WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: A Knife of Pure Blade

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

In this episode of The Poetry Fix, we read "A Knife of Pure Blade," by Joao Cabral do Melo Neto.

Hillsdale 101.7 and your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading A Knife of Pure Blade by Joan Cabraldo Meloneto. This is the last work in our series of Brazilian poets. We'll read the original, followed by a translation. It's hard to say what exactly a knife of pure blade means. The poet gives us a series of weapon imagery, bullets, and knives, using phrases such as just like or much like, but he never. completes the simile, even to the end.

We begin the poem with an incomplete simile describing a bullet made of heavy lead that weighs a body down on one side. This reads much like a symbolic description of depression, a heaviness that bears down on a person. The bullet imagery shifts gradually into knife imagery, and the final simile is what gets us closest in the message of the poem. The unknown ominous force is compared to a knife that turns inward, perhaps not in the sense of suicide. but in the sense of a metaphorical knife that forms a part of a man's own body like a skeleton. We end the poem with the image of a man who wounds his own bones. It's a clear image of self-sabotage of some kind,

a self-loathing, insecurity or vice embedded so deeply that we begin to see it as part of us. It's telling that the poet uses the phrase bones to describe the wounded part of us, not merely skin or flesh. That tells us not only that the metaphor, metaphorical knife has embedded deeply, but that it damages the very structure of our being. It might be frustrating that we never learn what the metaphorical knife is, but it might also be revelatory. After all, each person might have their own way of wounding their own bones. One person's knife could be an addiction, and another person's knife could be resentment.

Maybe the poet, by withholding the end of the simile, is giving us the freedom to identify what our knife is. With all that said, let's dive in. A knife of pure blade by Juan Cabral of Meluneto. Asing as a balla interrada in the corpse, making more sparse one of the sides of the morto. Asing from a balla of the chumbo more pesado, in the muscle of a man, pesando more of one side. What balla that had a live mechanism?

ball that a ball that a ball that's equal to a a little submerce

in a little a of a realoge a realoge a

realtoes a a gulm of a fack and the imped

of the black that a that a that's

a that would be a formas in part of

a vana a facer a abitando in a corpse as the proper skeleton of a man that he wastes, and always doloroso, of a man who was ferreys against his own own osos.

Just like a bullet entering the body, thickening one side of the dead man. Just like a bullet of the heaviest lead in the flesh of a man, weighing him down to one side. A bullet which had a living mechanism, a bullet that possessed a beating heart,

just like that of a clock, merged in a body, the heart of a living clock and also insurgent. A clock that had the edge of a knife and all the impiety of a blue-tinted blade. Just like a knife that without pocket or sheath made itself a part of your anatomy. Much like an intimate knife, a knife to be turned inwards, living in a body like the own skeleton of the man who had it in him, and always painful, the pain of a man who wounds his own bones. You've been listening to The Poetry Fix with Erica Kaiba.

We've been reading some dark poetry lately, but join me next week and we'll be making a turn to hope.