(Antonio Tabucchi 1943 – 2012)

TWO FOR THE BOOKS

1.       Too good to be true?

          Not at all.  Italians still

          shop at the tabacchi for

          pens, bus tickets, stamps,

          for cigarettes and other

          smokes when they fear

          they are running out.      

          Once, in Paris (so goes

          the story) a young student

          locked in on a word so very

          like his own name in the title

          of a poem versified from a

          language he did not yet know.

          The rest? The rest is history.

2.        Cruz na porta da tabacaria!

          (Grant me this rhetorical flourish,

          for no longer will a family nail a

          cross to a door to signal a death.)

          No matter. Gone now is the teller of

          the vagarious story, a man of words

          who (for ever and a day) espoused

          a language, a country, and a poet.

April 2012

George Monteiro is Professor Emeritus of English and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University, and he continues as Adjunct Professor of Portuguese Studies at the same university.  He served as Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Brazil–Sao Paulo and Bahia–Ecuador and Argentina; and as Visiting Professor in UFMG in Belo Horizonte.  In 2007 he served as Helio and Amelia Pedroso / Luso-American Foundation Professor of Portuguese, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  Among his recent books are Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, The Presence of Pessoa, The Presence of Camões, and Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop and Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Among his translations are  Iberian Poems by Miguel Torga, A Man Smiles at Death with Half a Face by José Rodrigues Miguéis, Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems by Fernando Pessoa, and In Crete, with the Minotaur, and Other Poems by Jorge de Sena.  He has also published two collections of poems, The Coffee Exchange and Double Weaver’s Knot. 

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