Lídia Jorge

Trans. by Margaret Jull COsta

Happening

Before, I was a stone in the mountains
and everything contained everything else—
Silence and darkness, voice and light.

Before, I was a stone.
Then the animal emerged from that sphere of dust
compressed by the millennia, and rolled about on the grass.

A bright light came and said—
This is your life, for a time at least.

And I wanted joy to clap its hands
and say—This is my life.
I sat down on the grass and I ate it three times a day.
It’s so vast, this sea of flowers, the world.

They can say what they like about death
or whatever it is that lies beyond that door—
I knew the taste of all the green grasses, I gave them names,
I will never go back to being that stone in the mountains.

The bright light might declare—Your life was of no value.
That and many other things. But it cannot say—You never happened.
I happened, and that, for me, is an honour beyond measure.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over thirty years and has translated such writers as Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Javier Marías and Bernardo Atxaga. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was made an OBE for services to literature. 

Lídia Jorge is one of Portugal’s foremost writers. She has written eleven novels, two children’s books, five short story collections, and, in 2019, a book of poems. Her work has brought her many prizes, most recently, the 2020 Premio de la Feria del Libro de Guadalajara for writers in Romance languages.