Adélia Prado

thumb|Adélia Prado Adélia Luzia Prado Freitas (born 13 December 1935 in Minas Gerais, Brazil) is a poet who writes in Portuguese. Quotes Suffering belongs to no language. fragment translated into English by Ellen Doré Watson inThe Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (1990) Interview for Bomb Magazine (1985 and 1999) interviewed by Ellen Doré Watson, translated into English by Ariane Martins, Eva Golinger and Ernesto Solorzano 1985 I don’t like to think of myself as a writer. I hate the idea of being an author who gives advice to other people or who writes forewords. I want to be a new author. I want to feel, with any book I come to write, the same doubt, the same anxiety, the same joy I felt when I wrote Bagagem. I always want to be in that precarious and difficult position…I always want to feel not completely sure that what I’ve just written is any good. That gives me more pleasure. Even if I believe in what I’m doing, there’s the insistent question: Will this be a good book? Will people like it? I think that’s vital for me. (EW Which writers influenced your artistic development?) AP João Guimarães Rosa—his books are like a Bible to me; Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Clarice Lispector, Manuel Bandeira, Jorge de Lima, Murilo Mendes, Helena Morley. I would like to write as Helena Morley wrote her only book, with no plot, with nothing. Just write, almost as breathing...The free verse of Carlos Drummond de Andrade made me think: That’s how I want to write. Reading him I realized I didn’t need rules hanging over me, I could write however I wanted. I just obey a rhythmic impulse, which is itself the very nature of poetry. And I think reading Joyce’s Ulysses opened my eyes to what you are calling free association, to the way the mind works: I say banana and I think potato; I say cup and I think eye glasses. I don’t explain things; I simply do what I do. I only know how to write about concrete, immediate and commonplace things. But these commonplace things show me their metaphysical nature. I can only see the metaphysical, the divine, through the concrete and the human. the terrain of poetry, the territory of poetry, is the territory of freedom. Poetry does not resist any theme, any part of the body, any human fact. It lands in the most unusual and unexpected places. Who am I to organize the flight of the poem? I am a servant, a minion of poetry. I cannot control it; it controls me. When it tells me to write a certain word, I put the word down. My religious education was repressive, which made for some difficulties in relation to sex and love, for example. But that’s about doctrine, the institutionalized church. The terrain of faith is the same as poetry. Faith can’t refuse what poetry accepts, because there is no contradiction between faith and poetry. It’s the same territory. I believe it’s God’s face that incites poetry and nourishes my faith...poetry is what freed me from this oppression. I found God more deeply in poetry than in doctrine. I realized that the poetic experience is in fact deeply sacred and religious. The poetic experience is deeply joyful and liberating and full of faith—something from God. I realized there was nothing wrong with poetry, but that there was something wrong with the kind of faith I had. So poetry liberated my faith, it purified and deepened it...The poetic experience is sacred. Once I realized that, I thought, There’s no contradiction, the God of poetry is the same God that I worship. So, where’s the reason to feel oppressed? Vision is essential. The shape of things, the color of things, the thickness of things. I think I write from my gut: “I hear the message according to the hand of the herald.” I want to know what your nose looks like. What your mouth is like. It makes a difference to me. Because I’m a sensuous creature. I think first with my gut, and then with my head. And it’s all the senses, really. You can’t separate them. (EW: when do you know that the poem is finished?) AP: When it gives me joy. When I look and think, Oh, what a beautiful child! (EW How much conscious control do you apply along the way?) AP: My concern, my obligation, is to reproduce the emotion as faithfully as possible. So I write a poem, and then I read it and say, No, that’s wrong. And then I cut it. I rarely need to add. It’s mostly about cutting and cutting. Like with a newborn, you remove the placenta, you wipe away the cheese, and the child gets clean. It’s born dirty, and you clean it up. Inspiration brings dirt with it. But if I need to fix a poem too much—that’s a signal that it’s a bad one. Poetry, as any other form of art, is an instrument of humanization, of knowledge. People think of the poet as being on the margins of life, but it’s just the opposite! Poet, artist, philosopher, mystic, saint—they’re the ones closest to reality. The spiritual has the same power for me as the concrete. Dreams can be more powerful than the apparent reality. Eternal life, the resurrection of the body, these things are as real for me as this cup—even more real. God is a person, not an abstract idea. He’s not a philosophical matter, but a personal one. The more we venture into other cultures’ forms of spirituality, the more real God becomes. The I Ching and The Bhagavad Gita predate Christ by thousands of years. Their language preceded scriptural language. I can only conclude that the source that inspires us and that inspired the Book of Wisdom and those Eastern texts is the same one. The same spirit that blew there, blew here. My faith is not a tiny thing in a small room. It’s a universal thing. God’s not a genie in a bottle. The Holy Spirit organizes life, creates life. Feelings are universal...What you must translate is the emotion. “I don’t care about the word. What I want is the grand chaos that spins out syntax.” What matters is the feeling that the word carries, in any language in the world. A literal translation might be just noise. The translation, as a performance of the text, as you said, has to be faithful to the emotion. 1999 I have no desire to dress up my poetry and make it fancy. I want the poem to be as true as humanly possible to the feeling that inspired it. That’s my only concern. Everything else seems wrong. The poetic phenomenon is divine, but the words are mine. The trains, the soil, the hens, the backyards are mine, but the poetry in them is divine. people get older and get more…mature…A lot of peace is a question of maturity. [asked about her poem “Arte,” translated into English as: “From the guts, heart.”] AP: Isn’t that what art is? You get the guts, extract the dirty bits, and you are left with the beauty of the heart. [asked about a fragment from one of her poems, translated into English: “Choosing words to express my distress / I breathe better already.”] AP: I write it again and again in each new poem. We all have one main drama in life and that’s what we write about…the magic word: acceptance. Sometimes out of infernal pride we reject the gifts we’ve been given. Sometimes, I want to be sick like others and God doesn’t want that. He wants the singer to keep singing, the poet to keep writing, the musician, composing sin is fundamental. As Paul says in the New Testament, “Oh, happy guilt, you bring us great salvation.” It’s the meeting with sin, with shadow, with the dirt and sadness of life, the dark side, that offers the possibility of perceiving and enjoying the light. Otherwise, there would be no conscience…One of God’s greatest gifts to us is the ability to perceive sin. That’s what salvation is. It is precisely through this work of annihilating my pride that I understand the nature of the human condition. Otherwise, I would have an inflated ego and I would confuse myself with God and they’d send me away to an asylum…The biggest suffering—putting aside physical suffering—is the death of the ego. The struggle to accept life, to embrace the mystery that things are as they are instead of as we want them to be. Catholicism has a very acute sense of conscience, which is very important. Real guilt, true guilt, isn’t shallow. Quotes about There is no desire for sophistication in her work. It identifies exclusively with the commonplace existence of everyday people in a city with no history…Adélia Prado’s poetry is striking, not just for its embrace of provincial life, but also for its desire to give positive symbolic expression to everything devalued by the dictatorship of modernism. Miguel Sanchez Neto, quoted in English here External links Smith College Visiting Poets page Image Journal Archives GoodReads page Category:1935 births Category:Living people Category:Catholics from Brazil Category:Poets from Brazil Category:Women authors from Brazil Category:Women born in the 1930s