the
bedroom’, typical of his messages – brief, a calculation stripped down to
the bone, and even written in a forged schoolboy’s scrawl – but then I
immediately forgot the simulated casualness of the message and entered the living room,
unhurriedly taking stock of whathe’d left scattered across the
floor, the two cushions that a little earlier would have served as his pillow, the
wrought-iron lamp beside them, the thermos flask on the stool, an ashtray within
arm’s reach, and another reference work splayed open on the floor, with its spine
facing upwards and clearly stating the contents of the tome, not to forget his beaten-up
sandals of raw leather, carelessly discarded like those of a child, shards isolated from
each other which I was reluctantly piecing together into a mosaic as I stood there for a
moment, weighing the density of the quiet house, ‘my cell’, according to the
curt comment he had made one day, mixing in this stoicism both monastic and worldly
things, until I moved through these fragments to the other side of the room and now I
only had to cross the hall to reach his bedroom, which floated lazily in the calm light
of a candle: lying on his side with his head almost touching his tucked-up knees, he
slept, and it wasn’t the first time that he had faked sleeping like a little boy,
and nor would it be the first time that I would attend to his whims, because a virulent,
vertiginous tenderness took hold of me, so sudden and unexpected that I could barely
contain the impulse to open myself completely and prematurely to welcome back that
enormous foetus.
Notes
1 . An allusion to a Fernando Pessoa poem, well known in the
Portuguese-speaking world and much translated into English. In Richard Zenith’s
translation
Autopsychography
(Penguin Classics), the referenced stanza
reads:
The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
2 . The section from ‘let cities fall’ to ‘dying
in the distance’ quotes a poem Fernando Pessoa wrote as Ricardo Reis, an ode about
chess players whose first-line title in Portuguese is ‘
Ouvi contar que
outrora, quando a Pérsia
’. The narrator of
A Cup of Rage
starts quoting in the seventh stanza of the poem, then jumps back to the start and end
of the fifth stanza for the lines from ‘when the ivory king’s in
danger’ to ‘dying in the distance’.
In Nassar’s Portuguese, the narrator quotes the poem
word for word, except for the lack of initial capitals and line breaks, until he says
‘
nada pesa
’ (it doesn’t at all weigh on you) instead of
the poem’s ‘
pouca pesa
’ (it hardly weighs on you), perhaps a
natural alteration for a narrator who has none of Pessoa’s understatement.
3 . Brazilian football crowds shout ‘
bicha
’,
i.e. ‘queer’, at referees they don’t like.
PENGUIN BOOKS
UK | Canada | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India |
South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of
companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com .
First published as
Um Copo de Cólera
in
1978
First published in this translation by Penguin Classics 2015
Text copyright © Raduan Nassar, 1978
Translation
copyright © Stefan Tobler, 2015
The moral rights of the author and translator have been
asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-39681-1
bedroom’, typical of his messages – brief, a calculation stripped down to
the bone, and even written in a forged schoolboy’s scrawl – but then I
immediately forgot the simulated casualness of the message and entered the living room,
unhurriedly taking stock of whathe’d left scattered across the
floor, the two cushions that a little earlier would have served as his pillow, the
wrought-iron lamp beside them, the thermos flask on the stool, an ashtray within
arm’s reach, and another reference work splayed open on the floor, with its spine
facing upwards and clearly stating the contents of the tome, not to forget his beaten-up
sandals of raw leather, carelessly discarded like those of a child, shards isolated from
each other which I was reluctantly piecing together into a mosaic as I stood there for a
moment, weighing the density of the quiet house, ‘my cell’, according to the
curt comment he had made one day, mixing in this stoicism both monastic and worldly
things, until I moved through these fragments to the other side of the room and now I
only had to cross the hall to reach his bedroom, which floated lazily in the calm light
of a candle: lying on his side with his head almost touching his tucked-up knees, he
slept, and it wasn’t the first time that he had faked sleeping like a little boy,
and nor would it be the first time that I would attend to his whims, because a virulent,
vertiginous tenderness took hold of me, so sudden and unexpected that I could barely
contain the impulse to open myself completely and prematurely to welcome back that
enormous foetus.
Notes
1 . An allusion to a Fernando Pessoa poem, well known in the
Portuguese-speaking world and much translated into English. In Richard Zenith’s
translation
Autopsychography
(Penguin Classics), the referenced stanza
reads:
The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
2 . The section from ‘let cities fall’ to ‘dying
in the distance’ quotes a poem Fernando Pessoa wrote as Ricardo Reis, an ode about
chess players whose first-line title in Portuguese is ‘
Ouvi contar que
outrora, quando a Pérsia
’. The narrator of
A Cup of Rage
starts quoting in the seventh stanza of the poem, then jumps back to the start and end
of the fifth stanza for the lines from ‘when the ivory king’s in
danger’ to ‘dying in the distance’.
In Nassar’s Portuguese, the narrator quotes the poem
word for word, except for the lack of initial capitals and line breaks, until he says
‘
nada pesa
’ (it doesn’t at all weigh on you) instead of
the poem’s ‘
pouca pesa
’ (it hardly weighs on you), perhaps a
natural alteration for a narrator who has none of Pessoa’s understatement.
3 . Brazilian football crowds shout ‘
bicha
’,
i.e. ‘queer’, at referees they don’t like.
PENGUIN BOOKS
UK | Canada | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India |
South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of
companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com .
First published as
Um Copo de Cólera
in
1978
First published in this translation by Penguin Classics 2015
Text copyright © Raduan Nassar, 1978
Translation
copyright © Stefan Tobler, 2015
The moral rights of the author and translator have been
asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-39681-1
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