Eduardo Pitta, Portugal

Por: Eduardo Pitta
Traductor: Nicolás Suescún to Prometeo

PROMETEO
Latinoamerican Poetry Magazine
No 81-82. July 2008.

UNDERWATER VILNIUS

Now that words dried up
and night fell
between us,
now that we both know
of the irreversibility
of lost time,
this poem of love and solitude is left to us.

All the rest is the insistence of days,
pursuing us, irreverent,
with watches,
people,
walls too ashy,
all things inevitably
logical.

For ours was not even a different
story.
The originality was all in the powder
of the mortars, in the circumstancial
feigning
of the smiles around us
and in the archaism of the alley where we made love.

EDUARDO PITTA was born in Lourenço Marques, Portugal, on August 9th, 1949, and he lived in Mozambique until 1975. “We are before a poetry that reaches its more singular vocation when it submerges in sensations or strong and intense emotions, bordering high temperatures (...) these words are capable of burning like fire or ice; images that come up from the "imminence of disaster" and coagulate in a verbal violence that makes the winds seem sweet or that can even descend to the crudest everyday reality (...) Even the loving domination – which is absolutely essential in Pitta- appears contaminated by the same expressive load, by the same intensity. When we see somebody’s face described as "a map / full of sacked cities", we understand to what extent eroticism is, in his work, a seduction territory whose fever triggers a frenzy that can sometimes involve a remarkable dose of violence (...) In fact, although Pitta is a Portuguese poet and has been separated from Mozambiquean reality for the last decades, this country has an obvious nostalgic subsistence in his poetry (...) of a "already lost intact and pure earth/". - Fernando Pinto do Amaral, “Leituras”, Lisbon, 1999. In addition to being a poet, an essayist and an acute, sensible, meticulous and perversely well documented critic, Eduardo Pitta is, in the slippery territory of our letters, a singular and strong character, full of brief, clear, abrupt and decided brilliance that gives him a unique and unmistakable identity. From his first book (...) he showed a disquieting and sensual speech, that was occasionally threatening or on the brink of an almost sinister thing, solar and voluptuous, but which incorporates with the same hunger, a nocturnal, violent and almost wild thing (...) One of the most remarkable poets made in Mozambique, though not said frequently enough, his poetry has little or nothing to do with the so called “local coloring”, but it still sometimes shows us some of those references (...) This is a poetry that owes nothing to those values that are conventionally considered poetic (...) the vigorous poetic discourse of Eduardo Pitta, in its solid and, apparently, materially seductive architecture, undermines our interior stability insidiously and unavoidably, and illustrates like few the words of Marcel Béalu: "la mission du poète est de troubler la sécurité". When Pitta’s clear verse explodes in our faces (...) we understand exactly what Béalu Meant”. Eugénio Lisboa, preface of “Watermarks”, Lisbon, 1999.