Happy Birthday, Rui Knopfli!

In honor of the Mozambican poet’s birthday, a translation of his poem “Naturalidade” (“Naturality”), written in the 1960s, but collected in his 1982 “Memória consentida” (“Consented memory”). Knopfli was born in 1932 in Inhambane in what is now Mozambique, but was then Portuguese East Africa. This poem in particular highlights the problematic tensions of being a white person born in Africa.
The word that I have translated as “pained” (“dolente”) is broader than just pain, encompassing heartbreak, pain, and suffering. It meshes nicely in the original with what I have translated as “evil eye” (“quebranto”), which refers to the evil effect of the gaze of someone who wants bad things to happen to you or a long-distance enchantment.
The micaia is a kind of acacia tree, but also one of the pennames of Knopfli’s fellow poet, Marcelino dos Santos.

“Naturality”
European, they call me.
They riddle me with
European literature and doctrine
and they call me European.

I don’t know if what I write is rooted in some
European thought.
It’s likely… No. It’s certain,
but I am African.
My heart beats to the pained rhythm
of this light and of this evil eye.
I carry in my blood a vastness
of geographic coordinates and Indian ocean.
Roses say nothing to me,
I’m more about the ruggedness of the micaias
and the long, purple silence of the afternoons
with cries of strange birds.

Do you call me European? Fine, I'll shut up.
But inside me there are arid savannahs
and tablelands without end
with long, languid, and sinuous rivers,
a vertical ribbon of smoke,
a black man and a guitar snapping.