In this week’s Translation Tuesday, we follow a moving lyrical meditation on family, belonging, and racial identity in an Angolan-Portuguese family as Ana Luísa Amaral traces the elements of a ‘glorious imperfection’ through music, photography, and the contours of the human face.
Genealogies, Imprints, and Flights
My great-great-grandmother was Angolan and black,
the other day I found her name on the reverse
not of a poem stuffed in a drawer,
but of a piece of paper imprinted
with silver salts and light
Her son had written her name
on that photograph, a gesture of remembrance.
I still remember him, vaguely,
I was only little and he was nearly blind,
he played the cello, my great-grandfather,
and spoke very slowly and in a rhythm
hesitant and delicate
They have both faded with age,
the photograph and my great-great-grandmother:
her tightly curled white hair
(the deep dark eyes of a tropical bird),
her very smooth skin which I envy,
for I inherited her name, but not the smoothness
or the colour of her skin
My daughter might reveal
those pigments passed to her
through that sweet-natured woman,
or so my grandmother used to say,
but my daughter’s blue eyes
came to her from a different imprint
The pigment launched through time
by a shared DNA
reached my daughter
in an invisible layer: an imperceptible
figment of skin, and an inherited voice:
more kora than cello
and played to a European beat
Volcanoes don’t really go extinct,
rather they conceal, in luminous stirrings,
reprints of us
tinged with the music of eternal filaments:
birds, albeit never perfect copies,
but that same glorious imperfection
gives wing one day to their flight—
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.
Ana Luísa Amaral has written over twenty books of poetry, fiction, and theatre, as well as books for children. Translated into several languages, her work has brought her many prizes, including the 2008 Grande Prémio from the Portuguese Writers’ Association and the PEN Prize for Fiction. She is also a translator, notably of the poetry of John Updike, Emily Dickinson, and William Shakespeare. A collection of her poetry, What’s in a Name, will be published by New Directions in 2019.
Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated works by novelists such as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago, and Javier Marías, along with the poets Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ana Luísa Amaral. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded an OBE for services to literature.
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