Cláudio Willer (Brazil)

Por: Cláudio Willer
Traductor: Cláudio Willer

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

TO ARRIVE THERE

Now I want the word reduced to the simple gesture of grabbing something, pure denotation, reference-language, an outstretched hand pointing at these pieces of reality - or else the party with all its ghosts seated on the absinth sofa while the fingers of memory bleed, everything true in the limit of what can be true, the notebook written backwards and the book read starting from the last page, and I could also speak about steam waves and curtains of smoke in the rooms, and report the complete history of tropical fevers - however, we, solely, the only ones who were capable to move in that intermediate plan in which reality and dream mingle themselves, touched by the suggestion of another scene or situation. Essence, that is the name of our game. Essence, essence! - so screams the legion of Unreal ones from the bosom of their probable existence. Essence, the real name of the mutations game. Not necessary to speak of hallucinations - it's like crossing an invisible wall, and there we are. The feverish text. The lights turned on. The lights turned on. The lights - turned on. For instance - but the number of examples is larger than the whole existence - for instance the lights on, so crudely rebutted by the white tiles illuminating our bodies while we got ready to start once more a loving game. I also remember the deserted beaches, which we crossed from one end to the other. Or when we discovered that waterfall in amidst the woods of the forest, that waterfall that should have about 30 or 50 meters of free fall, its cold sparkling that reached us in the margin, impossible to get any closer - that waterfall discovered in the middle of the woods induced us to complicity. The lights turned on. Complicity. Essence. And that old mirror - that oxidized and geometrically shaped old mirror, covered with the yellow of time past - that old mirror reflected us during one afternoon. It was placed on the dressing table in front of the bed at the room of the big colonial farmhouse, together with the other very heavy and solid pieces of furniture and the smell of dust, of something very ancient in that room. We also found many sanctuaries in our trips, it was as if a magnetic attraction for the sacred did impelle us. Some afternoons unbearably hot, so suffocating. There was a time in that. The lights. Essence. Hopelessly impregnating everything that was done later. How the transgression is everyday and imperceptible, how to be cursed is just some sort of indifference, lassitude, letting it be. The smell of dust on the upholstered couches. I want it all to be very clear. Not only words, the text, but another plan, now definitively glued to the Real. There remained a strange smell, impregnating the skin. Everything true. Everything. But this gesture of telling impossible histories, what does this mean? What button did I press? And now, let's not leave stone on stone. To transform the daily life in hyperbole, maze where everybody will get lost playing unconcernedly. Opacity is almost banal. The game of life and death is trivial. Let's wake up the irascible child that inhabits inside each one of us. There is no mystery. Let's not talk about madness. The other side, the other side walks smoothly on its sandals of rubber sole, the other side disguised as plumary art, the other side that smiles at us so friendly while looking askance, the other side is simple and is here, it's sufficient to be open minded and receptive. We are gods.

CLÁUDIO WILLER born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1940. Poet, essayist and translator. Some of his published books: Anotações para um Apocalipse, 1964; Dias Circulares, 1976; Jardins da Provocação, 1981; Volta, 1996; Estranhas Experiências, 2004; Poemas para leer en voz alta, 2008. Translator to the Portuguese for Conde de Lautréamont, Antonin Artaud and Allen Ginsberg, among others. As a critic and essayist, he has collaborated in supplements and cultural publications such as: Jornal da Tarde, Jornal do Brasil, revista Isto É, jornal Leia, Folha de São Paulo, etc. In several occasions he has been  president of the Brazilian Union of Writers. He studied sociology, pyshcology and has a PH.d in Compared Literature. Co-editor of the electronic magazine Agulha Perceptive writer of manifestos, where he has stressed: “Poetry is at the same time transitory and essential, it reports itself to the foundations, to that which is concrete behind appearances, and simultaneously aims at its own end, at its disappearance as an independent form of art or communication..."  In his second manifesto, he calls the attention on the fact that poetry cannot be separated from its social component. Referring to one of the key subjects in his work, he states: "... love is good, we say it thus, because it transforms the world, it confuses us with the world, it allows us to feel the world in the temperature of our body, as I observe in Poetic, or it is those wonderful landscapes, lakes, mountains, landscape of rising sun, of the series Poems to read aloud, that at the same time are the body of our loved one, our bodies, which are something else and for that reason they are more themselves, bodies; the woman is white, destination, they want to arrive there, to reach her, to find her; in my poetry, the companion is more of a departure point, I already arrived there, and now I want to set records straight with the world, as I affirm in the poem To arrive there, I do not want to leave stone over stone.”