[XCIV]
Si muero, sobrevíveme con tanta fuerza pura
If I die, survive me with so much pure force
que despiertes la furia del pálido y del frío,
that you awake the fury of the pallid and the cold,
de sur a sur levanta tus ojos indelebles,
from south to south raise your indelible eyes,
de sol a sol que suene tu boca de guitarra.
from sun to sun let your guitar mouth sound.
No quiero que vacilen tu risa ni tus pasos,
I want neither your laughter nor your steps to falter,
no quiero que se muera me herencia de alegría,
nor my inheritance of joy to die;
no llames a mi pecho, estoy ausente.
do not invoke my chest, I am gone.
Vive en mi ausencia como en una casa.
Live in my absence as if it were a house.
Es una casa tan grande la ausencia
It is such a grand house, absence,
que pasarás en ella a través de los muros
that in it you will pass straight through the walls
y colgarás los cuadros en el aire.
and you will hang the pictures in the air.
Es una casa tan transparente la ausencia
Absence is a house that’s so transparent
que yo sin vida te veré vivir
that, lifeless, I will see you live
y si sufres, mi amor, me moriré otra vez.
and if you suffer, love of mine, I’ll die again.
Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. Cien sonetos de amor, 1924, Pablo Neruda y Herederos de Pablo Neruda
1994, Random House Mondadori
Cuarta edición en U.S.A: febrero 2004
[English translation is mine.]
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
‘I Belong to Brazil’
The 1940s debut novel of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977), “Perto do Coração Selvagem” (“Near to the Wild Heart”), is described as the “reflections of a young female protagonist determined to live freely in a world ordered by men.”
This informative tribute to her shows how hard it can be for a female artist to fight free of the male gaze.
In a newspaper review, the poet Lêdo Ivo called the book “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.” “Hurricane Clarice,” declared the writer Francisco de Assis Barbosa on reading the book.
We’re told that many of her male critics and admirers echoed translator Gregory Rabassa’s remark that Lispector “looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,” a comment which Lispector herself rebuffed.
“I don’t like when they say that I have an affinity with Virginia Woolf,” Lispector wrote in one column, adding that she had encountered Woolf’s work only after her own first novel was published. “I don’t want to forgive her for committing suicide. The terrible duty is to go to the end.”
The statue of a solitary woman on a Rio beach (“I belong to Brazil,” she wrote) pouring her “mystery” into her writings is an appealing memorial to a woman who kept her cool intact.
(Lucas Iberico Lozada, “Overlooked No More: Novelist Who Captivated Brazil,” NYTimes, 12-18-20)
(c) 2020 JMN