a particular sensation arises in my heart
everytime I cross the Ipiranga and St. John Avenue--
when I first arrived here I understood nothing:
the hard concrete poetry of your street corners,
the discreet inelegance of your ladies..
But then, I didn't know Rita Lee,
your most lucid spokeswoman---
a particular sensation arises in my heart
everytime I cross the Ipiranga and St. John Avenue--
When I encountered you, face to face, I didn't see myself
What I saw, seemed bad taste, such bad taste--
just as Narcissus names everything ugly which is not himself, and the mind dismisses anything new, nothing from before Rita's Mutantes.....
How difficult it was to begin to
understand what was so unfamiliar--
Perhaps my expectations of a city were just dreams, and this is reality,
but this is so opposite, so backwards, backwards...
Your oppressed people, trapped in lines, in alleys, in shanties,
the power of money, destroying beautiful things
the ugly smoky plumes, obliterating the stars:
your poets dream of the countryside, of openness,
of forest-swarms of factories, of raingods...
African-America, utopia, sepulchre of samba;
but also-- a new freetown for the enslaved?
Now we Bahians amble through your drizzle,
Now we Bahians even call you -- wonderful.