Antonio Sergio Bessa Did the search for a new subjectivity lead you to the “other”? You mentioned your readings of Eliot and Pound, and as you know, a major part of their poetry is a kind of collage of other poems and voices. Is that what attracted you to their work?

Francisco Alvim No doubt. What I found in Eliot and Pound was a voice coming from a new, crushed subjectivity, which had already emerged, splendidly and movingly, in Baudelaire. My feeling is that, in our time, this subjectivity became manifest in poetry in two ways: via material things, of the thing-thing and the word-thing, and via man. “Via” here is meant as channel, as in voice, or speech, and of course writing. Via man, it became pluralistic and fragmented, because today man is a being without individuality, and the world, a reality imploded into a thousand fragments. Thus the shrapnel of voice, voice which is also, above all, a desperate attempt—inexorably failed—to hear itself and the other’s voice.

Three poems by poet and diplomat Francisco Alvim from Elefante, translated by interviewer Antonio Sergio Bessa.

for Cacaso

Sometimes the gaze follows
the network of light
without any curiosity
any illusion
It goes on in search of time
and time, as always,
emptied of everything
is not far
is here, now
The gaze with no memory
without destiny
arrested
in the air of air
in the light of light—
site?

for Carlos Drummond de Andrade

There are many shadows in the world
They blow in the clouds
and in the air they
glitter solitary like topazes—
drops of dimmed light
The stars blow wind
Shadows are the wind of stars
At the bottom of waters trapped
in ponds and dams
there is a wind of waters—
shadows
In the sea
they refract submersed
transient
amidst forests of algae—
shadows of emerged shadows
They are made—the shadows—of dark
air
They remember all and nil
The flight of shadows
spins around a sonorous
column, the poem—
light from inside
Out

Still

In the platform above

Between the legs
on the floor
the groceries in a plastic bag

Far from verse, almost prose
No guts
for the always venturesome—
while they last—
flights of passion

Far so far

from humor from irony

from the polymorph voices

sibylline

tattered in the tongue’s

ear

Where ground is ground

legs, legs

things, things

and the word, none

There, only the refraction

of an idea

of a thought exhausted

of movement

Between two roads

two harbors

(two lagoons)

two illnesses

Sublime virtues of chance

why not take me

from inside

and protect me from the cold outside

from the incessant, unbearable flight of plot?

from choosing?