In December 1994, I attended a poetry reading at Poets House in New York by two Portuguese poets, Nuno Júdice and Pedro Tamen, along with the translator, Richard Zenith. Little did I know that this event would have an impact on the profound journey into my ancestral roots in Portugal and the Azores.
After my Portuguese grandfather passed away in September 1993, I was at a loss to uncover our family’s history, which he had been reluctant to share. Hearing Júdice and Tamen read their poems in Portuguese the following December was a revelation of sorts—here were real, live Portuguese poets speaking the language of my ancestors.
The dearth of first-hand accounts and available source materials kept me from learning my family’s Portuguese Azorean history for many years and, frankly, life got in the way of digging deeper. When my father died in 2016, I realized that all my family’s histories were available to me, except one part—the Portuguese. By then, Ancestry.com had made many research materials available online for the first time, and a group of Azorean Genealogists gathered on a listserv to share information, leads, and help translate documents from the Azores, much of which had also become available online in the form of scanned records from the parish archives from the Azores. Suddenly, my research got easier.
In 2018, I made my first trip to the Azores and Portugal, and before going, I reached out to Nuno Júdice, whose contact information I had kept from that poetry reading decades ago.
To my surprise, Nuno remembered me, and we arranged to meet during my visit to Lisbon in July of that year. We spent a delightful evening together, with Nuno sharing insights into Portuguese poetry, history, and culture. Our connection deepened further when he invited me to write a foreword for David Swartz’s English translation of his novella, The Religious Mantle, and later, he published several of my poems in a literary journal he edited.
In 2020, Nuno graciously provided a blurb for my book Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana, celebrating the work as a poetic exploration of ancestral memory and the experiences of Portuguese emigrants.
Our paths continued to intertwine as the translator Margarida Vale de Gato, whom Nuno had earlier recommended for my poems, agreed to translate my book Dwelling: an ecopoem into Portuguese. Nuno even agreed to help launch the translated edition, Habitar: um ecopoema, in Lisbon in September 2022. In many ways, this felt like coming full circle from our initial encounter at that poetry reading nearly three decades ago.
In a serendipitous twist, Júdice revealed that he had met one of my teachers, the renowned poet Gary Snyder, whom Margarida had also translated, in Madrid in the 1980s. He even shared a draft of a poem he had written about that encounter, further solidifying the interconnectedness of our poetic journeys. When Nuno Júdice passed away last month unexpectedly, I was deeply sad to hear the news from David Swartz; I had just been thinking about Nuno and had planned to write to him. He would have turned 75 years old later this month.
Here is Nuno Júdice’s poem, “Madrid, Anos 80” and my translation from the Portuguese:
MADRID, ANOS 80
Cruzei-me uma vez com Gary Snyder nas Bellas Artes
de Madrid. Eu vinha com livros espanhóis – poesia, e algum
Borges, onde há sempre coisas novas – e cruzei-me com Gary
Snyder, que vinha de ler poemas, mas quando o soube já
a leitura tinha acabado. Também não sei se o iria ouvir: não é
todos os dias que se está em Madrid, com tempo para ir
às livrarias e espreitar museus; e ouvir Gary Snyder pode
não dar jeito ou, pelo menos, obrigar a que se perca alguma coisa
que tão cedo não se voltará a ver. Foi assim que, antes de ir à livraria,
eu tinha passado pelo Caspar David Friedrich, no Prado,
perseguindo montanhas e ruínas da velha Alemanha. Ao sair dali,
com os olhos enevoados pelo mar do Norte, como iria
entrar numa sala para ouvir Gary Snyder? Da próxima vez
que estiver em Madrid, porém, não vai ser assim: e se me cruzar,
nas Bellas Artes, com um poeta que acabe de ler poemas,
mesmo que eu venha da livraria, e tenha passado pelo Prado,
vou arranjar tempo para o ouvir – em homenagem a
Gary Snyder, que não tive tempo
para ouvir.
Nuno Júdice, 26-11-2000
__
MADRID, 80’s
I crossed paths with Gary Snyder once, at Bellas Artes
in Madrid. I was carrying Spanish books – poetry, and some
Borges, where there are always new things – and I bumped into Gary
Snyder, who came to read poems, but by the time I found out
the reading was over. I didn’t know if I would listen to him either: it isn’t
every day that you’re in Madrid, with time to go
to bookstores and look around museums; and listening to Gary Snyder might
not be useful or, at least, make you miss something
that you won’t see again anytime soon. So, before going to the bookstore,
I had passed by Caspar David Friedrich, in the Prado,
chasing mountains and ruins of old Germany. As I left,
with eyes clouded by the North Sea, how was I going to
walk into a room to listen to Gary Snyder? The next time
when I’m in Madrid, however, it won’t be like that: and if you bump into me,
in Bellas Artes, with a poet who has just finished reading poems,
even if I’m coming from the bookstore, and have just passed through the Prado,
I will make time to listen – in honor of
Gary Snyder, who I didn’t have time
to hear.
