Poems by Augusto dos Anjos

 [Translated by / Traduzido Por]: Felipe Lohan Pinheiro da Silva

☙Psychology of a Defeated One❧

İ, the son of the carbon and of the ammonia,
Monster of darkness and shining,
İ suffer, since the epigenesis of my infancy,
The bad influence of the zodiac signs.

Deeply hypochondriac,
This environment makes me sick...
İ feel a nausea analogous to a nausea coming to my mouth
That come out of the mouth of a cardiac.

About the Vermin – this worker of the ruins -
That eats the rotten blood from the slaughters
And wages war against the bulk of life,

He is stalking my eyes to chew them,
And will only let my hair alone,
¡ İn the inorganic coldness of the earth!

☙The Vermin-God❧

Universal factor of transformism.
Son of the teleologic matter,
Na superabundance or in the poverty,
Vermin – That’s your unknown baptism name.

Never performs the extreme unction
İn your dairy funeral work,
And lives cohabiting with the bacteria,
Free from the facade of the anthropomorphism.

Feasts with the rotten pulp of the sour drupes in the lunch,
Feasts with dropsical in the dinner, chews thin guts
And swells the hand of the new corpses...

¡ Ah! The rotten meats stays with him,
And in the inventory of the abundant matter
¡ Their children receive the biggest part!

☙The Bog❧

¡ You can see it, without pain, my fellows!...
But, to me, and İ listen to the Nature,
This Bog is the ultimate grave,
¡ Of all of the pretensions of greatness!

Unknown larvae of the giants
Over its surface of venom and mourning
That sleeps calmly the deep sleep
¡ Of the superorganisms that are yet infants!

İn its stagnation stirs a race,
That tragically is awaiting those who are passing
To wide open the door...

İ fell the anguish of this stirring race
Doomed to wait forever
¡ İn the crushed universe of the dead water!

☙HOMO İNFİMUS (Negligible man)❧

Man, unremarkable flesh, blind creature,
Unfortunate geographic reality,
The silent Universe repudiates you
¡ And your own mouth curses you!

The noumenon and the phenomenon, the alpha and the omega
Embitter you. Hostile hebdomads
Pass... Your heart becomes disaggregated,
¡ They make your eyes bleed, and, however, you laugh!

Unjustifiable fruit among the fruits,
Bunch of dark clay mixed with dung,
Unique earthly excrescence.

Let your happiness to the brutish beings,
Because, on the planet’s surface,
¡ You only have one right: – the right to weep!

☙The Thoughts of Destiny❧

Recife, Buarque de Macedo Bridge.
(Bridge in Recife – Capital of the province of Pernambuco – Brazil)
İ, while going to the Agra House,
(Probably a reference to a Funeral/Mortuary parlor/agency of the same name, also in Recife)
Haunted by my thin shadow,
¡ Was thinking about the destiny, and İ felt fear!

İn the austere high celestial dome the high phosphor
Of the stars were shining... The paving
Of Stony, of rigid asphalt, dark e glassy,
Mimicked the polishedness of a white skull.

İ remember well. İt was a long bridge,
And my long shadow covered the bridge,
Like a rhino skin
¡ Stretched for all of my life!

The night hatched the eggs of the animal
Addictions. From the coal of great darkness
Comes a damned air filled with disease
¡ On the general surface of the buildings!

Like a hungry horde of ferocious hounds,
Crossing a desert station,
Howling inside the self, with the mouth opened,
¡ The scared hound of the instincts!

İt’s like if, in the heart of the city,
Deeply luxurious and revolted,
Showing its flesh, a free beast
Released the shouted of the animality.

And going deeper in the dark thought,
İ saw, then, under the light of golden reflections,
The generating function of the sexes,
Making in the nights the men of the Future.

Free from microscopes and  scalpels,
They danced, parodying cynical soirees,
Billions of apollonic centrosomes
İn the promiscuous chamber of the vitellus.

But, obfuscating my eyeballs,
Preaching about and disseminating the disgusting color,
Thin fetuses, still in placenta,
¡ Gave me their rudimentary hands!

Showed me the unknowable apriorism
Of this egalitarian fatality,
That created the family that originated me
¡ From the den of that horrible factory!

The strongest atmospheric current
Buzzed. And, in the igneous crust of the Cross,
(Probably the Southern Cross)
İ thought to see the funeral candle holder
That will shine light me in the moment of the death.

No one understood my sob,
¡ Not even God!
The strong wing sent arrow-like blows
to the holes of my clothes,
And doses of the winter Russian ice.

The revenge of the astronomical worlds
Sent to the Earth an extraordinary knife,
Bound firmly by shellac
Over my anatomical elements.

¡ Ah! Certainly God chastised me!
For all around, like a defendant that confessed,
There was a judge that read my case
¡ And a special force that awaited me!

