This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to feature a poem by the award-winning Portuguese writer Ana Luísa Amaral. In “The Breath,” the speaker’s observation of the mundane everyday on public transport turns into a moment of poetic transport. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, this life-affirming poem from a frequent contributor duo is one to hold and behold, to turn over in our hands until, we realise, it becomes something too that breathes, something that moves.
The Breath
The woman sitting opposite me
plays with her handbag—
distractedly
She flips the handle-cum-wing
of the bag
back and forth
twines it around her fingers
Like a small
dancerly bird,
the wing-cum-handle comes alive
between the woman’s fingers
The bag is blue and the zip yellow,
the woman is old,
her skirt faded, her blouse tired
and old like her, she’s wearing slippers
But she plays with the wing
of that handbag
with the blithe air of a child or a sparrow,
unconcerned about the serious people—
hands serenely,
seriously resting on their laps—
who sit, motionless, reading the paper
The woman sitting
opposite me
plays with her handbag,
distractedly
Is she distracted? Or the handbag?
performing pirouettes,
elegant somersaults, brief dance steps,
with the sun lighting one side of her face,
the woman is almost pretty
with her absorbed child-like air
as she breathes life into that handbag,
which dances
distractedly
in her lap
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Ana Luísa Amaral has published over thirty books of poetry, as well as a play, a novel, essays, and several books for children. She has been translated into over twenty languages, and she herself has translated into Portuguese the poetry of Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, John Updike, and Louise Gluck. With Margaret Jull Costa she co-translated the poetry of Mário de Sá Carneiro (London, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2020). In 2019, her poetry collection What’s in a Name (trs. MJC) was published by New Directions in the United States. She has won many national and international prizes, the most recent being the 2021 Premio Reina Sofia for Ibero-American Poetry. In 2022, a book of essays on her work will be published in the United Kingdom: The Most Perfect Excess: The Works of Ana Luísa Amaral (eds. Claire Williams & Luisa Coelho).
Margaret Jull Costa has worked as a translator for over thirty years, translating the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists: Javier Marías, José Saramago, and Eça de Queiroz, and poets: Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Ana Luísa Amaral. Her work has brought her many prizes, among them the Pen Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz. In 2013, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature; and in 2018, she was awarded the Ordem Infante D. Henrique by the Portuguese government and a Lifetime Award for Excellence in Translation by the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, New York.
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