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Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person: A Translation
A temporary move to Toronto in the winter of 2000, a twisted ankle, an empty house—all inspired Mouré as she read Alberto Caeiro and Fernando Pessoa's classic long poem O Guardador de Rebanhos. For fun, she started to translate, altering tones and vocabularies. From the Portuguese countryside and roaming sheep of 1914, a 21st century Toronto emerged, its neighborhoods still echoing the 1950s, their dips and hollows, hordes of wild cats, paved creeks. Her poem became a translation, the jubilant and irrepressible vigil of a fervent person. "Suddenly," says Mouré impishly, "I had found my master." Caeiro's sheep were his thoughts and his thoughts, he claimed, were all sensations. Mouré's sheep are stray cats and from her place in Caeiro's poetry, she creates a woman alive in an urban world where the rural has not vanished, where the archaic suffuses us even when we do not beckon it, and yet the present tense floods us fully. In this ecstatic long poem of hope and creeks and cats and rain, Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person catches Governor General's Award-winner Erin Mouré at her most playful and ingenuous—and wearing her Galician name.
144 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2001
3 people are currently reading
53 people want to read
About the author
Erín Moure
77 books35 followersErín Moure is a transborder poet and translator of poetry and poetics. In Canada, the USA, and the UK (variously), she has published seventeen books of poetry, and several books of prose including a memoir and a book of short takes on translation. Her most recent book is Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (ed. Shannon Maguire, Wesleyan 2017). She is the translator or co-translator of seventeen books of poetry and three books of non-fiction (biopoetics) from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese into English. Her translation of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat, 2017) was a finalist for a 2018 Best Translated Book Award. She holds two honorary doctorates for her contributions to poetry and translation, from Brandon University in Canada and the Universidade de Vigo in Spain. She lives in Montreal.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 20, 2022
At sunset, bending out the window
Knowing, sidelong, fields in the avenues
My eyes burn anyhow bu I don't care, I'm still reading
that Book by Erin Mouré.
How she makes me ache! She was a creek's companion
lost south of St. Clair, a walking prisoner in the city's freedom.
But the way she saw houses,
And the way she stopped short to look in the avenues,
And gave herself to things, in the same way
You'd gaze at trees,
And lift eyes down Vaughan Road to see where you're headed,
And notice small crocuses pulse in the ravine.
She never speaks to that ache of sadness,
Never admits it,
Just walks downtown as if in a creek bed catching minnows.
* * *
Thinking about God is just contumacious,
Because none of us are meant to know what face God has
And, as such, we're godless...
Let's calm down here, simply,
Like Garrison Creek and the trees above No Frills,
And we'll feel loved entirely, feel
Beautiful as trees looking for creeks,
Given - as gifts - the greenitude of this springtime,
the green harbour,
the parkign lot
And a river to hold to when we've done!...
* * *
Some woman out there has a piano
It's pleasant bu can't match the current of rivers
Can't beat the murmurs composed by the trees
Why would anyone have a piano?
What if you want to play a show tune no one likes?
If you have ears at all
you can go outside instead and lie in the lawn,
the dirty grey cat will come to visit
and be scared of you,
and you can go to the manhole cover and hear the creek run.
* * *
What I'd give to be the sidewalk on Winnett
So that people without cars could trudge over me...
What I'd give to be the creek under the road at No Frills
So that people could sense water on the way to the laundromat
What I'd give to be the scrub poplars at the parking lot of No Frills
For they've just sky above and water below them
Well, and an ugly parking lot...
What I'd give for a job at the mall, then just sit on my ass
So they'd berate me for being slow, bu admire my stamina...
All this I'd rather, than pass through my life
Looking back, with such heartache, desfeita...
* * *
That boy Virgil's out blowing soap bubbles again
into the windy avenue,
A pure philosophy of translucination, out of a straw!
Clear, useless and transitory as Nature,
Greeting the eye as coisas do.
They are what they are
With round and aerial precision
And no one, not even Virgil with his dark curled head,
it's cold out today - where's his sheep coat? - he'll catch a chill,
Pretends they're more than they appear to be.
Some can't be seen in the lazing light;
They are like a passing breeze that ruffled the flowers
So that we only know its passage
Because some chose or coisa grows lighter in us
And accepts all, oh ache, with rising clarity.
* * *
Only Nature is divine, and she's not divine...
That I talk of her as of a being
Just means I'm stuck with human language
Which gives coisas personalities,
and imposes names on choses.
But chose or coisa have no name or personality
and no passport,
They exist, and the sky is vast and earth rolls out forever,
and our heart is fist-size...
You can bet I'm lucky for all I don't know
I fall into happiness like one who knows there is a sun!
* * *
What I say and write are not always commensurate.
I change, bu not much.
The colour of flowers is different in sunlight
than it is when clouds blow in
Or at night's entry
When flowers are the colour of shadow.
But those with good eyes see they are the same flowers.
