Poem Delivery Service | Portuguese Poem on Art and Change | Art and Literature

Well, fancy seeing you here, exhibitionists. Welcome to my studio. Where I was looking at these art wonderman tools that are books. This one in particular that contains the poem to which I'm going to dedicate this episode is really interesting because it says books are TP, so livros, Ertepe in Portuguese. And Ertepe is like the BBC in Portugal, public television, broadcast television. And so I guess that at this time the media were still tools of education, especially after a dictatorship that ended in 1974. Well, actually, I must say, this book, sorry, correcting myself immediately, it is from 1971, so still a publication under the dictatorship of not Salazar at this point, but his successor, Marcelo Caetano.

Portugal. Ruled by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. He called his regime Ishtado Novo, the new state.

I am Joanna, contemporary art curator and writer, and this is Poem Delivery Services, a series where I dedicate an episode to a poem. Because what are these things? What are books other than Art Wonderment tools? And this is your Art Wonderment podcast. It was a poet that would have been important to the Portuguese regime at the time because this is the Renaissance epic poet Luigi de Camois. Louis de Camois talked about colonization. It's one of the first narratives of encounters of the navigators of the time, the proto-colonizers, the ones who would facilitate the appropriation of land and goods in so many places of the planet by an epic poem called Luziadish. But that's not the poem that I want to talk about today. But let me first explain why I'm talking about this book in particular and why I'm talking about books and poetry in general. Well, because this series, Poem Delivery Service, which will deliver to you one poem per episode, once a month, stems from a sort of a frustrating feeling. Sometimes when I'm recording these episodes, or even when I'm writing, I think about specific poems in other languages than English. And when I read the translation, that moment that I want to focus on, or that specific verse or couple of verses that expresses the idea that I'm trying to convey is not well translated. And I mean not only in terms of vocabulary, but also the rhythm, the sound of the poem. So what I'm going to do is to focus on one single poem. This is a very short episode. It's an in-betweener. It's one of those short episodes between two other bigger, longer episodes about a specific topic or with a conversation around contemporary arts. And I'm just going to focus on the notion that I wanted to capture in these poems. And I'm going to read the translation in English of the poem, try to explain the idea that these poems have given me and that I carry with me, and I have carried with me for a long time, that I don't want to gatekeep. This should be accessible to you, dear reader, if you don't speak these languages. So, of course, the first one is Portuguese. Portuguese is my mother tongue. It's the first language that I learned. It's the language of my country of birth and also that my family speaks. It is also a poem that talks about something that I think is really crucial in art in general, the notion of change. It so happens that I was kind of going over a book that I read a long time ago, whose premise had fascinated me. The book is called Time and Reality. It was written by a philosopher called Alba Papa Grimaldi. And it talks about change as well. And it tells us that our minds cannot think change. Think about Zeno's paradox. You know the one of that Greek crazy, ancient Greek crazy philosopher who stated that if you're trying to imagine an arrow reaching its destination, you have to imagine that it has reached half of its destination. You have to cut it in halves to get to the point where it touches the target or the tree or wherever you're pointing the arrow. But because you are cutting it in the middle, it never really arrives to its destination. You're imagining a static moment of that movement. So trying to understand movement for Xeno was obviously cutting it up, but because you're dividing it, because your brain is not equipped to think movement and therefore to conceptualize change, the arrow in your mind will never get to its target. Whereas in real life, you don't have to think it, you just witness it. And she writes in the beginning of her book. The impossibility to conceptualize the passage from one to many and from many to one is seen as the culprit of our incapacity to conceptualize and understand a final real change at the end of the endless series of descriptions of events in which our understanding of reality is invariably engaged, and so of our incapacity to conceptualize movement. This fundamental feature of our mind has a startling consequence for our epistemology, since we cannot conceptualize real change but only describe events that for being self-identical are far from capturing what is changing, what is not yet in the words of Permenides. Real happening or real change must be outside our possible reach. The situation finds a validation in an analysis of our concepts of time and event. Any event having a duration must consist of what happens in that duration. This means that every event is not what is really happening, but is merely the description of its various sub-events, and this is so long as we analyze a duration. Since our temporal framework consists of such durations, it cannot host a final and so real event. This appears as a real paradox in our phenomenal observation. Reality as the place where an event can finally happen is outside our temporal framework and so outside our reach. For those of us who like philosophy, this is a fascinating couple of sentences. But for those of us who find this complex, who find this kind of philosophical conceptual language too entangled in its own over definition of concepts and complicated words that are too caught up in their Greek and Latin roots. This may be a bit too complicated and it also may lack some poetry. And that's why I love this poem that I'm about to read to you in its English version. Because the poem is so simple, it talks about something so familiar, and yet the more you think about it, the more it tries to phrase this unthinkable thing that is change. So, exhibitionistas, what I'm going to do now is to read the translation of one of Louis the Camoy's sonnets, my favorite one. And I remember that when I was a child, my mum used to say the first verse of the poem, just like that, you know, when an occasion presented itself that would warrant this reflection on desire and time. His sonnets are absolutely exquisite. And I have a few that are favorites, but I think this one is the one that comes the most often to my mind when I'm talking about something, and particularly when I'm talking about art, because it talks about desire, it talks about time, and it talks eventually and ultimately about change, that thing that we cannot conceptualize. And the translation that I found bewildered me. It is fine until you get to the very last verse where it does something absolutely appalling. And that's why I never, ever, ever quoted it. So I'm going to read it now and I will explain what happens in the last verse. It was translated by William Baer, and William Baer decided to give it a title, Time, which Louis the Camoise