To Live a Grand Love
by on 9 Oct 2009
A love poem/ song, a template if you will, for a grand love - Para Viver Um Grande Amor.
Pablo Neruda was scribbling his twenty anguished love poems in Chile around 1927 – “Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window. The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish,” he wrote. “Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.” “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long,” he wrote.
Rudyard Kipling wrote If, his solemn, eternal poem on how to live a noble life in 1896, England – “If you can make one heap of all your winnings, And risk it in one turn of pitch and toss, And lose and start again at your beginnings, And never breathe a word about your loss.”
After both Neruda and Kipling had done writing, somewhere in Brazil, probably Rio de Janeiro, some time in the 1960s or 1970s Vinicius de Morais wrote his love poems/songs – but not anguished ones– on living and loving. Para Viver Um Grande Amor, (To Live a Grand Love) is one of the legendary ones.
Vinicius de Morais was a poet, song-writer, composer. De Morais was writing poetry and had written a samba song Quando tu passas por mi (When you pass by) when, during the production of a play he’d written, he was introduced to the pianist and song-writer Tom Jobim. The same Jobim who’d later write and sing Garrota de Ipanema (the Girl from Ipanema).
Two years after they met, in 1958, Vinicius De Morais and Tom Jobim together composed Cancao de Amor Demais (A song of too much love), an album for the singer Elizete Cardoso that also featured the sensation to be Joao Gilberto. The album marked the start of a heated decade of music, “Bossa Nova”, which translates “New Trend”. The curious thing about the Bossa Nova lyrics, and a lot of Brazilian Samba lyrics, is that they’re not anguished, or angst ridden; even when they’re sad, they’re not melodramatic but full of heart and tints of lightness.
Para Viver Um Grande Amor, De Morais’ epic poem/song on everything it takes to have and to keep a love, is sincere, with a tint of light-heartedness keeping it afloat. De Morais used to perform the poem to music in small gatherings, while sipping whisky.
Para Viver Um Grande Amor - To Live a Grand Love
To live a grand love, you need a lot of concentration and a lot of bite, a whole lot of seriousness and little laughter – To live a grand love.
To live a grand love, you need to be a man for one woman only; to be a man of many, damn! is to collect….it doesn’t have any value.
To live a grand love, first, it’s necessary to make yourself a gentleman and to be one to your lady throughout – no matter what. You must make of your body a home that encloses the woman you love and keeps outsiders away with a sword – To live a grand love.
To live a grand love, I tell you, needs attention like an old friendship, because there are those who will always try to delude your grand love. It needs a whole lot of care with those who aren’t able to be passionate, because those who aren’t, are always prepared to bore and cheapen a grand love.
To live a love, in reality, is to make a temple of the truth that love without fidelity doesn’t exist – To live a grand love. For the man who betrays his love for the sake of vanity is ignorant of freedom, of this immense, individual freedom that brings one love only.
To live a grand love, its important besides, to be an expert in the culinary arts and in judo – To live a grand love.
To live a grand love perfectly, its not enough to be a good citizen, you need also to have a big heart – the chest of a rower. You need to look always at your loved one as if she’s your first love and your widow also, immortalized in your undying love.
It’s very important to have a line of credit at a florist’s – much, much more important than at the stylist’s! – to please your grand love. One thing about grand love you really want to know is that it’s love, it’s love, it’s love at random; and after a tempestuous little argument, it helps to win points.
To win points it also helps to know how to make little things — scrambled eggs, prawns, little soups, sauces, stroganoffs, food for after the love. And rather than going out to eat, isn’t it much better to prepare with love a little chicken with a rich and delicious little stuffing, for your grand love?
To live a grand love it’s very, very important to live always together while you’re alive, and if possible, to die together – to not die of pain. It’s important to be careful permanently not only with the body but also with the mind, because any “lows” of yours, your loved one feels – and it cools a little the love. It’s important to be well-mannered without too many courtesies, sweet and conciliatory without cowardice; to know how to make money out of poetry – To live a grand love.
It’s important to drink whiskey (but if you’re a band drunk never risk it!) and be impermeable to the I-said-you-said – that don’t have anything to do with love.
But all this adds up to nothing, if in this darkness and hopelessness you don’t manage to find a loved one – To live a grand love.
(The translation may have one or two small errors – my limitations - but it translates the song with minimum loss in meaning and spirit.)
Vinicius De Morais reads Para viver um grande amor in Portuguese to music
