t brush its garments against the floor of Material Life

Nor leave its scent along the pathways of the Eye. 

Fold your hands over your knees, oh dear friend that I don’t have nor want to have. 

Fold your hands over your knees and look at me in silence

Now in this hour in which I cannot see that you are looking at me,

Look at me in silence and in secret and ask yourself

—You who know me—who am I…

Translated by Martin Earl for