Want fewer ads?

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (October 31, 1902 - August 17, 1987) was perhaps the most influential Brazilian poet of the 20th century. He has become something of a national poet; his poem "Canção Amiga" ("Friendly Song") was printed on the 50 cruzados note. He is considered to be among the greatest Brazilian poets of all time.

Drummond was born in Itabira, a mining village in Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. His parents were farmers of Portuguese ancestry. He went to a school of pharmacy in Belo Horizonte, but never worked as a pharmacist after graduation. He worked in government service for most of his life, eventually becoming director of history for the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service of Brazil.

Though his earliest poems are formal and satirical, Drummond quickly adopted the new forms of Brazilian modernism that were evolving in the 1920s, incited by the work of Mário de Andrade (to whom he was not related). He adopted a Whitmanian free verse, mingling speech fluent in elegance and truth about the surrounding, many times quotidian, world, with a fluidity of thought.

Drummond's popularity has been credited due to the fact that a great part of his poetry (especially after lirycal maturity) has acquired an impressive capacity for the translation of ideas, transforming his particular troubles into a tool for universal communication.

One of Drummond's best-known poems is his hymn to an ordinary man, "José." It is a poem of desolation:

What about now?

What about now, José?

The party’s over,

the lights are off,

the crowd’s gone,

the night’s gone cold,

what about now, José?

You, what about now?

You, who are nameless,

who mocks the others,

you who writes verses

who loves, protests

What about now, José?

You have no wife,

you have no speech

you have no affection

You can’t drink,

you can’t smoke,

you can’t even spit

The night’s gone cold,

the day didn’t come,

the tram didn’t come,

laughter didn’t come

utopia didn’t come

and everything is over

and everything fled

and everything rotted

What about now, José?

What about now, José?

Your sweet words,

your feverish instant,

your feasting and fasting,

your library,

your gold mine,

your glass suit,

your incoherence,

your hate ... What about now?

Key in hand

you want to open the door,

but there's no door;

You want to die in the sea,

but the sea has dried;

you want to go to Minas

but Minas is no longer there.

José, what about now?

If you screamed,

if you moaned,

if you played

a Viennese waltz,

if you slept,

if you were tired,

if you died

But you don’t die,

you’re hard, José!

Alone in the dark

like a wild animal,

without theogony,

without a naked wall

to lean against,

without a black horse

that flees galloping,

you march, José!

José, to where?

The no-reasons of Love

I love you because I love you

You don't have to be a lover

and not always know how to be one.

I love you because I love you

Love is a status of grace

and it is not payable

Love is given freely

it is sowed in the wind

in the waterfall, in the eclipse

Love runs from dictionaries

and several regulations.

I love you because I don't love

Enough or too much me

Because love is not swapped

nor conjugated nor beloved.

Because love is love for nothing,

happy and strong in itself.

Love is Death's cousin,

and of the death, winner

Even if they kill it (and they kill)

in every moment of love.

Definitive

Definitive, as everything that is simple.

Our pain doesn’t come from the things that we’ve lived,

but from the things that were dreamed up and not acquired.

Why do we suffer? Why do we automatically forget

what we had enjoyed and we suffer for our unfulfilled projections,

for all the cities that we would have known next to

our love and did not happen, for all the children that we would have together

and didn’t have, for all the shows and books and silences that we would have shared

and did not share.

For all those kisses canceled, for eternity.

We suffer not because our work is stressful and pays little, but for all the free

hours that we lost to go to the movies, to talk to a friend,

to swim, to date.

We suffer not because our mother is impatient with us, but for all the

moments that we could be confiding to her our deepest

anxieties if she was interested to understand us.

We suffer not because our team lost, but for the suffocated euphoria.

We suffer not because we age, but because the future is being

confiscated from us, thus preventing a thousand adventures to happen to us,

all those with whom we dreamed and we never ever try.

Why suffer so much for love?

The truth was we did not suffer, just thank you for having known a so

nice person, which generated an intense feeling in us and made us

company for a reasonable time, a happy time.

How to ease the pain that is in what wasn’t lived? The answer is simple as a verse:

Deluding themselves less and living longer!

Every day I live, the more I become convinced that the waste of life

are in love that we don’t give, the forces that we don’t use,

in the selfish prudence that nothing ventures, and that, dodging the

suffering, we lose also the happiness.

Pain is inevitable.

Suffering is optional ...

The work of Carlos Drummond is generally divided into several segments, which appear very markedly in each of his books. But this is somewhat misleading, since even in the midst of his everyday poems or his socialist, politicized poems, there appear creations which can be easily incorporated into his later metaphysical canon, and none of these styles is completely free of the others. There is surely much metaphysical content in even his most political poems.

The most prominent of these later metaphysical poems is A Máquina do Mundo (The World's Machine). The poem deals with an anti-Faust referred to in the first person, who receives the visit of the aforementioned Machine, which stands for all possible knowledge, and the sum of the answers for all the questions which afflict men; in highly dramatic and baroque versification the poem develops only for the anonymous subject to decline the offer of endless knowledge and proceed his gloomy path in the solitary road. It takes the renaissance allegory of the Machine of the World from Portugal's most esteemed poet, Luís de Camões, more precisely, from a canto at the end of his epic masterpiece Os Lusíadas. There are also hints from Dante and the form is adapted from T. S. Eliot's dantesque passage in "Little Gidding."

One of those said segments have been found only after his death: deliberately erotical poetry. That type of poetry has been published in only one book "Moça deitada na grama" (woman laid down in the grass) with the autorization and actual intervention by his son.

It has been theorized that maybe that verge of erotica has been the fruit of an adultery, a relationship Drummond had with Lygia Fagundes while still married. That has been backed up by the fact that many of the poetry from this phase has a quotidian atmosphere to it, in reality, many of the situations the book describes could have easily happened. More than the continuation of a well-known characteristic of Drummond, the natural point of view given by the poems of this phase has made this theory largely accepted among readers.

Drummond is a favorite of American poets, a number of whom, including Mark Strand and Lloyd Schwartz, have translated him. Later writers and critics have sometimes credited his relationship with Elizabeth Bishop, his first English language translator, as influential for his American reception, but though she admired him Bishop claimed she barely knew him. In an interview with George Starbuck in 1977, she said:

I didn't know him at all. He's supposed to be very shy. I'm supposed to be very shy. We've met once ... on the sidewalk at night. We had just come out of the same restaurant, and he kissed my hand politely when we were introduced. [1]

Typical themes of the poetry of Drummond

The individual: The individual in Drummond is complex, tortured.The homeland: The place where the person was born, its importance in shaping the individual.The family: The man interrogates himself, without joy and without sentimentalism, the strange reality of family relations.The friends: The "song of friends". He made poetry to praise figures such as Mário de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira, and Machado de Assis, among others.The social shock: The social space where the individual expresses himself and his limitations before this space.Love: Not romantic or sentimental, love in Drummond is a bitter way of knowing others and oneself.Poetry: The making poetry appears as reflexion throughout his poetry.Dreamy exercises, joke poems: Playing with words, sometimes in an apparent innocent way.Existence: The being in the world question.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Carlos Drummond De Andrade", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0