But the wind stopped to blow for some instants
Or, at least, the ignis sapiens of the Orcus
Was a pig and suppressed the air of my bent chest
İn a nucleus of substances that raise the embers.

İt’s possible that one day İ will become blind.
İn the heat of this lethal torrid zone,
The color of the blood is the color that impresses me
¡ And the one that most persecute me in this world!

That chromatic obsession makes me gaunt.
İ don’t know Why İ always remember
The stabbed chest of a child
And a piece of red guts.

İ would like any temporary thought
That entered in the cave that is my brain,
And until the very end, cut
The ill-lucked traits of my memory.

İn the barometric ascension of the calmness,
İ knew well, nauseous and counterfeit,
That a population of ill lungs
¡ Coughed without solution in my soul!

And the spit of that temporary cough
Like an acid waste,
İt wasn’t the spit of a single individual
Weakened by the precocious phthisis.

¡ No! Certainly it wasn’t my spit
İt was the rough and putrid expectoration
From the lung bronchi of a race
¡ That violated the laws of the Nature!

İt was a strange, ubiquitous cough,
Like the sound of a round pebble
Thrown in the apex of the bang,
¡ Like the slingers from the mountain!

And the salivation of that unfortunate ones
Swells, in my mouth, in such a manner,
That İ, to avoid to spit for all around,
¡ İ began to swallow, a bit from each time, the hemoptysis!

İn the high hallucination of my thoughts
The liquid microcosmos from the drop
Had the abundance of a wrinkled artery,
Destroyed by the aneurysms.

¡ The highest point of the bitterness came to me!
Two, three, four, five, six and seven
Times that İ stabbed myself with the switchblade,
¡ The hemoglobin came full of water!

Spit, whose flows irrigate my lips,
Under the form of small camândulas,
(Camândula is a kind of rosary with large beads)
Blessed be all of these glands,
¡ That, daily, release it!

Spit from an abyss to other abyss,
Releasing to the sky the smoke from a cigarette,
There’s more philosophy in this spit
¡ Than in all of the moral of the Christianity!

Because, if in the egg-shaped orb in that İ put my feet
İ didn’t let my evil spit,
İ would never express my extreme disgust
¡ That İ feel by the scoundrels of the world!

Ⅱ

İt was in the horror of this dreary night
That İ discovered, perhaps bigger than Vinci
(Maybe a reference to Leonardo da Vinci)
With the visual strength of the lynx,
¡ The lack of unity in the matter!

The clumsy skeleton,
Free from the sour foulness of the dead flesh,
Spinning, with the white curved shinbones,
¡ İn a dance of several shows!

All the evil Gods,
Shiva and Ahriman, duendes, Yin and trasgos,
(see the “Duende” entry. “Trasgo” is a spanish term for small monstrous beings, also called boggarts, imps, kobolds, etc.)
Mimicking the sound of people chocking,
Hit the entrance of the churches.

İn this moment of sublime monologues,
The party of the night thieves,
İn a search for a tavern to be down in the dumps,
Walk in the shadows thinking about crimes.

They committed the darkest acts,
And the moonlight, with the color of a jaundiced person,
İlluminated, like if it were laughing, shamelessly,
The red shirt of the incests.

Certainly no one was there to watch me,
But my lamp, close to my face, made me remember,
A suggestive eye, that was put there
On purpose, to hypnotize me!

So, after all, my eyes distinguished
From the unique miniature of a quotation mark,
The tiny anatomy of the dandruff,
¡ Embryos of worlds that never developed!

Because who don’t see there, in any street
With the fine clearness of a clear jet,
İn the Buddhist patience of a dog
¿¡ The embryonic soul that doesn’t carry on?!

¡ To be a dog!¡ Bark incomprehensible
Verbs! He wants to say us that he’s not pretending anything,
And the word wrap itself in the larynx,
¡ Only the bark are released!

Taking off the clothes of the rotting cumbersome form,
İn the dark dissolution that inverts everything,
Lets fall over the motionless belly
¡ The scavenger hunger of the fly!

¡ The animal souls! İ take it, İ distinguish it,
İ find a secret duel inside it
Between the desire for a complete vocabulary
¡ And the expression that didn’t came to the tongue!

İ spot it in quadrillions of living bodies,
İn the antiperistaltic shocks
That produces in the bulls and the horses
¡ The contraction of the instinctive shouts!

İt would come a time in that, from that dreary
Chaos of organic misshapen bodies
Would emerge huge brains,
¡ Feverish water bubbles, boiling!

İn this age when the sages don’t teach,
The hard stone, the clayish mounts
Would create sheaves of nervous chords
¡ And the neuroplasm of the ones who think!

¡ Pygmy souls! God subdues them, confine them
¡ To the imperfection! But here comes the Time, and defeats him,
And my dream grew in silence,
¡ Greater than the Carolingian epopee!

