This video is based on the poem “Elegy 1938” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, translated by L. Sant’Anna-Henrique, narrated by Caetano Veloso.
You joylessly work for a lapsed world,
where forms and actions do not enclose any example.
You laboriously practice the universal gestures,
you feel hot and cold, lack of money, hunger, and sexual desire.
Heroes fill the parks of the city you slouch through,
and they advocate for virtue, renunciation, cold blood and conception.
At night, if foggy, they open bronze umbrellas
or retreat to the volumes of sinister libraries.
You love the night for the power of annihilation it encloses
and you know that, in your sleep, problems spare you from death.
But you awake in horror with the proof of the existence of the machinery that restores you, meager, before indecipherable palm trees.
You walk among the dead and talk with them
about things of future times and matters of the spirit.
Literature spoiled your best hours of love.
On the phone you wasted lots, lots of time better spent sowing.
Proud heart, you are in haste to confess your defeat
and to defer collective happiness to another century.
You accept rain, war, unemployment, and unequal distribution
because you just cannot, by yourself, explode Manhattan Island.
- #Title: Elegy 1938
- #Director: Lícia Arosteguy
- #Choreography: Luana Arosteguy
- #Production: Lícia Arosteguy, Luana Arosteguy
- #Country of Production: Brazil
- #Year of Production: 2022
- #Duration: 00:02:58
- #Dance and Acting: Luana Arosteguy
- #Camera: Lícia Arosteguy
- #Editing: Lícia Arosteguy
- #Music: Caetano Veloso
- #Screenplay: Lícia Arosteguy, Luana Arosteguy
- #Webpage: www.liciajar.com.br
- #Trailer: