From the mouths of babes and drunks

Drunkards get to the point.
In The Harp just off St Martins Lane two nights ago, my friend Ernesto and I were accosted by an imposing Churchillian figure in faded denim, staring out the open window from his perch on a rather too small bar stool. 'Hey, you look like academic guys, with your beards.' We tried to wriggle out of the charge, but not quick enough to come up with alternative careers, owned up to our studies. G. was a chef.
When he heard I was studying and translating a contemporary Brazilian poet, G. the pissed Harpist stared goggle-eyed (was this good or bad?): 'Can you say some of it for me?'. I know his poetry, don't I? But I couldn't recite any. Was it the pressure? Only partly. I really haven't exercised that part of my knowing it. I've cut and pasted Antônio Moura's poetry hundreds of times, but here's someone who wants to hear it and I'm high and dry without a single line or two to croak out. Moura's last collection is Rio Silêncio, or Silence River, and for all my efforts his poems have returned to silence. He launches into his own whistle-stop tour through 'that Welsh eejit' Dylan Thomas' lesser known gems (he loves Thomas, and recites them all).
Quick-fire, out comes the next question, 'Where does poetry go from here?' I start to laugh - am I being quizzed?
'Don't laugh, don't laugh,' he says. 'This is serious.'

Yesterday I snatched a free hour or two to sit in the sun in Wellington Square and start Saramago's O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). In one corner of the near circular lawn a couple were having a lavish picnic, laughter peeled from Korean students sitting on the far side, and a mother and toddler ran about in the middle. A couple stumbled in, dishevelled, all over the place, like the people that hang around outside halfway houses and drug rehab clinics. They plonked themselves down a couple of yards from me. Was I in their corner?
'What you reading, good book?'
'To early to tell,' I say. I'm on the second page. It's not too early to tell, but I want to carry on reading. That answer should do it.
Except he likes to chat, comes and asks what the book is, if Portuguese is a kind of Spanish, and then asks if I can help with something. A woman told him there's a word for when you can't find the words for what you're thinking, no, no, more than that, for your feelings too, your emotions. And now he can't remember it, and it's driving him mad. Do I know it? I don't, suggest he ask the dictionary makers at Oxford University Press round the corner. - Ah, they'll never let me in there! Well, probably not, I agree, but he could leave a note. - Yeah, it's driving me mad, that word.

Is there a word for that? Because it's what we've all got, isn't it?, trying to draw the right words out of the silence, and it's not just a light entertainment for the literati, it's serious. I don't know, that word isn't just one word, maybe it's just language.

We were in The Harp that night after the launch of Hearing Eye's beautiful book of Stephen Watts' Mountain Language / Lingua di montagna (in Cristina Viti's translation), a delightful, moving long poem written with something of a novelist's touch, such affection for the people in it, and lyrical perceptions of alpine life. And perfect 'illustrations' by Stephen too.
To give his poem the last words:

Forgive me, nonno, I cannot properly put
into words that which I meant to say.