Tags
do it for fun or not at all, erotica is life, exigÊncia, Leila Míccolis, poema para o namorado, portuguese translations, voyeurismo
three poems by Leila Miccolis, from Portuguese
VOYEURISMO
Te olho
me molho
VOYEURISM
I look at you
I’m soaking
POEMA PARA O NAMORADO
Teu lado feminino me erotiza:
são belos, sensuais e muito caros
certos instantes gostosos, em que te encaro
menos como homem e mais como menina:
quando passas teus cremes para a pele,
ou pões o avental pra cozinhar,
ou quando em mim te esfregas
até gozar os teus gozos sem fim,
ou quando tuas mãos, leves e lésbicas,
desabam como plumas sobre mim.
POEM FOR A BOYFRIEND
Your feminine side makes me erotic:
it is beautiful, sexy and very dear.
There are certain moments when I regard you
less like a man and more like a girl:
when you apply creams to your skin,
or when you put the apron on to cook,
or when you massage me
so that I enjoy your endless joys,
or when your hands, light and sapphic,
fall like feathers upon me.
EXIGÊNCIA
Meu homem eu quero,
enquanto puder,
molhado e úmido
feito mulher.
REQUIREMENT
I want my man
to be able to be
wet and damp
like a woman
][][
NOTE:
I do things not because I am particularly skilled or
good at them but because they are fun. Translations are a wonderful
example. Of course I don’t know Portuguese or any other language—I
hardly have a grasp on English—but muddling through puzzles,
decoding, deciphering, finding that something totally alien is
beautiful and amazing … that’s why I wake up in the morning. Once I
attempted to translate a Pablo Neruda poem and thought I had done a
kinda/maybe/sorta good job (I checked it against other English
translations and it didn’t seem to have any horrific flaws) so I
posted it on my blog. A couple of days later someone from Uruguay
wrote to me saying, “what have you done to my beloved Pablo?”
Apparently some of the words I decided to use weren’t the correct
ones. Another time I found a Federico Garcia Lorca poem that I had
translated getting torn apart on an on-line forum because, as one
person put it, if I “had any grasp of the Spanish language at
all” I wouldn’t be making such obvious mistakes. Translators
seem to be a very unforgiving bunch, at times. Since then I mainly
focus on poets that I’ve stumbled across who have never been
translated into English because, as Marilyn Hacker put it, “even
a bad translation is good because it might cause someone more fluent
in that language to make a better translation.” Life is too
short to apologize for having fun.