“A woman and the Beberibe river”

Published March 1979, The Nassau Literary Review

translated from the Portuguese of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto by Madeleine Picciotto ‘78

She lies still the way water moves

and can’t decide what to be: time or space,

like streams in the northeast. Mapmakers

call them weak rivers. Slow and lazy

they move through mangroves, leaving

sand and the coming sea. Full and ripe,

a spread of water that knows no time

since time cannot pull the water.

The Beberibe when it’s young and growing

becomes impulsively time, not space.

No one slows it down. While it grows up

it steps more slowly, and now full grown

in the mangroves it steals its stillness

from the woman who—just a minute ago—

was imitating water. Slow and easy,

a spread of water that knows no time

except for the ebb and swell of tides.

“There’s an intentionality of sound and language in this piece that is not lost in translation. I’m struck by the contrast between spatial and temporal that parallels a geographical system—slow versus impulsive, weak versus young, full versus growing. Is time movement? Is space stillness (i.e. a stationary spread)? Are they mutually inclusive in the tide?”