Today we bring you a poem from one of Brazil’s most lauded living poets, Salgado Maranhão. In clear, crisp lines, the poet evokes a sense of loss and a sublimation of that loss into something beautiful, something lasting. If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out the poetry section in the Winter 2018 issue of Asymptote.
Day Without Dawn
Now,
in the city of your absence,
another day
breaks. And pleading,
a cry trickles through the countryside.
All places
are made of your befores.
From the window,
night comes
with empty hands. And
everything in the end vanishes
like a tissue woven of wind.
Only my heart insists
on raising up your name…
beyond, beyond forgetting.
translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin
Salgado Maranhão won the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti in 1999 with Mural of Winds. In 2011, The Color of the Word won the Brazilian Academy of Letters’ highest poetry award. In 2014, the Brazilian PEN Club chose his recent collection, Mapping the Tribe, as the best book of poetry for the year. In 2015 the Brazilian Writers Union gave him first prize, again for The Color of the Word. A year ago, he was awarded the Jabuti for the second time, an extremely rare honor. In addition to fourteen books of poetry, he has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians. His work has appeared in numerous magazines in the USA, including Bitter Oleander, BOMB, Cream City Review, Dirty Goat, Florida Review, Massachusetts Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Here in the USA, he is represented by two bilingual collections of poetry: Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015). On November 13, Salgado received an honoris causa degree for his achievements in poetry from the Federal University of Piaui in Teresina, Brazil.
Alexis Levitin’s forty books of translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent books include Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012), Eugenio de Andrade’s The Art of Patience (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013), Ana Minga’s Tobacco Dogs (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2013), Santiago Vizcaino’s Destruction in the Afternoon (Diálogos Books, 2015), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press, 2015), Salgado Maranhão’s Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015) and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord (Milkweed Editions, 2016). In 2012, Levitin and Maranhao completed a three month reading tour of the USA, visiting over fifty colleges and other institutions. In the spring of 2016, they read from Blood of the Sun and Tiger Fur in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast. In the fall of 2017, they have read at Yale University, New Jersey City University, Rutgers University/Newark, Boston University, University of Massachusetts at Lowell and the Chapin School in Princeton.
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