By Sérgio Mattos

Translated and selected by Albert G. Bork

With a Forward by Fred P. Ellison

Tejidos Publications - Austin, Texas, USA, 1980

Presented in readings at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and as part of BRAZIL WEEK FESTIVITIES at the University of Texas at Austin, which was sponsored by the Institute of Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in February of 1980.

Preface:

The poet and his translator

By Fred P. Ellison
(The University of Texas, at Austin, Department of Spanish and Portuguese)

One of the joys of being in the Luso-Brazilian section of our Department comes from the fact that the Portuguese and Brazilians on campus, especially the Brazilians, often tend to gravitate there, perhaps to matar saudades, or fight off homesickness, in an environment where their mother and cultural values are especially appreciated. Thus it was that we met the young poet Sérgio Mattos two years ago (in 1978) when he came to Austin to pursue the doctorate in the field of Communications. It might be said that he discovered us and that we discovered him. Through his poems, which he recited to us, to our classes or to broader audiences, as during our recent Brazilian Culture Week, in which were featured the works of many of the time-honored poets of Brazil, Sérgio Mattos helped to quicken everyone's interest in Brazilian poetry. More than that, he has stimulated others to translate him. Notably Albert Bork, also of our Portuguese section, and already a well-known and respected translator of Oswald de Andrade. Thanks to his intimate knowledge of the Portuguese language, he is the ideal person to undertake the creative task of mirroring the Mattos poems in English. His versions are more than able to confront and to illuminate the original poems on facing pages.

Though the poems belong to a tradition of freedom in metric and stanzaic form, they are, in their essential simplicity, close to the rhythms of colloquial Brazilian Portuguese. Albert Bork has found a similar kind of English for the translations. The poems sing of love, of solitude, of youth in a perplexing world, and finally, of poetry itself. Sérgio Mattos' poetry is soft-spoken but, as he says in "Poetics," "in the life of poetry there can be no laziness or inertia..." or to put it another way, there is in these twenty-two poems a sense of inner strength and integrity that makes them memorable. Finally, this bilingual book, beautifully created by Sérgio Mattos and completed symmetrically in Albert Bork's translations, reflects a real symbiosis of spirit.

Austin, Texas, 1980