menina e moca menina and moca menina
and moça
menina e moça
Menina e Moça
(translation of selected passages)
The first page number refers to the Ribeiro edition, and the second to the
corresponding passage in the French translation. My selection here mostly is
from passages illustrating the book's dark feminism, together with the theme of "mudança"
or transformation/ change; I end up slighting its psychological and storytelling
aspects. It's a short book and these passages represent about 3% of the total.
Corrections are
welcome. (At g mail dot com I am emersonj.) It's
rather a
disgrace that this book is still not translated into English after more than 450
years; volunteers are solicited.
A
girl and a child, I was taken from my father's house to distant lands;
as for why I was taken away .... I was little, I didn't understand. Now I
can only believe that I was already meant to be, then, what I later came
to be.
I lived in that place long enough to make me unable to live
elsewhere. I was very happy in that land -- but, alas, in an instant
everything was changed that I had long sought, and sought forever.
It was a great misfortune which made me sad
--
and perhaps what made me happy also. But after I had seen
so many things replaced by others, and happiness turned into a intense
pain, such emotions came over me that the good that I had had pained me
more than the evils that still were with me.
For my peace of mind (if such a thing
there might be, together with such sadness and regret) I chose to live near this
mountain, where both the place and the lack of human company are right for my
feelings -- for it would have been a great mistake, after witnessing so many
troubles with these eyes of mine, still to venture to hope for that peace from the world, which it never gives to anyone.
And being here alone, so far from all others, and farther still from
myself -- where I never see anything but the hills on one side, which never
change, and on the other the waters of the sea, which are never still -- I
thought that finally I would escape from ill fortune, since first my ill
fortune and then I myself, with all the power that either of us had, had made
sure to leave left no place in me where new griefs might lodge,
Before, much time had been filled with sadness, and with
good reason. But it seems that misfortune can transform
itself into new misfortune, whereas something good does not become a new
good. And it so happened that, in a strange way, I was
transported to a place where my own pain was reenacted before my eyes in others' lives; and my ears did not escape their own share of woe. I then
came to understand that the pity I felt for others, I should have felt just as much for
myself, if I had not been much more in love with my misery than the one who was
the cause of it seems to have been with me; but so great was the logic
of my sadness, [that no trouble ever came to me that I would not have gone
myself to search for. Thus it came to seem to me that I had already been
looking for these transformation in which I saw myself here, when I had
been more pleased by this land where it took place than by any other, and chose it
to finish the
few days of life that I thought remained to me.*]
But in this, as in many other things, I
deceived myself. Now it has already been two years that I have been
here, and I still do not know when my last hour awaits me -- it cannot be
far. This made me doubt whether to write down the things I had seen and
heard. But afterwards, thinking to myself, I said to myself that the
fear of not finishing the writing what I had seen was no reason not to do
it, since I had no one to write for, except for myself alone.
The more so since in the unfinished parts there will
be nothing new for me; for when have I ever seen happiness fulfilled, or
trouble that came to an end? But rather it seemed to me that me that the
time when I was to be here in this refuge (as suits my distress) could not
be employed in any way closer to my intention, as God has wanted it to be.
If at some point this book is found by anyone happy,
may they not read it -- since perhaps, if it makes them feel their own
fates to be changeable, like those recounted here, their happiness
would be less. Wherever I might be, this would grieve me, since it was
enough for me to be born for my own troubles, and not also to trouble others.
[Anyone who is sad can read it; but there
will be no men among them, since mercy is to be found in women; women,
because men are all heartless. But it was not for those women that I
made this, for since their own trouble is so great, and they cannot
respond to that of others except by becoming even sadder, it would be
wrong for me to want them to read it; but instead I beg them to flee from
it and from all sad things, since even so the days are few in which they will able to be joyful; for
thus was it ordained by the misfortune of their birth.
5/38
[* I well knew that I was not ready for
this task which I now wanted to begin*], for to write anything requires
tranquility -- and me, my troubles draw
me now to one side, and now to the other; they compel me so, that I am
forced to take the words that they give me. I am not driven to serve art,
so much as as my own sorrow. Many flaws will be found in my little book,
but they came from my fate. But who is it that asks me to look for flaws,
or for excuses? The book will be what is comes to be written in it.
Of unhappy things it is not possible to write in an orderly way, since
their occurrence is so disorderly.
17/48
This is enough for the sadness of women, who do not have
the remedies for trouble that men do; for in the little time that I have lived, I
have learned that there is no sadness among men; only women are sad; for
when troubles see that men are always moving this way and that and, as is
often true, with the continual changes things sometimes are scattered and
sometimes lost, and that these various activities obstruct them most of the time, they turn toward the poor women, either because
they are wearied by the changes, or because the women have nowhere to
hide.
18/48
When I was a child in my father's house, during
the long evenings of the fearful winter nights with the other women
of the house, some spinning and the others weaving, we decided that in
order to distract ourselves from the work one of us should tell stories,
so that the evening would not seem so long. A woman of the house, who was
already old and had seen and heard many things, would claim that as the
oldest, that office was hers, and she would tell us stories of knights-errant.
And truly the outrages and great adventures that she described them
undergoing in the service of their ladies made me feel sorry for them. For
I believed that a knight, stoutly armed on his splendid steed and passing
through the laughing countryside by a riverbank, could live as sadly as a
frail damsel in a lofty apartment,
reclining on her bench, walled-in, alone, surrounded by high walls, and
guarded with such force for such a weak creature -- great precautions
being made to take away
her freedom, but to keep distress from reaching her, very few. But
knights have ways to make themselves seem sadder than they really are; and
damsels, few to show that they are really sadder than they seem.
22/50
To you, tears should not be unfamiliar,
since it pleased you to find solitary places like
this one where we find ourselves, which once in a different time, it is
said, were peopled with noble knights and lovely ladies. And yet to day in places
around here, shepherdesses find pieces of armor and jewels of great
price, which makes the shades of this valley seem sadder than others.
No one knows where the disorder of this world will stop: at one
time, these
valleys were well-populated which are now desert; gentlefolk used to go, where
there are now only wild beasts; the former abandoned what the latter
then took. Why were there such transformations in this sole land?
But it seems that the very land was transformed, like the things on it; and this is because the time
for happiness had passed, and the
time had come for being sad.
64/84
[A shepherd speaks]:
"The earth is well supplied with pasture, and just as
good springs up, so does evil. And once I heard speak a great man who
attended to things of the other world, who said of the peopling of this
land (which, though you see it in many places gone to brush, is in many
places populated with herdsmen) that this is one of the marvels of nature,
that from a single land could be born two things so opposed to one
another. And this is true not only of animals, but of men also: for there
is no evil except where there is good, and there are no thieves except
where there is something to steal.
71/88
For up until now I have gone about amazed at myself
at how long sorrow can last after the cause of it is gone, and at how time
does not destroy it the way it does all the other things that exist.
115/121
And so she little by little got used to
living differently, since the business of the household and the doubt or
despair which she had come to feel toward Bimnarder gradually cast on the
things of the past a shade of forgetfulness, with which she could have
lived the days of her life untroubled, or less troubled, if there were
anything secure in this world.
But there is nothing secure; for change rules
everything.