I am a cowherd; I don’t deny it, my goods
Are those you see over there, I live happily
By guiding among the fresh flowering grasses
The sweetest company of my herd of cattle;

And there’s where they hear me, the love-¬struck trunks of trees,
Into which the ancients have been transformed;
Each and ev’ry one of them feels their own ruin;
In the way that I too feel all of my worries.

You, oh trunks of great trees, (I say to them) at one time
Considered yourselves to be so firm and secure
Within the arms of a beautiful companion;

Console yourselves in me, oh solid, sturdy trunks;
Because I, at one time, also once witnessed joy;
And today I do weep at the falsehoods of Love.

We present this work in honor of the 130th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Chortle, laugh, in a laughter of storm
like a clown who, lanky and nervous,
laughs, in an absurd laughter, inflated
with violent irony and pain.

With that atrocious and bloody guffaw—:
rattle the jester’s bells, convulsing.
Jump, puppet: jump, clown, pierced
by the stertor of this slow agony—

You’re asked for an encore, and that’s not to be sneered at.
Come on! Tighten the muscles up, tighten up
in these macabre steel pirouettes…

And though you fall on the ground, quivering,
drowned in your hot and seething blood,
laugh! Heart, saddest of clowns.

Translation by Flavia Vidal

Eyes thus turned gazing,
Head thus inclined
Steps thus taken
She comes to communicate with me.
Oh! Companion,
It cannot be or yes it will be,
The moves are those of a Brazilian.
Who could have told me,
But it is true;
That Lisbon produced
A Pretty Brazilian Woman.

Translation by Lucia Helena Costigan