B de Biografia (IV)

Whenever I think of you, you are dancing lightly in a whirl of disheveled cinnamon, oh lingering scent, aerial disorder, but memory is hasty, blood is hasty inside, and before I think, I shake, and then I shake, through the core the dread of a transcendent beauty grows, the heart runs through rapid illuminations, it’s a sequential child on the music scores, thus I write a simultaneous nation, your dress vanishes in the breath, meanwhile revelation is heralded through fear, you bend like the villages devoured by the moon, later whenever I think of you, you are holding a scripted kerchief in both your hands, and your haste relents close to the mirrors, you expand, thus, in slow engraving, you are a forest of visible silence, whenever I think I think always in reverse from the end, you stand more and more at your self-beginning, then I see that in this place sits my eternal birth, when you dance, there’s a body encircling the encircled whiteness or yet again something criminal between carefulness and space, along the pure lines of loneliness the brain burns as burns the wind, behind you night’s murderous images rise – the stars: subversion of the night, whenever I think of you I dance till the resurrection of time.

 

Herberto Helder
 in Vocação Animal

[Translated by Ana Hudson, 2011]

* Lembro-me de ter dezassete anos, o professor ler este texto na 1ª aula de uma escola nova, entre rostos novos e medos antigos, e de só conseguir pensar em como era maravilhosa a expressão "num clima de canela despenteada". Essa beatitude dura até hoje.