A such, when I seem incommensurate with myself
Pay attention:
If I'd shifted to the right,
I've turned against leftward
But I'm always I, eu, standing upright on two feet -
The same always, thanks to sky and earth
And to my eyes and ears at the ready
And to my soul'd clear simplicity, which I call soul...
* * *
Dismal are the flowers kept in prissy gardens.
Are they afraid of the police?
But they're so good that they bloom identically
And have the same venerable smile
With which they caught the eye of the first child
Who saw them open petals and touched them, lightly,
to see if they spoke...
* * *
Like a huge blotch of sullied fire
The gone sun hands in the last of clouds.
A vague whistle far off touches the first calm of evening.
It must be a train south of Davenport.
At that moment I'm touched with a vague wistfulness
And a vague lulled desire
That flickers and amends.
Just as, at times, at the riverbank's edge
Bubbles of water form
Are born and set loose
Not ever meaning.
"Bubbles of water." Just this,
Born, set loose.
* * *
A butterfly just wobbled in front of me
And I'm struck by the realization
That butterflies have neither colour nor motion
And flowers don't have fragrance or colour.
Colour has to steal colour in the wins of the butterfly,
And in the butterfly's zigzag, movement is what moves.
Scent? It's what's scented in the scent of a flower
A butterfly is scarcely a butterfly.
Whoosh.
And a flower has a tenuous grip on bloom.
* * *
I go back inside and shut the window
My cat's already gone to bed on the stair
And my voice says goodnight happily.
I hope my life will hearten me always:
A day lush with sun, or with rain's soft stutter,
Or stormy like the world is trying hard to end.
A gentle afternoon with the buzz of people
Seized intently from an open window
The last glance so friendly it assuages the trees,
And then closing the window, by the lamp now,
not reading anything, thinking of nothing, not yet sleeping
I feel life course through me like Garrison Creek
under the road,
And far off, the silence so huge, like a god,
or a neighbour in a lawnchair after dusk, sleeping.
Knowing, sidelong, fields in the avenues
My eyes burn anyhow bu I don't care, I'm still reading
that Book by Erin Mouré.
How she makes me ache! She was a creek's companion
lost south of St. Clair, a walking prisoner in the city's freedom.
But the way she saw houses,
And the way she stopped short to look in the avenues,
And gave herself to things, in the same way
You'd gaze at trees,
And lift eyes down Vaughan Road to see where you're headed,
And notice small crocuses pulse in the ravine.
She never speaks to that ache of sadness,
Never admits it,
Just walks downtown as if in a creek bed catching minnows.
- III. At sunset, bending out the window, pg. 9
* * *
Thinking about God is just contumacious,
Because none of us are meant to know what face God has
And, as such, we're godless...
Let's calm down here, simply,
Like Garrison Creek and the trees above No Frills,
And we'll feel loved entirely, feel
Beautiful as trees looking for creeks,
Given - as gifts - the greenitude of this springtime,
the green harbour,
the parkign lot
And a river to hold to when we've done!...
- VI. Just thinking about God is disobeying God, pg. 21
* * *
Some woman out there has a piano
It's pleasant bu can't match the current of rivers
Can't beat the murmurs composed by the trees
Why would anyone have a piano?
What if you want to play a show tune no one likes?
If you have ears at all
you can go outside instead and lie in the lawn,
the dirty grey cat will come to visit
and be scared of you,
and you can go to the manhole cover and hear the creek run.
- XI. Some woman out there has a piano, pg. 41
* * *
What I'd give to be the sidewalk on Winnett
So that people without cars could trudge over me...
What I'd give to be the creek under the road at No Frills
So that people could sense water on the way to the laundromat
What I'd give to be the scrub poplars at the parking lot of No Frills
For they've just sky above and water below them
Well, and an ugly parking lot...
What I'd give for a job at the mall, then just sit on my ass
So they'd berate me for being slow, bu admire my stamina...
All this I'd rather, than pass through my life
Looking back, with such heartache, desfeita...
- XVIII. What I'd give to be the sidewalk on Winnett, pg. 55
* * *
That boy Virgil's out blowing soap bubbles again
into the windy avenue,
A pure philosophy of translucination, out of a straw!
Clear, useless and transitory as Nature,
Greeting the eye as coisas do.
They are what they are
With round and aerial precision
And no one, not even Virgil with his dark curled head,
it's cold out today - where's his sheep coat? - he'll catch a chill,
Pretends they're more than they appear to be.
Some can't be seen in the lazing light;
They are like a passing breeze that ruffled the flowers
So that we only know its passage
Because some chose or coisa grows lighter in us
And accepts all, oh ache, with rising clarity.
- XXV. Those soap bubbles blown by the boy Virgin, pg. 69
* * *
Only Nature is divine, and she's not divine...
That I talk of her as of a being
Just means I'm stuck with human language
Which gives coisas personalities,
and imposes names on choses.