never did, and it goes like this. Time changes, and our desires change. What we believe, even what we are, is ever changing. The world is change, which forever takes on new qualities, and constantly we see the new and the novel overturning the past, unexpectedly, while we retain from evil, nothing but its terrible pain, from good, if there's been any, only the yearning. Time covers the ground with her cloak of green, where once there was freezing snow, and rearranges my sweetest songs to sad laments. Yet even more astonishing is yet another unseen change within all these endless changes that for me nothing ever changes anymore. It falls so so flat because in Portuguese, the repetition of the word change is a sound that goes like this mudons, mudons, mudas, mudas. So you have the m and you have the s and so this sort of very almost hypnotic repetition of the m and the s is very different than time changes and our desires change. I will read the whole poem at the end, by the way. I don't know if I said this in the beginning, but I will say it again. You will get to hear it in Portuguese at the very end of this episode. The flattening of this notion that times change, desires mutate constantly. But the way it's said in Portuguese gives us a sort of almost chaotic wheel that turns and turns and brings us from the end to the beginning and back again. There's something that is said in the pace and the singing of the poem that is absolutely lost in English. And the rest of the poem is about a very banal phenomenon, which is that things change. The world, in fact, is change. If there's anything that could define reality, is the fact that it is unstable. We perceive change because we are change. And so the world is change. And the way change manifests is by taking on new qualities. So the same things have different appearances, which is a profound thing to say. And then he talks about retaining from evil nothing but its terrible pain, and from good, if there's been any, only the yearning. So the idea of the terrible pain that is retained and the joys manifesting only in longing is a very Portuguese notion. Most of you probably know about the words saudades, which is longing, it does mean longing, saudaj, plural, so yearnings, um, is a word that isn't translatable. It is almost as if as you are living something, you're already projecting and longing for the thing that you're living, for the experiencing that you're actually having, but that you are conscious of being ephemeral and passing, and that you will, because it is joyful, yearn for in the future. So it is a very temporal notion, so that it is difficult to translate because it is quite philosophical and probably also connected very strongly with the sailors in general that would go into the sea and not come back. I mean, Portugal is not the only country that has this relationship to the ocean, but Portugal is often connected to the Mediterranean, but it is not the Mediterranean at all. It's an oceanic philosophy, I would say, if anything, characterizes the way we think, the way we behave, the way we are, and how we conceive of time and of desire, it is very much tied to the presence of the ocean. And that's something that unfortunately I don't see very explored in Portugal and Portuguese philosophy, but I do find that that's something very strong in there. And if any of you Portuguese out there, Portuguese listeners, if you know of any conceptualization of this oceanic disposition of the Portuguese people, please let me know in the comments. I would love to have references and ideas and authors or any cultural um phenomenon that speaks of that. So far so good. Of course, pain leaves a far deeper scar or even a far deeper wound. It depends on our disposition than joys, because joys are you know few and far between, apparently. And then at the end, the most astonishing thing we are told by Louis de Camoins is yet another change, an unseen change within all these endless changes. And it is that for me, says the poet, nothing ever changes anymore. Record scratch. That's not at all what Louis de Camoise says in Portuguese, the end, the last verse, is that the thing that is the most astonishing about time, desire, life, and the accumulation of experience, of joy and of quite a great amount of pain is that even change changes. And in the end, he says, change doesn't change as it used to. And that's the beauty of this poem, and that's why I love it so much, because the more you think about it, the more it becomes deep. It goes really under layers and layers of this apparent sameness of the world that surrounds us. And I've been reading it since I was a child. Now that I'm 50 years old, I read it differently because what was to me a clever play with words, this idea that change doesn't change as it used to, especially in the Portuguese version, is now something that I feel. I understand conceptually what Louis the Camwise is trying to say, but I also feel it so deeply. I feel that change, the change that I'm expecting, doesn't come from the same places, is not presenting itself the way it used to, because you can get accustomed even to change. You expect it, you can even anticipate it because you are experienced and also you read and you listen to people's stories, you know about things that are coming, crises, revolutions, even. You know conceptually about all these things, but to experience change changing in unexpected ways is something very different that I think you can only really truly feel when you've been around for a while. Half a century more precisely. So this is going to be a bit different because I'm going to read another version in English because I did find a better version, a better translation in English. I don't know who wrote it, I don't know who translated this one, but I did find it online. So I'm going to read it again. Times change, desires change. Our being changes, trust changes. Everything is composed of change, always taking on new qualities. Continually we see new things different in all from hope. From evil, bitterness stays in the memory, and of good, if there is any, longing. Time covers the ground with a green mantle, where it was already covered in cold snow, and at last transforms the sweet song into lamenting. And besides this change each day, another change brings a greater fear. That change doesn't change as before. Had I found this translation, I would have included this poem in all my writings. But the Portuguese one, the original one, is so so beautiful. It's unexplainable really. So I'm going to read it now and leave you to it. Listen to it now that you know more or less what it is talking about in each moment of the poem. And if you don't understand Portuguese at all, well lucky you. You can listen to the true meaning of the poem. That goes beyond words. Mudam-se os tempos, mudam-se as vontades, muda-se o ser, muda-se a confiança. Todo o mundo é composto de mudança, tomando sempre novas qualidades. Continuamente vemos novidades diferentes em tudo da esperança. Do mal ficam as mágoas na lembrança, e do bem, se algo um houve, as saudades. O tempo cobra o chão de verde manto, que já coberto foi de neve fria, e enfim converte em choro doce canto. E a foreste mudar-se cada dia, outra mudança faz demorospante, que não se muda já como suia. Have a good one, enjoy your week, and I'll be in your presence in a couple of days. Take care.