Family Portrait

(Camera in Landscape by André Kertész, 1894-1985,
Hungarian-born photographer)

“[In the beginning,] the photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer — a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same things, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.” ~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

FAMILY PORTRAIT

Yes, this family portrait
is a little dusty.
The father’s face doesn’t show
how much money he earned.

The uncles’ hands don’t reveal
the voyages both of them made.
The grandmother’s smoothed and yellowed;
she’s forgotten the monarchy.

The children, how they’ve changed.
Peter’s face is tranquil,
that wore the best dreams.
And John’s no longer a liar.

The garden’s become fantastic.
The flowers are gray badges.
And the sand, beneath dead feet,
is an ocean of fog.

In the semicircle of armchairs
a certain movement is noticed.
The children are changing places,
but noiselessly! it’s a picture.

Twenty years is a long time.
It can form any image.
If one face starts to wither,
another presents itself, smiling.

All these seated strangers,
my relations? I don’t believe it.
They’re guests amusing themselves
in a rarely-opened parlor.

Family features remain
lost in the play of bodies.
But there’s enough to suggest
that a body is full of surprises.

The frame of this family portrait
holds its personages in vain.
They’re there voluntarily,
they’d know how — if need be — to fly.

They could confine themselves
in the room’s chiaroscuro¹,
live inside the furniture
or the pockets of old waistcoats.

The house has many drawers,
papers, long staircases.
When matter becomes annoyed,
who knows the malice of things?

The portrait does not reply,
it stares; in my dusty eyes
it contemplates itself.
The living and dead relations

multiply in the glass.
I don’t distinguish those
that went away from those
that stay. I only perceive
the strange idea of family

traveling through the flesh.

~ Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987), Brazilian poet

¹ chiaroscuro — interplay of light and shadow