Jorge de Sena -Quem a tem… Trans. by George Monteiro “Those Who Have It”

QUEM A TEM…

Não hei-de morrer sem saber
qual a cor da liberdade.
eu não posso senão ser
desta terra em que nasci.
embora ao mundo pertença

E sempre a verdade vença,
qual será ser livre aqui,
não hei-de morrer sem saber.
trocaram tudo em maldade,
é quase um crime viver.

Mas embora escondam tudo
e me queiram cego e mudo,
não hei-de morrer sem saber
qual a cor da liberdade.

Those Who Have It

I will not die without knowing
the color of freedom.

I cannot be other than
of this land of my birth.
While belonging to the world,
and since truth will always out,
what it will be like to be free here
I will not die without knowing.

So evilly has everything been changed.
It is almost a crime to live.
But even though they hide everything
And would have me blind and dumb,
I shall not die without knowing
The color of freedom.

[translation by George Monteiro;
published in Jorge de Sena, In Crete
With the Minotaur and Other Poems
(Providence: Gávea-Brown, 1980)]

George Monteiro is a lifelong student and teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, contributing to the scholarship on numerous writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and Bob Dylan. His latest book is Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed (McFarland, 2012).

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