SO FAR, FOR BEAUTY

 Over the wall, the treetops delicately peeked out over the top of the open-air movie screen, which belonged to the Hydra film club. In a few moments, the last concert that Leonard Cohen had given in his life would be shown, the first of two sessions prepared for the 218 people who had come to Greece for the 8th Meetup around Cohen and the first after his death. Sometimes Marianne Ihlen, the best known of his muses, participated in these meetings.

As I had dinner at Dusko, right next to the cinema, on the same terrace that Mr. Cohen and Marianne frequented over the years they lived on the island, I arrived very early and was able to choose any of the 140 canvas chairs with backrests that lined the empty space. “Sisters of Mercy,” cautiously spread by a column, assured me that I had entered the right event, as there was nothing on the cinema’s facade to indicate what would happen inside. At the box office, no one was selling tickets and only one man was hurriedly scribbling PRIVATE SESSION on a paper note glued with adhesive tape on the door. The Greeks on duty just smiled when I asked if I could come in, and they didn't check my name against any list or even force me to pronounce the holy name in devotion that night. Perfect night, there was even a June full moon in the sky.

Dusko tavern, Hydra.

Then the guests started arriving and those who didn't know each other from Café Roloi started talking, wondering where they were from: behind me, for example, were two Algerians, to my left sat a Danish woman who must have been a sensual babe a few decades before; a German woman who I had already stumbled upon at Krifo Limani, one of the tavernas in the Port of Hydra, arrived at the row seat preceding mine and who, by her discreet pose, I thought was an ordinary tourist and not one of those retarded hippies who revealed themselves by the T-shirts printed with song titles, album names or song fragments. In the blink of an eye I counted a Dance me to the end of love, an Ain´t no cure for love, two Songs of love and hate. Also part of the horde of fans, who dotted the paths and stairs of Hydra, were a handful of concentration campers sporting on their skin the Order of the United Heart, a tattoo of two intertwined hearts that mimic a Star of David and are part of the iconography designed by Cohen himself.

Marianne and son, Leonard & friend, Port of Hydra, 1960.
 (picture of photo posted at the Café Roloi, 2017).

The screen hiccups with the first images and for the next three hours I watched, first surprised and then not so much, which was usual in a live Leonard Cohen show, when he himself was alive. People clapped a lot, people were flooded by the emotion with which he reached their innermost being, they cried... But in something that is happening second hand!? Yes, yes, at first it was all very timid, perhaps there was still a hint of rational ceremony in the air, but soon — like ectoplasm from the real concert spectators projected onto the sheet — we found ourselves clapping at the end of each song; we applaud every time Mr. Cohen would take off his hat, cover his heart with it, and name the musicians and the corner of the globe they came from.

Hydra Cineclub.

Leonard Cohen's last concert in life (Dublin, Ireland) opened with “Dance Me to the End of Love,” a song that seems to speak of joyful, eternal love when, in fact, it invokes the ragtag prison orchestras that were forced to play on the path of the condemned to the gas chambers and remembers the children who were left unborn in the bellies of their mothers, roasted in the crematorium ovens. After all, Mr. Cohen was Jewish, born when Hitler was coming to power, he was just lucky that his native Canada was too far away... In front of me the discreet German woman sank her chin into the palm of her hand, her fingertips touching her eyelids. It was limpid that she was weeping in silence, that what L. Cohen provoked in all of us was happening to her: what he sang became ours, ours, or it worked as a consolation, a light pat on our shoulder, a “go on, weep, I'll be here to keep you company.” I felt like discreetly tapping the German woman on the shoulder, and I hoped the Algerian wouldn't do the same to me. 

After an hour and a half the first break arrived. I woke up and put on the coat that, fortunately, I had brought with me: the night suddenly has grown colder. Like others, I came to the street to clear my head and stretch my legs; the German woman was smoking alone, sitting on a bench, as if she were waiting for a late bus.

In the brief speech he gave us at the beginning of the session, Jarkko Arjatsalo — the Finn responsible for Leonard Cohen's official website and the driving force behind the periodic meetings in Hydra — informed us of the program of the festivities for the following day: at 7 pm, the inauguration of the garden bench in honor and memory of Leonard Cohen will take place, and in the evening, at 9, promoted by the Municipality of Hydra, a concert with Greek musicians, during which songs by the favorite author will be performed. “Please show yourself,” Jarkko asked with the vowels hissing of ‘vv’. But there was no need to ask, after all we were all there because of Mr. Cohen and despite there being too many of us to fit at the same table in the local tavernas — the name used in Greece to refer to what we call restaurants — we never failed to show up where we were supposed to. Still in the morning... Still that Saturday morning, as I turned a corner of the paths that would take me to Kamini, I came across a devotee sitting on a step, under the shade cast by Leonard's house on the island, reading from a little book in a low but audible voice. I walked by very slowly, observing the exuberant fuchsia of the bougainvillea climbing over the doorstep, so as not to disturb anyone and to be able to understand that the lady was reading poems by L. Cohen. I didn't plan on stopping, but at the end of the narrow street (where, if a donkey goes by on a leash in the opposite direction, we'll have to stick to the wall) I was intrigued by a rectangular stain, the same deep blue as the Mediterranean, on the whitewash wall bordering Mr.'s Cohen backyard. Ah!, it was the sign I had heard about: the Municipality Council had decided to name the path after the famous person who had lived there. It was heard, in the gatherings that kept the Roloi lit up with songs and conversation until six in the morning, that Adam Cohen, Leonard's son and heir, had opposed such an idea. On the Roloi esplanade there were those who were passionately for or against the toponymic plaque.

“What does that mean?” I asked, exposing the camera's viewfinder to the young man who was serving me at the table under the green needle trellis of The Little Pine, the restaurant in Kamini where you can see the blue of the sea through the green branches: OΔΟΣ.

“Street... Leonard Cohen Street,” he replied, “in Greek, the word ‘Street’ comes before the name of the street.”

“In Portuguese too,” I countered.

In Hydra I almost always follow this route, it suits me: I go to the tiny port of Kamini through the alleys and lanes that start from the upper part of the town, because I like to take a look at the white and grey house (the colours of the houses in Hydra) belonging to Mr. L. Cohen, of looking at the rusty pole where you can still see the porcelain goblets where the telephone wires that inspired the first verse of “Bird on the Wire” once ran; to see that a fig belonging to Mr. Cohen garden had fallen onto the worn paving stones of the street; that the lemons in the backyard shine like Chinese lanterns that someone forgot to blow out and that, on the contrary, in the orange trees you can't tell the green of the fruit from the green of the foliage. And, I confess, sometimes I sit on the same step where the devoted reader was, thinking about nothing and resting from the hundreds of steps I have already climbed.

You can get to Kamini (he used to go to the beach here; more than one poem happened to him here, he signed them as such) by going down my current terraces and returning to the Port of Hydra via the little coastal road, always with the certainty that you won't find cars or motorcycles or even bicycle maniacs. On the island of Hydra there are only donkeys and mules for transport, which is why you can hear the bells so loudly, the crowing of the roosters at dawn, the exfoliating of the cicadas, the anguished roar of the boats preparing to leave the island pier. Following that path is like traveling on a Yellow Brick Road or something like that, in the background of the landscape the comforting line of the Peloponnese reminds us that a man is not an island and, between the lines, the islands that dot the deep blue with stone, one of them rises a tiny chapel on the surface of the water. Who will you serve?

Road from Kamini to Port of Hydra.

On a bend in the road, there is a recent building, it looks like an archaeological remains in a new state; a U-shaped stone wall where, at the back, they fixed a light wooden crossbar. It's the bench offered by subscription from the Cohen Fan Forum — hosted by Jarkko on his website —, I can infer from the small commemorative plaque screwed onto one of the outer faces. The location was well chosen, whoever rests there has a view of infinity and could have sat there three thousand years ago. It will be inaugurated later this afternoon, there is a striped orange and white plastic ribbon threatening it. The mayor will first give a brief speech, joking about the Greek bureaucracy that prevented it from being inaugurated while the honoree was still alive; by the way, he will ask for a minute of silence; someone will sing a Leonard Cohen song, followed by another about him and romanticizing the film too much... Next to me, squeezed by the crowd of people, the lady who read poems at the door of Mr. Cohen strikes up a conversation with me, and I ask, in the bard's language, what she read in the morning. 

“Where are you from anyway?” she asks me.

“Around Lisbon,” I reply.

“Ah, it had to be... And look at us, the only ones here speaking Portuguese! I'm from Viana do Castelo...”