Translated from the Portuguese by Scott Edward Anderson
My Poem, “The Poet Gene,” Receives Honourable Mention
January 30, 2011
My poem, “The Poet Gene,” received honorable mention in the 2011 ESRC Genomics Forum Poetry Competition announced this weekend.
The competition was co-sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Genomics Network and the Scottish Poetry Library of Edinburgh. The judges for the competition were Pippa Goldschmidt, Professor Steve Yearley, director of the ESRC Genomics Forum, Peggy Hughes, the communications officer at the Scottish Poetry Library, and poet Kona Macphee.
Writing about my poem, the judges said, “Understandably, most of the poems were serious, and so we particularly enjoyed the humour in one of the runners up, “Improving the Human: ‘The Poet Gene’,” a nicely self-referential poem which imagines the perhaps negative impact of genetic engineering upon poetry itself.”
Here is my poem
“The Poet Gene”
The gene for “poet” has likely been isolated,
somewhere in a lab in southern California.
And I wonder how close it is to the gene
that makes you crave potato chips
or the “coffee-drinker” gene, perhaps,
or the one that causes procrastination.
If they have the poet gene cornered
in a Petri dish, will they admonish it
for all the bad poems ever written,
however unwittingly?
Would it improve the human
to have the poet gene spliced
into fruit or beef – or even bacon?
Poetry-enhanced bacon. Now that’s
genetic modification one can get behind!
Perhaps it can be modified by the reader gene,
increasing the number of poetry readers.
Oh, but what if it went “aft agley”?
What if this innocent experiment turned wicked?
Think of it, more bad poems by more bad poets—
(Increased productivity isn’t always a good thing.)
Perhaps this poem is, in fact, one of them,
a mutated, altered, monster poem
waiting to grab you by the throat and…Ahem.
Think of the sheer volume of bad poetry
overtaking the world, smothering us;
entire forests decimated for paper
upon which these poems are printed
or hundreds of iPhone apps built
to accommodate a staggering number of poems
cranked out by “GMPs” (genetically modified poets)
careering and MFAing all over the place.
Undoubtedly, someone will decide to splice
the poet gene from one poet into another. Then what?
Talk about trouble: one side striving for simplicity;
the other deliberately obtuse and indirect.
No, best leave the poet gene out of even this poem;
rather, focus on how to make potato chip consumption
actually slimming to the human figure, especially
when consumed with large quantities of your favorite ale
and generous servings of bacon.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Related articles
- What do you get when you cross poets and geneticists? (newscientist.com)
William Stafford, Rimbaud & the Poet as an Embarrassed Young Man
November 15, 2010
Arthur Rimbaud
Poet William Stafford was a quiet and gentle force in poetry. He liked it that way; at least that’s what he told The Paris Review in 1989. (I think it was published in 1993, the year he died.)
As William Young, the interviewer, wrote in his introduction,
The intimacy of William Stafford’s poetry would seem to belie the enormous popularity the poet’s work has enjoyed, but in fact it is a product of Stafford’s keen ability to discern poetic language in everyday speech and appropriate it for his own work.
Stafford, whose first volume of poetry was not published until 1960 when he was forty-six, was born in the small town of Hutchinson, Kansas, on January 17, 1914 and died in Portland, Oregon, on August 28, 1993 at the age of seventy-nine.
He came to my high school when I was a freshman and read poetry to us. I had been reading the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, in the Louise Varese translation published by New Directions, and was all hopped up about the poet as visionary and seer, about the power of poetic vision on the soul.
So, when it came to the Q&A, I raised my hand and asked, “Mr. Stafford, do you agree with Rimbaud that the the poet must be a visionary?”
It was a brilliant question. I stood there while the entire audience turned around to admire my brilliance.
Then I saw their faces. One classmate in particular, one of the drama students, looked at me incredulously and mouthed something that appeared to be “Rim-bod?!”
Then I realized what I had done. Despite being in my fourth year of French lessons, I had badly butchered Rimbaud’s name, and rather than sounding like “Rambo,” I had made it sound like “Rim-bod.”
My face went red. I sank down into my seat. Humiliated.
Stafford, for his part, very calmly looked at me and answered, “No. I think the poet needs to be able to see the world he or she lives in, but not necessarily be visionary. Paying attention goes a lot longer than vision.”
You can read many of William Stafford’s poems at Selected William Stafford Poetry.
Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 