Four Poems

The first three poems in this sequence are from Bruna Beber’s most recent work, her 2017 book Ladainha (Litany). It’s a work divided into three sections, the titles of each alluding in some way to possible interpretations of parts that might make up a “litany,” with the poems themselves all with prime numbers as their titles, and poem “2” being the opening to the book. Some critics and readers have noted variations on what could be described as an oddness running throughout all Beber’s work, and in this book in particular, there are many examples of the way she often seems to turn language itself—and in turn, the way we look at the world—upside down, in a peculiar but also disconcertingly familiar way. This is something I think can be seen particularly well in poem “23,” a poem which also illustrates something Beber herself said in a recent interview, when asked about the apparently surreal aspects to her poetry, that “. . . there’s nothing more surreal than the everyday, or, the ‘real’ itself, and I can't answer what exactly ‘real’ versus ‘surreal’ might mean, because for me it's all the same thing” (Bruna Beber interviewed in Jornal do Commercio, June 2017). The final poem in the sequence here, “watering the plants,” is from her 2013 book Rua da padaria (Bakery street), a collection evoking her childhood in the town of Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro. It’s a book that to me feels, from start to finish, like a kind of magical, musical, multilayered film that we’re let into as readers, with its scenes of births, deaths, aunts, mothers, and grandmothers, embroidered towels, plants to be watered, floors to be slipped on, schoolrooms, homes, men and women, butchers and corner shops, wine and amusement parks, the passions of adolescent love, lemon popsicles, and guaraná soda. On the musicality of her work, Beber also said in a recent talk that, both with regards to how she reads and listens to the world around her, as well as how she writes, she considers poetry in terms of the construction of its sound, tone, and rhythm, and much of her writing practice involves being attuned to the way the language may occur out loud. (This aspect was discussed by Beber in a live event broadcast on the Youtube channel of the Mário de Andrade Library, São Paulo, June 2020.) Translating these poems with the aim of bringing to English-language readers as many of these aspects as possible of Beber’s singular, often comma-free, rhythm and tone, is an interesting task. There are infinite choices to be made in translation. In the case of Beber’s work, as well as deciding between, for example, bulging or bug-eyed for the eyes of the cicada, raising or bringing up for the mermaid, translation here is an attempt to bring over this very specific oddness, this music and this image, and to keep it all intact on its journey to new readers, who may then find ways to also enter and disentangle these poems one by one for themselves as they are reached.