This is her first time in Hydra and she knows everything about his idol, she has been attending Roloi like a church; she must be in her late thirties, she's foul-mouthed, she's overflowing, and when I reveal that one of the things Cohen wrote in Hydra was the poem of "Alexandra Leaving," she surprises me with an:

“Oh, don’t talk to me about other bitches! For me it all comes down to Marianne, I don't want to know anymore...”

I smell danger in the warm evening: it's almost eight at night and it must be about thirty five degrees Celsius. Too close to my eyes the back of a fan's T-shirt – which reads Like a drunk in a midnight choir – is covered in sweat.

“Well, I must be going,” I say, “I don’t want to be late for the show and I still want to stop at the hotel before dinner...” 

“Wait, don’t go yet,” she begs, “I want to introduce Henning to you.” He's German and has some fantastic stories about Leonard...”

And while she moves among the people present, looking for Henning, I walk away at a leisurely pace, without looking back, as Bob Dylan advises.

Leonard Cohen's bench at Hydra.

They chose for the concert the spontaneous square marked by the facade of the museum and the Port pier, right next to the place where, every hour, the ferries arrive from Athens and the other islands of the Saronic Gulf. Nowadays, the trip to Athens takes just over an hour, but when Mr. Cohen came here to visit for the first time, there was a boat twice a week and the connection took five hours.

Every wooden electric pole has a poster stapled to it, the usual way of advertising events on the island. The Municipality Council sent for a band with bass, guitar, drums and vocals from the mainland; the singer addresses the audience, calling us “you guys”, defines the group as being jazz, announces that they will perform songs from their new album and that they will do their own versions of some of the honoree’s songs. I fear the worst. However, the public waits patiently, they have faith: the venue is packed, there is not a single chair to be occupied, there are even people sitting on the old cannons that defended the island from pirates and Turks. There are hundreds of us and now there are many Greeks mixed in, something that did not happen in the previous stages of the festivities. The music plays and powerful projectors intermittently dazzle the audience with a jet of lilac color. The band's future CD on stage is uninteresting, the compositions uninspired, and the singer's voice formats the songs in a pattern that makes them indistinguishable. At the end of the second song I had already seen everything there was to see and I stood up, as it was not worth waiting for a miracle when it was the time for Mr. Leonard Cohen’s covers. On the Roloi esplanade I walked around my fellow countrywoman, who was already sitting there — she also gave up on the show.

The night is full and the moon continues to be full. As I climb the 149 steps that take me from Porto to the hotel, the same ones that the honoree descended every day to come from home to the town center, I can't help but hear the music clearly, as if I were still at the concert. The town of Hydra stands in an amphitheater, in a cascade, wedged between the sea and the hills, and this configuration gives it wonderful acoustics. I now finally identify a song by Mr. Cohen. It's “Hallelujah” and the young musicians didn't give up on twisting it to their personal taste, they finish it off in the reinterpretation. Anyway... I arrived at the street where my hotel is located, I stopped to catch my breath, the music continued to reach me clearly: “First We Take Manhattan”. Mr. L. Cohen greek house is located just a hundred meters from where I am staying and just as it happened in 1967 — when he listened from his window to the sounds being played at Dusko — today I can hear the songs he wrote then, rising in the air like the singing of a drunk at midnight.

Port of Hydra by dawn.

© With the exception of the third photo (Marianne and Leonard & friend), all photographs by Pedro Serrano, Hydra (Greece), 2017. 

    

SURYA AND THE DUST AT THE FEET OF BRAMA

 Officially, the caste system ended in 1950, when the first Indian Constitution was adopted after British rule. But we are all fed up with knowing the difference between the letter of the law and real life, especially if that system was based on rules and practices that are more than three millennia old. A caste is a hereditary social group, in which the condition of the individual passes from parents to children, marking their existence with such determinism that each one can only marry and form a family with a person from their own group. In India, the four main groups were (and still are, particularly in rural areas) the Brahmins (priests and scholars), the Kshatriyas (military men), the Vaishyas (merchants) and the Sudras (peasants and workers). This division is based on the body of Brahma, the first God of the Hindu trinity: thus, the Brahmins would have been born from Brahma's head, the Kshatriyas from his arms, the Vaishas from his legs and the Sudras from his feet. But there was still dust beneath the feet of the God and there, so low that they do not even constitute a group, would be the Dalits, the untouchables, untouchable because the fact that they are touched defiles whoever touches them... As is natural, one of the professions most associated with this sub-people is cleaning up other people's shit and this role is also passed down from parents to children. If I clean latrines, my son will dig toilets, as will my grandson and their wives, and so it will be until the end of time. A shitty fate.

In 1997, a man named Abraham George decided to roll up his sleeves and do something that could change and, above all, demonstrate the lack of foundation of a previously established destiny and overcome the apparent impossibility of breaking this cycle of poverty and misery. Despite his name, Abraham George is a native of South India who made his life and fortune on Wall Street in the United States. One day, in his early fifties, George sold the company, packed his bags, returned to India, and applied his wealth and organizational and management experience to a project called Shanti Bavhan. It's not so easy to define Shanti Bavhan, as it's not one of those indulgent charity projects that drops a few crumbs, takes a few quick English courses and walks away, tax deductions included. Shanti Bavhan's very conception made the link between promoters and beneficiaries definitive. Let me see if I can explain. Shanti Bavhan's first school is based in Tamil Nadu, southern India, and is designed to accommodate children from untouchable families. He takes them in, at the request of their parents, at the age of four or five and only lets them go when they get their first job, some seventeen or eighteen years later. A long-term project and commitment, therefore. Children begin living on the organization's premises, where they attend kindergarten, then primary school and then secondary school. They live there as a boarding school, but at least twice a year, during the holidays, they return to their parents' house, so that they can maintain contact with their family and the community they come from. Later they enter the universities that exist in India, to which they applied using the usual national method, continuing their studies and stay in the big cities, which are paid for and accompanied by Shanti Bavhan. When they graduate and begin to fly on their own wings, the organization expects them to return the human capital and knowledge accumulated to the village where they come from, helping to raise the standard of living of its people. 

 I came into contact with all of this through a Netflix documentary (miniseries) called Daughters of Destiny. This documentary, very illustrative and cleverly-made, follows the lives of four or five girls, from when they were little until the day they finished their university studies and started working, one as a lawyer, another as a journalist, another as a nurse. It shows everything that is important and, sometimes, it is hard to watch what our eyes see, because it is not one of those cheesy scenes that TV likes to push on us, whether to sell dog food, hamburgers or subscriptions to the latest generation fiber optic devices. There is hope for a tomorrow that sings, yes, but the singing is sometimes hoarse, croaking and sad and if the little child fails to take advantage repeatedly he is made to walk away to make room for someone else. They all have the right to a chance, but it is a unique chance. It's a tough, very tough journey and one of Dr. Kennedy sons, already born in America and on welfare, who is preparing to take over what his father started, complains about the harshness of the rules; has doubts... One or another of the girls, in that series, also has doubts, feels that the project has torn her in half, divided her, she can no longer return to the village and the family she came from and knows that the school, in Shanti Bavhan, cannot give her shelter forever: one of them even develops anger towards Dr. George. It's hard to grow up, it's hard to live, the portion is sometimes bitter. But before our attentive and moved eyes, the value of the initiative and its global success were demonstrated and, indeed, in the end, an untouchable can go as far as any other human being. It's all about opportunity, as Dr. Abraham George stated when he decided to commit to all this.

I know India reasonably well (although it’s hard to use the term, because, in its greatness and diversity, one never gets to know India, not even reasonably well) and watching that documentary affected me enough that, in the following days, I went to spy on the Internet the organization's pages. How could I make any contribution to something so well thought out, so serious and so useful? Shanti Bavhan's website answers any questions we may have as it is also very well thought out and presented. The interested party can donate money in whatever way they are most interested in: they can contribute to the equipment of a classroom, they can contribute to paying for the solar generators that heat the water in the buildings, they can help buy towels for a dormitory or, if they prefer, they can dedicate the contribution to the education and maintenance (food, clothing, etc.) of a child. They also accept volunteers for work, but warn that they will be ruthlessly selected and that life is hard there: they are also well aware of the plague of instant solidarity, which runs out after two days or when it is realized that there is no hanger to hang the fur coats...

I ended up opting for the contribution dedicated to one child: the price was around 1,600 euros/year and that included everything: daily food, medical care, school supplies, clothing, teaching of all subjects (from English to mathematics, through science, computing and music). All! Around 140 euros per month. A few days later I was informed by mail that my donation had been linked to a boy named Surya. They sent me a photo of a cute, smiling little boy who was opening his palms to me in a gesture of welcome and gratitude. Along with the photo were a few lines about Surya: he was five years old, had just entered Shanti Bavhan, was from a village near Bangalore, his father was a well-digger and her mother was at home with his younger sister. As for Surya, a kindergarten student, he had some difficulties with math and English and really liked to draw elephants, fish and bananas; he also liked playing with puppies. I wrote back, thanking for the information I had received, sending several photographs of elephants that I had taken in India, and asking if they could be delivered to Surya. I was told "no", at least not directly. For the protection of children, direct communication between them and people who contribute to their education is prohibited. In any case, the photos would be shown by the teacher to the class Surya attends. I thought it was OK, the daily lives of those girls and boys must be protected from outside invasion, otherwise it could turn into a circus of exposure, vanity (from the donors), etc.

Now Surya is nine years old and has already started the third grade of elementary school. Every now and then they send me a little report on his progress, a photo of him, or a drawing he made. It has been three years now and I recently sent a contribution to support Surya's stay at Shanti Bavhan for another year. Not that my money is essential for him to stay there and be supported until he becomes an adult and gets his first job, because, fortunately, the organization is not dependent on me! But I enjoy doing it and I find myself hoping that the winds will be good for Surya and that one day later, with confidence, he will be able to blow the dust that remains from Brahma's feet from his hands.

Notes: Daughters of Destiny can be seen on Netflix; 

            Shanti Bavhan's website is at: https://www.shantibhavanchildren.org

            © elephant photography: pedro serrano, Udaipur (India), 2013. 

ONCE UPON A TIME: In the kitchen of Bob Dylan's Lyrics Portuguese translation

One afternoon, at the end of the summer of 2005, Francisco Vale, editor and owner of Relógio d’Água, called me: “Would you like to translate Bob Dylan’s complete lyrical works into Portuguese? I'm thinking about buying the rights from the Americans…” In addition to the shock, I tried to buy time: “Let me think about it for a few days…”

In the 1960s my parents had a farm on the outskirts of OPorto, with a water border on its southern limit, the Douro River. During the Easter holidays of 1966, a friend and I spent a week there, alone with our cans of tuna, camped ten feet above the ground in a granary, a small hut where the corn was stored, well ventilated and safe from rodents.

In the photo, I'm on the stairs and the guy sitting on the doorframe is Rui, now an ophthalmologist in OPorto. If you look closely, next to his left hand there is a wire that crosses one of the granite pillars on which the granary sits and disappears into the right corner of the photograph. It's an electric wire and a Gründig tape recorder, our permanent sound companion, was connected to it.

That week we listened incessantly to an album that had appeared in Portugal not long ago, although it had already been released in the United States almost a year ago. It was titled Highway 61 Revisited, the singer was called Bob Dylan, the songs were all his compositions and I had never heard anything like it, so strange and so powerful. So hypnotic and full of details to absorb that as soon as the last song ended I would pull the reel back and start it all over again.

If, at the time (I was 13), someone had told me that one day I would be asked to translate Dylan, I would have believed it as much as if I had been told that there was life on Mars, and I would have felt as crushed by the honor and responsibility as if I had been told that I had been chosen to engender a prophet…

“Don’t take too long to decide,” said the editor on the other end of the line, “my right of first refusal on the translation is running out...”

But, going back to that afternoon in the summer of 2005, in addition to the honor and the almost cosmic responsibility there were also the practical aspects: the work to be translated (Lyrics 1962-2001) was immense (600 pages of a dense, almost A4-sized sheet of paper, in American-English); labyrinthine poetry; the interpretations surrounding what he wrote generated thousands of interpretative theories, theses, 500,000 active presences on the Internet.

A week later I ended up saying yes, but I presented a counterproposal: yes, but only in good company. This half had been preparing, in the meantime. I had a friend, who had a degree in English and German and specialized in Anglo-Saxon literature, and I knew she demonstrated a taste for rigor and an ability to work in a step-by-step, word-by-word fashion.

And so it was, for two and a half years our free time and vacations went away. We took Dylan into our heads as an obsession, as a curse: I bought the many records I didn't already have, I ordered books, I spent two years immersed in his music and immersed in reading what he had written, what had been written about him and about his work. And, attached to his music, to his lyrics, came the broth from which all that exploded: the literary, musical, cinematographic influences, the muses; and as a result, there we were reading about English poetry, Scottish and Irish ballads, about blues and blues legends, reviewing Fellini, Hitchcock and Scorsese. Even when looking at things that are apparently less related to the arts, such as political activists, gangsters, baseball players and boxers—Dylan sang about everything, like any self-respecting songster.

Gina lives in Braga, I live in the south, 400 km of road separate us. So all the work was done via mail, and we only met half a dozen times in person to discuss criteria, fine-tune final versions of the poems, review the evidence for the two extensive volumes that all this turned into. In these long meetings in Braga, permanently watched by the domestic eyes of Gina's two dogs and invaded by the company of her black cat, we sucked kilos of menthol candies in marathons that lasted 12 hours a day and during which we discussed, exhaustively, the decision to be made about a word, a verse, a stanza, a song, the definitive title of a song, the text of a footnote; whether yes or no to introduce a comma.

It was hard and all the more so because we had decided, as a general axiom, that our approach to translation would be strictly literal, that is, we would follow absolutely what was written and not allow ourselves to be tempted by what might have been the author's intention, the meaning of words, intuition or sensitivity… Or the tight ropewalker contortions for maintaining the rhyme, the sound, the taste of the rhyme. “Fuck the rhyme!”, one of us said, “if anyone wants to savor what it sounds like, listen to the songs”.

This choice caused us frequent aesthetic suffering and I am disappointed not to find a denser word than 'playful' for the mysterious figure of the Joker in the apocalyptic lyrics of “All Along the Watchtower”; something that would better portray the enigmatic, somewhat diabolical figure depicted on the playing cards. Neither of us escaped this frustration and now Gina is going through all the dictionaries, all the possible websites, all the translators' forums, looking for an alternative to the 'tambourine' of “Mister Tambourine Man” (“Lord of the Tambourine”), which she had imagined. could translate as tambor (drum), ending up with no alternative other than the rustic tambourine for a song played on a melodious dreamy morning. And even Vladimir Nabokov's enlightened sentences on translations did not fully console us: “A tortured author and a deceived reader, this is the inevitable result of artistic paraphrase. The sole purpose and justification of translation is to convey the most accurate information possible, and this can only be achieved by a literal translation, with notes."* Lots of notes and lots of mint candies...

That the edition would be bilingual was always granted between us and the publisher, but initially the hypothesis was raised that the main space in the pages of the book will consist of the Portuguese version of each song, with the original text appearing in a footnote, the verses of each stanza presented horizontally, separated by dashes. Something like this:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine /You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?/People'd call, say, “Beware doll, you're bound to fall”/You thought they were all kiddin you/You used to laugh about/Everybody that was hangin' out/Now you don't talk so loud/Now you don't seem so proud/About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

And that's just the first verse of a song that has eight! Gina and I were horrified by this editorial suggestion, which was sensibly presented as a space-saving method and is widely used. In addition to the aesthetic issue of presentation, we wanted the whole thing to appear before the reader's eyes in total transparency and comparative clarity: on the left page the original text, in English, and on the right page, in mirror image, the translation of the same; aligned so that each line in English on the left corresponded, neck-and-neck, to its caption in Portuguese on the right. It was not too difficult to convince the editor of the goodness of our arguments and there was one last thing that decided the hesitations: followers of Nabokov, as far as translations are concerned, and knowing Dylan's prose, we anticipated that the text would have to have abundant footnotes from the translators. Now imagine what it would be like to mix the train of lines of the English text with the serpentine of the numerous and extensive footnotes. A jungle in which, on each of the book's pages, the lower half would be occupied by a visual chaos that would ruin the attention or understanding of the most selfless of readers.

All of this ended up conditioning the physical dimension of the translation into Portuguese of Bob Dylan's lyrics (Songs 1962-2001) and the work had to be published in two extensive volumes: the first, with 665 pages, was released in bookstores in September 2006. and contains songs written between 1962 and 1973. The second, 754 pages, was released in June 2008 and contains songs written between 1974 and 2001.

The translators' footnotes, which we anticipated would be abundant, ended up numbering 409, and the end-of-volume notes, with considerations on the framing of albums and songs, ended up taking up more than 60 pages of the total translation.

* The quote of Vladimir Nabokov is taken from the book Strong Opinions (Opiniões Fortes, published in Lisbon by Assírio e Alvim, 2005).

Images (from top to bottom): Quinta do Outeirinho, Avintes (north of Portugal), 1966 (photo by Eduardo Serrano). Other photos by © Pedro Serrano: Braga, 2006; Proof of cover and backcover of volume 2: © Relógio d'Água editores, 2008.