Carlos Drummond de Andrade - A Flor e a Náusea 中译

Nausea and the Flower

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Bound by my class and some clothes,

I walked down the gray street in white.

Dejections and goods for sale observe me.

Should I keep on until I’m nauseous?

Can I, without weapons, rebel?

Grimy eyes in the clock tower:

No, the time of full justice has not arrived.

It’s still a time of feces, bad poems, hallucinations, and waiting.

The hapless time and the hapless poet

merge in the same impasse.

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

Beneath the skin of words: ciphers and codes.

The sun cheers the sick and doesn’t renew them.

Things. Considered without emphasis, how sad things are.

And if I vomited this tedium over the city?

Forty years and not one problem

solved, nor even formulated.

Not one letter written or received.

The people are all going home.

They’re less free but carry newspapers

and spell out the world, knowing they’ve lost it.

How can I forgive the world’s crimes?

I took part in many. Others I concealed.

Some I found beautiful, and they were published.

Soothing crimes, which make life more bearable.

A daily ration of error, delivered at our door.

By ruthless milkmen of evil.

By ruthless bread boys of evil.

And if I set everything on fire, myself included?

They called the adolescent of 1918 an anarchist,

but my hatred is the best part of me.

Without it I’d be lost,

and with it I can give a few people a slight hope.

A flower has sprouted in the street!

Buses, streetcars, steel stream of traffic: steer clear!

A flower, still pale, has fooled

the police, it’s breaking through the asphalt.

Let’s have complete silence, halt all business in the shops,

I swear that a flower has been born.

Its color is uncertain.

It’s not showing its petals.

Its name isn’t in the books.

It’s ugly. But it really is a flower.

I sit down on the ground of the nation’s capital at five in the afternoon

and fondle with my fingers this precarious form.

Inland, over the mountains, thick clouds are gathering.

In the sea tiny white dots, panicked chickens, are moving.

It’s ugly. But it’s a flower. It broke the asphalt, tedium, disgust, and hatred.