A poet whose tone is clearly elegiac.

Rui Lage

Rui Lage was born in 1975 in Oporto, in Portugal where he now lives, but he has spent long periods in the province of Trás-os-Montes, where his parents are from. This remote region of northeast Portugal is assiduously present in his most recent poetry, not so as to play out the traditional opposition between frenetic city life and the peaceful delights of rural existence, but to contrast the anodyne and often parochial modernity of the wealthier, densely populated coast with the abandoned northeast province that even the Portuguese don’t know, unless as tourists.

Lage’s poetry has a strongly ethical dimension, and even a political one, if we consider it a task of politics to give back physical and human meaning to a territory whose various parts – both urban and rural – once constituted a self-respecting nation.

Having taken a degree in Portuguese and English, specialising in Portuguese and Brazilian literature, Rui Lage is now finishing his doctoral dissertation, entitled (with a wink at Milton) Farewell, Happy Fields: loss, mourning and disillusion in 20th-century Portuguese poetry, an understandable theme for a poet whose tone is clearly elegiac.

In addition to producing four volumes of poetry, a play and other texts, Lage has translated Pablo Neruda’s Crepusculario, an anthology of poems by Paul Auster and the novella III Seen III Said by Samuel Beckett.

He also founded and edited the literary review aguasfurtadas, whose most curious feature was the inclusion, in each issue, of a CD with unpublished works by young contemporary Portuguese composers. He is the co-author of a massive anthology of Portuguese lyric poetry (forthcoming), whose 2,000 pages will encompass some 300 poets, from the 12th century to the present.

Lage had his début as a poet in 2002, with the publication of Antigo e Primeiro (Ancient and First), a deliciously anachronistic book of sonnets. This was followed in 2004 by Berçário (Cradle), likewise off the track beaten by current Portuguese poetry. Revólver (Handgun) (2006) represents a qualitative advance over the previous books, and while it has more in common with the work of Lage’s poetic contemporaries, touching on diverse aspects of contemporary urban culture and citing films and books, he still retains some of his stylistic eccentricity.

And he continues to distinguish himself for what we might call his ‘ancient’ attention to the world of nature. We could almost speak of an “ethics of attention” in his poetry. In his latest book, Corvo (Raven) (2008), this approximation to the things of the earth is achieved by cutting a path through the thick undergrowth of literary rhetoric that has for so long obscured them.

Miguel Queirós (Translated by Richard Zenith)

Some of his poems

HANDGUN

Thanks for the memento, granddad:

you left me your handgun.

The trigger’s bent,

the barrel’s rusty,

and the job, with bullets of this caliber,

isn’t a sure thing

(you didn’t have to buy it from the gypsy

you used to drink with),

but no child will be able to spoil

the pessimism of this poem,

or arrive in time to avert its conclusion

– laughing, for instance, on the playground at school

THE FATE OF CLOTHES

In the laundry hamper

of any bedroom in the world

a mother would recognize them.

They endured the inroads of time,

the onslaughts of garbage,

the ravage of a first love,

the rips of a first quarrel,

stains from fruit,

the rose’s thorns,

the rose of love,

the bitter vomit of Saturday night,

the blood of a friend in the totalled car.

WHAT THE WIND HAS TO SAY

People pass by you, stretched out

in the morgue, as if you’d never

shed a tear or cracked a smile

or been afraid or lost a job

or returned home drenched by the rain

with blank ink on your fingers grasping

the newspaper.

As if you were mere wind

ruffling the flowers on garden walls,

bending the trees,

making the laundry wave on the balcony

and the plastic bag flit down the street:

a voice that says nothing

but speaks of all things in all places.

WONG KAR-WAI

As if I asked your

name, and an echo of me

answered

that you don’t exist

and yet I still felt

like dying on your doorstep.

As if in the back of a cab

you weren’t riding with me towards death

nor resting in my lap

your head,

lipstick glowing on your white face

and the blue of your eyes like a mirror

leaning across the night

or like a ship light asking for land

but passing by in the offing.

YOUNG WOMAN IN A COUNTRY CHAPEL

Seated in a pew near the wall,

dark and fertile like tilled earth,

her eyes nodding off in the incense

that grabbed her waist

and brought her the early

morning’s weariness.

Her black hair probing the cold

that came in through the door

someone left open,

with its view of the distant river

and the orange tree stripped

by the frost.

Death

on both sides of the door

giving entry

and suddenly the day

and then

nothing more.