Minor Life

(poema traduzido)

The escape from the real,

even more than the escape from the magical,

more distante than all, the escape from self,

the escape from the escape, exile

with no word or water, the voluntary

loss of love and memory,

the echo

does not correspond to the plea, and merging,

the hand becoming enormous and fading away

maimed, all gestures at last impossible,

if not vain,

the unnecessity of the canticle, the cleansing

of the colour, not an arm moving nor a nail growing.

Not death yet.

But life: captured in irreducible shape,

with no ornament or melodious remark,

life as we yearn for as peace and rest

(not death),

minimal life, essential;  a start-, a sleep;

less than dirt, with no heat; no science or dry wit;

the least cruel that can be longed for: life

in which the air, not breathed, but embrace me;

not a waste of fabric; the absence of them;

chaos amongst morrow and noon, with no sorrow,

for time is no longer divided into sections; time

suppressed, subdued.

Not the dead nor the eternal or the ethereal,

the living only, the minute, the mute, uncaring

and solitary living.

This I want.





- Carlos Drummond de Andrade