The Flower and the Nausea

By Duda Kovarsky Rotta

Carlos Drummond de Andrade is a name every Brazilian child at least vaguely recognizes—most major cities have invariably named a street or a square after him. Some say he was our greatest poet; others, that he just was another rich intellectual brandishing communism and art as sword and shield. Either way, there is a stark contrast between his towering influence and the terribly insufficient translations of his work into English. The poem I chose to translate, “A Flor e a Náusea,” was written several years into the Vargas dictatorship, published near its end in 1945. 

De Andrade's first ever translator is rumored to be Elizabeth Bishop. The American poet made most famous by her 1976 poem “One Art”, where she details the ease with which one must accustom themselves to loss. She begins, “the art of losing isn't hard to master.” There is much I have lost constantly traversing between my native language of Portuguese and English. To translate is to inescapably lose—let us hope, like Bishop, that there is some art in the loss of recasting from Portuguese to English. I hope that between strange phrases and even stranger references, you can feel the words of De Andrade as a small flower sprouting, however ugly, from the harsh concrete. Of nauseating sights, we have no shortage. 

The Flower and the Nausea 

By Carlos Drummond de Andrade 

Chained to my class and a few clothes, 

I wear white through the gray streets. 

Melancholies, merchandises lurk around me. 

Should I continue unto sickness? 

Without guns, can I revolt? 

Filthy eyes on the clocktower: 

No, the time of complete justice has not arrived. 

The time is still of feces, bad poems, hallucinations, and longing. 

The poor time, the poor poet

Fuse into one in an impasse. 

In vain I try to explain myself, the walls are deaf. 

Beneath the skin of words there are ciphers and codes. 

The sun consoles the sick and doesn't repair them. 

The things. How sad are the things considered without emphasis. 

To vomit this dullness over the city. 

Forty years and no problem solved, not even put. 

No letter written nor received. 

All the men return home. 

Less free and yet carrying newspapers, 

spelling out the world, knowing they are losing it. 

Crimes on this earth, how shall we forgive them? 

I partook in many, others I hid. 

Others I thought beautiful, and published them. 

Gentle crimes to help us survive. 

A daily ration of error, distributed at home. 

The fierce bakers of evil. 

The fierce milkmen of evil. 

Set all on fire, including myself. 

They called the 1918 boy an anarchist. 

Though my hate is the best of me. 

With it I am saved, 

And give very few a small hope. 

A flower sprouted on the street! 

Trolleys, buses, a steel river of traffic, move away. 

A flower still faded 

Has deceived the police, ruptured the asphalt. 

Make complete silence, paralyze the business 

I guarantee a flower was born. 

Its color imperceptible 

Its petals unblossomed 

Its name nowhere in the books. 

It is foul. But it is truly a flower. 

I sit on the ground in the nation’s capital at five o’clock in the afternoon. 

And feel slowly this unsure form. 

Next to the mountains, clouds swell solid. 

Small white dots move in the water, panicked flock. 

It is foul. But it's a flower. It pierced through the asphalt, the tedium, the sick, and the hate.