Olaf Bilac was a Brazilian poet, essayist and journalist who was born in Rio de Janeiro a day like today in 1865. I remember or discover it with this selection of poems in his memory.
Olaf Bilac
From a very young age he dedicated himself to journalism and founded the magazines A cicada y Quite. He is considered one of the most important poets of his country along with Alberto de Oliveira and Raimundo Correia. First published in 1888. It was a book entitled Poetry which was followed by chronicles, lectures and children's and educational works. He also held public office and was one of the founders of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His posthumous work was Afternoon and was published in 1919.
poems
Exile
You do not love me anymore? Good! I will leave exiled
from my first love to another love that I imagine ...
Goodbye loving flesh, divine raptor
of my dreams, goodbye beautiful adored body!
In you, as in a valley, I fell asleep drunk
in a dream of love in the middle of the road;
I want to give you my last pilgrim kiss
like someone who leaves the homeland, exiled.
Farewell, fragrant body, homeland of my enchantment,
nest of soft feathers from my first idyll,
garden, in which made flowers, my first kiss sprouted!
Bye! That other love has to make me so bitter,
like bread eaten far away, in exile,
kneaded with ice and moistened with tears.
Vanity
Blind, feverish, insomniac, with nervous stubbornness,
the artist polishes the marble of the longed-for stanza:
want it throbbing, want it excited,
he wants to infuse the marble with a tremor of agony.
He triumphs gallantly in the brave way;
fight, shine, and the work shines finished:
- «World that with my hands I plucked out of nowhere!
Daughter of my work! -It shines in the light of day.
«Filled with my anguish and burning in my fever,
you were the rough stone; I gave you deep shine
and iricé your facets with goldsmith care.
I can hope, because you live, a serene death ».
And imagine that exhausted he will roll at the foot of the world,
and, oh vanity, succumbs next to a grain of sand.
new life
If with the same burning eyes,
you invite me to the same ancient joy,
kill the memory of the hours gone
in which the two of us live apart.
And don't talk to me about lost tears
do not blame me for dissipated kisses;
a hundred thousand lives fit in a life,
like a hundred thousand sins in a heart.
Love you! The flame of love, stronger
revives. Forget my past, crazy!
What does it matter how long I lived without seeing you
if I still love you, after so many loves,
and if I still have, in my eyes and in my mouth,
new sources of kisses and tears!
To the bells
Tower bells, ring out loud!
The earth our longing for infinity does not satisfy,
we want the conquest of a world in which things
be eternal in a spring of grace.
From here, from the mud of these tedious beaches
as far as the sapphire of the heavens is spaced,
carry in your voices our crying voices
and the ancient cry of the land in disgrace.
In festive chimes, in doubles of bitterness,
in fights of anguish, all that we suffer
take him to the impassive solitude of the height.
And oh bells! tell them in supreme cries,
our pain to those stars in which we were born,
our hope to those stars where we will go!
Portuguese language
The last flower of Lazio, uncultivated and beautiful,
You are, at the same time, splendor and grave:
Native gold, that in impure denim
The rough mine among the navigation gravels ...
I love you like this, unknown and dark,
High-noise tub, single lyre,
That you have the horn and the whistle of the procela
And the attraction of longing and tenderness!
I love your savagery and your scent
Of virgin forests and wide ocean!
I love you, oh rude and painful tongue,
In which of the motherly voice did I hear: "My son!"
And in which Camões wept, in bitter exile,
Luckless genius and dull love!