But chose or coisa have no name or personality
and no passport,
They exist, and the sky is vast and earth rolls out forever,
and our heart is fist-size...
You can bet I'm lucky for all I don't know
I fall into happiness like one who knows there is a sun!
- XXVII. Only Nature is divine, and she's a girl, pg. 73
* * *
What I say and write are not always commensurate.
I change, bu not much.
The colour of flowers is different in sunlight
than it is when clouds blow in
Or at night's entry
When flowers are the colour of shadow.
But those with good eyes see they are the same flowers.
A such, when I seem incommensurate with myself
Pay attention:
If I'd shifted to the right,
I've turned against leftward
But I'm always I, eu, standing upright on two feet -
The same always, thanks to sky and earth
And to my eyes and ears at the ready
And to my soul'd clear simplicity, which I call soul...
- XXIX. What I say and write are no always equal, pg. 77
* * *
Dismal are the flowers kept in prissy gardens.
Are they afraid of the police?
But they're so good that they bloom identically
And have the same venerable smile
With which they caught the eye of the first child
Who saw them open petals and touched them, lightly,
to see if they spoke...
- XXXIII. Dismal are the flowers kept in prissy gardens, pg. 87
* * *
Like a huge blotch of sullied fire
The gone sun hands in the last of clouds.
A vague whistle far off touches the first calm of evening.
It must be a train south of Davenport.
At that moment I'm touched with a vague wistfulness
And a vague lulled desire
That flickers and amends.
Just as, at times, at the riverbank's edge
Bubbles of water form
Are born and set loose
Not ever meaning.
"Bubbles of water." Just this,
Born, set loose.
- XXXVII. Like a huge blotch of sullied fire, pg. 95
* * *
A butterfly just wobbled in front of me
And I'm struck by the realization
That butterflies have neither colour nor motion
And flowers don't have fragrance or colour.
Colour has to steal colour in the wins of the butterfly,
And in the butterfly's zigzag, movement is what moves.
Scent? It's what's scented in the scent of a flower
A butterfly is scarcely a butterfly.
Whoosh.
And a flower has a tenuous grip on bloom.
- XL. A butterfly just winged in front of me, pg. 101
* * *
I go back inside and shut the window
My cat's already gone to bed on the stair
And my voice says goodnight happily.
I hope my life will hearten me always:
A day lush with sun, or with rain's soft stutter,
Or stormy like the world is trying hard to end.
A gentle afternoon with the buzz of people
Seized intently from an open window
The last glance so friendly it assuages the trees,
And then closing the window, by the lamp now,
not reading anything, thinking of nothing, not yet sleeping
I feel life course through me like Garrison Creek
under the road,
And far off, the silence so huge, like a god,
or a neighbour in a lawnchair after dusk, sleeping.
- XLIX. I go back inside and shut the window, pg. 121
May 6, 2017
One of several reasons I have long wanted to learn Portuguese is Fernando Pessoa, this time in one of his many heteronyms as Alberto Caeiro. (The other reasons: fado, forró.) On this particular outing with Portuguese, it was from yet another filmic reference in Manoel de Oliveira's Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura [Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl] (2009) [an earlier encounter being from a Quebec film]. Which brought me then to Erín Moure's Toronto-anchored adaptive translation into English (mostly). Erín's is quite a success for bringing out the original Portuguese's what I might call "apophatic epistemology" (of coisas and choses) for a poet. This is especially relevant to me at the moment in my continued reading of Bruno Latour's (ed) of Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. The collection/translation gives as much edge to Moure's personal undertaking for herself and perhaps on behalf of the citizens of the city of Toronto, but to which purpose it does not matter really, for it, the coisa, is now simply there, much like how the river is no longer there, nor the old season, nor the old love, which just is or are, beyond the provocations of a poetic line or hammer and chisel on gyprock. Certainly more readers should be exposed to Fernando Pessoa, and Erín Moure's crack at it is faithful and rewarding and also, as the one-time mayor of this city has been known to smoke it, yes, not too recalcitrant in dispelling the need for public libraries, which is a thing, a coisa, a chose as firm as a muddy ravine in spring. This book is now due to return to the library for the next reader.
November 19, 2022
Playful and deep, feminine, mature yet silly trans(e)lation. It’s such an interesting project. It’s like a post modern version of translation? Muire is acknowledging the impossibility of literal translation so she throws out the rule book and instead has a conversation with Pessoa. Poetry needs more joyful innovative creations like this one!! Love
Read
May 24, 2011I'm very reluctant to "rate" books of poetry as I am really not qualified to do more than say whether I liked it or not! Did I like this book of poetry? Yes. "Things are things and have no meaning" is the central theme of this, I'd say, and quite a feat to convey that in a book of poetry!
Read
May 16, 2009I like this woman
February 5, 2010
Incredibly clever and fun.
June 20, 2011
Interesting. I won this book so didn't really realize what it was until I started digging in . I thought it was an actual translation. THis was much better...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews