Between I, myself and me
Maria S. Mendes
Between I, myself and me, tradução Rita Faria
Between I, myself and me
What has risen I do not know
Which makes me my enemy
For a time with much delusion
I myself have lived with me
Now in the greatest misery
I find great harm comes in profusion.
Sorely costly is disillusionment
and yet kill me it did not
But how sorely have I paid the cost
To myself I am made a stranger
Between consideration and concern
Evil lies there, spun
By great evil to which I succumb.
A new fear, a new woe
This is what has had me so,
Thus I am had, thus I am so.
Antre mim mesmo e mim, Bernardim Ribeiro
Antre mim mesmo e mim
não sei que s’alevantou
que tão meu inimigo sou.
Uns tempos com grand’engano
vivi eu mesmo comigo,
agora no mor perigo
se me descobre o mor dano.
Caro custa um desengano
e pois m’este não matou
quão caro que me custou.
De mim me sou feito alheio,
antr’o cuydado e cuidado
está um mal derramado,
que por mal grande me veio.
Nova dor, novo receio
foi este que me tomou,
assim me tem, assim estou.
Very little is known about Bernardim Ribeiro but at the same time a great deal is known. His poetry was included in Garcia de Resende’s 1516 Cancioneiro Geral and fellow poet and friend Sá de Miranda writes about him (“amigo Ribeiro”) to both praise his literary gifts and lament his mysterious fall from grace. Almeida Garrett attributes the latter to a heartbreaking love story between Bernardim and Beatriz, who happened to be the King’s daughter. Sadly there is no historical evidence for such a cinematic love story. What we do know is that Bernardim, in all likelihood born in the late 1400s and deceased in the mid-1500s, was a poet who enjoyed success and royal favours for a time; left the court for reasons unknown but probably in disgrace; transformed the cadence of music and alliteration into cerebral poetry and wrote the most wonderful beginning to a novel – “Menina e moça me levaram de casa de minha mãe para muito longe. Que causa fosse então daquela minha levada, era ainda pequena, não a soube”. It is also Menina e Moça who provides grounds to believe Bernardim might have been Jewish – converted, reconverted, in exile, we don’t know (as explained by Helder Macedo in his preface to Menina e Moça, D. Quixote, 1999). His mind seems to have been a mind in exile – and there are many forms of exile, with which Bernardim was certainly acquainted. This, we know.
Rita Faria is a professor at the Catholic University of Portugal. She doesn’t know how to do anything else apart from reading and writing and wants to do nothing else apart from reading and writing. Besides this, she enjoys horror films, vampires, ghosts and zombies in general and thinks the Portuguese language is the most fun in the whole world.