Marianne Moore, refusing a pen,
writes her stanzas
with a cutting edge,
a common jackknife or scalpel.
She discovered that the clear side
of things is the obverse,
and therefore dissects them
to read more honest texts.
She enters with her right hand
and scalpel pen
to compose, on leaving,
a neatly stitched poem.
And since the scar is clean,
sparse and straight,
more than the surgeon
one admires the surgical blade.
Francis Ponge, also a surgeon,
uses a different technique, turning
in his fingers the things he operates
and turning himself around them.
He handles them with all ten
thousand fingers of language;
his is not a straight scalpel
but one with many branches.
With it he so wraps up
the thing, he almost winds it
se perde, enovelado nela.
E no instante em que até parece
quejá não a penetra,
êle entra sem cortar:
saltou por descuidada fresta.
Miró sentia a mão direita
demasiado sábia
e que de saber tanto
já não podia inventar nada.
Quis então que desaprendesse
o muito que aprendera,
a fim de reencontrar
a linha ainda fresca da esquerda.
Pois que ela não pôde, êle pôs-se
a desenhar com esta
até que, se operando,
no braço direito êle a enxerta.
A esquerda (se não se é canhoto)
é mão sem habilidade:
reaprende a cada linha,
cada instante, a recomeçar-se.
Mondrian, também, da mão direita
andava desgostado;
não por ser ela sábia:
porque, sendo sábia, era fácil.
himself, wound up inside it.
And just when it would seem
he can no longer penetrate,
he enters without cutting,
through a crack that went unseen.
Miró felt that his right hand
was too intelligent
and that knowing so much
it could no longer invent.
He wanted it to unlearn
all it had learned
so as to recover
his left hand’s still fresh curve.
Since this was impossible, he began
to draw with the left hand,
attaching it at last
to his right arm by a graft.
The left hand (unless one is left-
handed) lacks ability;
every line is a relearning,
every instance a new beginning.
Mondrian regarded his right hand
with just as much distrust,
not for being intelligent,
but because it was easy as such.
queria-a mais honesta
e por isso enxertou
outras mais sábias dentro dela.
Fêz-se enxertar réguas, esquadros
e outros utensílios
para obrigar a mão
a abandonar todo improviso.
Assim foi que êle, à mão direita,
impôs tal disciplina:
fazer o que sabia
como se o aprendesse ainda.
he wanted it to be truer.
So he grafted other
more intelligent ones into it.
He grafted rulers, T-squares
and other instruments
that forced his hand
to abandon all impulsiveness.
Thus he imposed on his right hand
this discipline:
to do what it knew
as if it were still learning.
Translated by Richard Zenith