[In the following review of two books by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and Drummond's Travelling in the Family, Rosenthal notes Drummond's sense of irony, contemplative nature, and colorful use of poetic language.]

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-87) and Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) rank among the foremost poets of our century, yet neither has received much recognition in the United States. It is tough being an author whose native language is deemed “minor.” Still, one can't grumble, for here we have a generous selection of each. Perhaps the gods deliberately deferred this pleasure, knowing that after the thin gruel of much recent North American verse, we would need something robust. …

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Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who died this year, is Brazil's most famous 20th-century poet. His work is more transparent than Pessoa's, definitely not the expression of a divided personality. Yet, as readers of his selected poems, “Travelling in the Family,” will find, it can be complex. Like such Mediterranean authors as Yehuda Amichai, Cesare Pavese and Joan Vinyoli, Drummond was simultaneously straightforward and in touch with life's ineffable mysteries:

One day she came to the hammock,
curled up in my arms,
gave me a hug,
gave me her breasts
that were just for me.
The hammock turned over,
down went the world.
And I went to bed
with a fever of forty degrees.
And a giant laundress with giant breasts was spinning around in the greenness of space.

Ironic and contemplative, Drummond lived through his eyes and ears, his saudade tempered by a typically Brazilian sensuality and exuberance. The result is a wryly bittersweet counterpoint between nostalgia and hope:

Since from everything a little remains,
why won't a little
of me remain? In the train
traveling north, in the ship,
in newspaper ads,
why not a little of me in London,
a little of me somewhere?
In a consonant?
In a well?

Often he is incantatory, Whitmanesque:

Fiancée dead, girl friends dead.
Engineer dead, passenger dead.
Unrecognizable body dead: a man's? an animal's?
Dog dead, bird dead.
Rosebush dead, orange trees dead.
Air dead, bay dead.
Hope, patience, eyes, sleep, movement of hands: dead.
Man dead. Lights go on.
He works at night as if he were living.

He can tell a story—of betrayal, sex and the unpredictability of passion (“Story of the Dress”); of a mother's lament for her “sweet” daughter who has probably run off with her boyfriend (“The Disappearance of Luisa Porto”); or of an imaginary banquet thrown by the poet, his brothers and his sister for their dour, distant and now deceased father (“The Table”). In Drummond, the traditional themes of Portuguese and Brazilian lyric verse and popular song—loss, mutability, the elusiveness of all experience—are reworked into a body of poetry at once accessible and suggestive:

In the warm, humid night, noiseless and dead, a boy cries.
His crying behind the wall, the light behind the window
are lost in the shadow of muffled footsteps, of tired voices.
Yet the sound of medicine poured into a spoon can be heard.

Both Pessoa and Drummond have been fortunate in their translators. Useful prefaces to these volumes situate the two poets in their cultural milieus. … Eloquent, volatile and obsessed with life—and death—their poems place them among the modernist giants in whose shadow we live and who made our century one of extraordinary poetic richness.