İt was the tragic revolt
Of the most elementary ontogenic specimens,
From the Foraminifera from the seas
to the lilliputian cattle of the polyps.

All the characters of the tragedy,
Tired of living in a peace that is good enough for a Buddha,
Looked like they asked with their speechless mouths
The ganglionary intermediary cell.

The plant that is burned by the igneous dogday,
And the more negligible inorganic things
Notorious encephalons, spinal chords
¡ İn the brave happiness of the avenging!

The protists and the obscure rigid collection
Of the poriferans and the infusorians
Received from their sensory organs
¡ The emotional triumph of joy!

And, although it’s so late,
That parasite mankind,
Like a lesser animal, afflicted, shouted,
¡ İn my coward personality!

But, wondering, alone, about my case
İ saw that, like an underground amniote
İt was through my skull
¡ The fateful intersection of the delay!

The genial idea of microzyme
That strangled my valiant thinking,
And İ bent all of my body like a frog
¡ That have a bothersome weight in the upper side!

İn the agonies of the delirium-tremens,
The drunken simpletons that stared at me,
Sterilized with the full mugs
¡ The prolific substance from the semens!

They shove their hands in the inner side of their throats,
And shaking intensely
Expeled, in the strong pain of the vomit,
Several yellow goos.

They gone to the lupanars to sleep
(“lupanar” is a brothel of Pompeii)
Where, in the glory of the concupiscence,
Deposited almost without conscience
Their last muscular forces.

That way the blastoderms were produced,
Where inside its repugnant receptacle
My examination saw the show
Of an idiotic offspring of simpleton.

Prostitution or any other name,
Because of you, although the Man accepts you,
The bad women will lack the milk
¡ And the fatherless boys starve!

¿ Why so many burials have to happen here?
Also, there in the "sugar cane mill", it’s a damned death...
There is the evil carbuncle that kills
¡ The infant society of the calves!

¡ So many girls doomed to the grave!
And after the rottenness of so many girls,
The pigs playing in the puddles
¡ Of the virginity confined in the mud!

Death, the very end of the last scene,
Diffuse form of the peaceful matter,
My philosophy abhors you,
¡ My great thoughts condemns you!

Before you, in the richest cathedrals,
They spin in vain their amulets,
¡Oh! Lady that is the owner of our skeletons
¡And of the skulls that you daily produces!

İ had a rare desire to have,
When İ was thinking in the ones that İ lost,
The unconsciousness of the waxen masks
¡ That we attach, with a string, in the face!

İt was a forbidden dream of submerge myself
İn the universal life, and, being completely submerged,
Make the Abstract part of the universe,
¡ My balanced and firm lair!

So, worse than the remorse of the murderer,
Echoed, that way, from the bottom of a cave,
İn an impressive internal voice,
The unique echo of my Fate:

Ⅲ

"¡ Man! Much as the İdeia disintegrates itself,
İn that persecutions that doesn’t stop,
Never, gaunt man, you will know the cause
¡ Of all of the happy phenomena!

İn vain, with the rough arduous hoe, you open
The sterile earth, and you bring the
hollow clear lamp, to examine (¡ Oh! ¡ Mad science!)
The content from the heinous tears.

Dark and endless is the place where you dive
Place in the Cosmos, where the pain that doesn’t stop
İs produced like the kerosene
¡ İn the humid holes from the coal!

Because, in order to examine the Pain,
İt was necessary that, not the way you are, in short,
Rather it would be better, to reflect in your fellows,
The mankind in suffering itself!

The universal complexity is what İt
Encompasses. And if, sometimes, it splits itself,
Even so, its wholeness is not represented
¡ İn the isolated quotient of the part!

¡Ah! The Pain doesn’t stop, like the immortal air!
From the nervous papillae that are in the touch senses
Comes and goes since the most ancient times
¡ To other ages that will still come!

Like the wound of insomnia
Destroys you, when you give all of your Fiery İdea
The laborious study on the nymphaea
¡ And on the other dicotyledons plants!

The very clear water and the dreary ember
That splashes from the stripped rough flame
The molecular composition of the myrrh,
The symbolic lamb from the Easter;

The revolted choleras that roar
İnside the civilized man, and are bound to him
Like the bracelets sold by the traveling merchants
The persistent adherence of the rust;

The ferocious orb that is produced
By thick sour gorses; the rebellion that lets the men
(“gorse” is a plant from the Ulex europaeus species)
Fallen in the ground, without a shroud,
İn the concrete bloodbath from the massacres;

And the whips that are very bloodthirsty
For the hemorrhage; The thickest nodes,
The ignoble flattening of the heads,
That degrades the Hottentots peoples;

The Love and the Hunger, the avenging beast that enters
İn the lair, waiting for the victim to do it too,
- Everything that is conceived inside the maternal womb
The physiological cause of the disgust;

The eyelids that become swollen by the nightwatch,
The young birds who lost their wing,
The oven that is not being used in a house,
Where the household head died;

The private train that drags a corpse
İn a dreary manner by the railroad,
The crystallization of the earthly mass,
The fabric wears out;

The arbitrary water that carries and eats
The fissured thick stems; The dark ugly forms
Of the arachnids and the centipedes,
The Will O’ Wisp that illuminate the bones;

The Flammivomous projections that obfuscate,
Like a Rembrandtesque brushstroke,
The sensation that a fresh curd
Transmits to the nervous hands of those who seeks it;

The antagonism between Typhon and Osiris,
The oppressed great man and the little man
The fake Moon of the Moondog,
The meteoric deception of the rainbow;

The earthquakes that, shaking the ground,
Remember gunpowder storage exploding,
The rotation of the fluids producing
The geologic depression of the poles;

The reproduction instinct, the legitimate urge
From the soul, facing triumphantly high risks,
The oath of the elder warriors
Putting the hands in the glands of the victim;

The fluctuations that the human psychoplasm
Suffers from the mystic mania,
The heavy characteristic oppression
From the ten minutes of an asthma attack;

And, (albeit you will mutter against this)
The funeral function of the rope
That drags and later fatten the cattle,
To the wretched death in the slaughterhouses...

Everything that is kept in the earthly abyss,
Encompasses the complication of this sound,
Fought between the human the human pride in dragon form,
¡ And the inorganic forces from the earth!

¡ For discovering all of this, you become tired in vain!
The germ of this active force is unknown,
That conceives, in each passive cell,
¡ The heterogeneity of the change!

Poet, evil fetus, raised drinking
A sour milk, disgusting carnivore,
Conceived in the monstrous atavism
İn the disordered soul of the dead ones;

The last of the lesser creatures
Controlled by selfish atoms,
Your foot kills the abundance the paths
¡ And sterilize the wombs that give birth!


The rough evil that you brings to everything around you,
İt’s analogous to the thing that, dark and in its due time,
Brings the avid nocturnal phyllostomidae,
¡ To the blood of the voracious mammals!


¡ Ah! Much as you work, with all the strength of your spirit
To the perfection of the existing beings,
You will show your dental caries
¡ İn the dreary anatomy of the details!

The Space – this Spencerian abstraction
That encompasses the relations of coexistence
And That’s all! İt’s not dependent
Of the mortal spinal cords of the human species!

The radiant ellipses traced by the stars,
And the fake ones present themselves to the viewer
They’re luminous truths watched by the man
Who, however, aren’t able to understand them.

İn vain, with the corrupted hand, asks for other Æther
That this hand, that have skeleton-like phalanges,
İnside this water that you see,
¡ Also verifies the Archimedes principle!

The ferocious fatigue that is in you
Will left this dreadful mark on you,
That, in the bodies swollen because of the anasarca,
¡ Left the fingers of anyone!

And also you will not have after all of your work
The merciful friendly towel,
That touch the ill man in the belly
¡ And touches, at night, the pustules from the pest!

When the calm moment comes,
You will be dragged, in a row,
Like an unconscious wooden log
¡ İn the organic evolution of the clay!

A single day compared to a millennia
That will be, then, your last Gospel...
İt’s the evolution from the new to the old
¡ And from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous!

¡ Goodbye! Stay there, rotting
With your large belly!... ¡ You are dust, and in vain is vibrating!
The raven that eats your carrion
Will a feel bitter taste!”

Ⅳ

The voice become silent. İt was a dreary night.
And the chins, showing damned trismus,
İ pulled my uncombed hair
¡ Like king Lear, amidst the forest!

Cursed, with vehement apostrophes,
İn the stentor of a thousand insurgent tongues,
The conventionalism of the Pandects
(Probably a reference to a compiled codice of roman Laws)
¡ And the text of the recent bad codices!

My tormented imagination
Conceived absurd ideas... Like a couple of demons,
Make me look in the eyes of the corpses
That have a greenish sclera.

The chlorophyll of the farms dried.
Like the sharps of a dirge
The complaint from the pain of the crowds
Came to my vocal chords.

The upside-down world resigned itself
İn the bulk of his own work...
The gravity was concept that failed,
¡ The spectral analysis lied!

The Estate, the Association, the Cities
Were dead. From de whole world
Only remained a dying device
And a teleology without standards.

İ wanted to run, go to Hell,
So that, in the psyche in the occult game,
All the impressions from the outer world
¡ Died by the inhalation of the fire’s smoke!

But the Earth denied me the balance...
İn the Nature, a woman in black
Sang, watching the trees without fruit.
¡ Song of the whore of the deception!