Posts filed under 'Brazilian Academy of Letters'

Translation Tuesday: “Day Without Dawn” by Salgado Maranhão

February 20, 2018 | in Translations | by Salgado Maranhão

All places
are made of your befores.

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

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 31, 2017 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Julia Sherwood, Layla Benitez-James, Maíra Mendes Galvão, and Theophilus Kwek

The latest literary news from Brazil, Singapore, the Czech Republic, and Spain!

We have a busy schedule this week, Readers, so pack light and wear comfy shoes! First stop is Brazil, where we’ll board book-selling buses and more. Then we’re off to Singapore to check out a nation-wide, month-long poetry project before visiting a new cultural hub in the Czech Republic. And final destination: the vibrant literary scene in Spain!

Maíra Mendes Galvão, Editor-at-Large for Brazil, gives us the latest:

Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll passed away at age 70 on March 29 in his house in Porto Alegre, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Noll stood out among his contemporaries in the 1980s for his language-driven writing at a time when Brazilian literature favored narrative and plot. His novels Quiet Creature in the Corner and Hotel Atlântico were translated into English by Adam Morris, and Harmada was translated by David Treece.

Rizoma Livros is an itinerant bookstore on a bus that tours the city of São Paulo, Brazil, offering books by independent publishers such as n-1 and elefante. It will be parked in front of Middle-Eastern food restaurant Al Janiah, owned by Palestinian refugees and Brazilian friends, in the Bixiga neighborhood of São Paulo until the end of April.

Another book bus is touring the Northeast State of Ceará as part of the project “Ceará Leitor” [Ceará Reader], aimed at encouraging the population of smaller towns such as Baturité, Aquiraz, Maracanaú and Horizonte to read more by offering discounted books by publishing houses from Ceará. The will also donate book baskets to the visited municipalities’ book collections for public and school libraries, and offer an orientation on how to start book clubs. Organized by the Viva Brasil institute and the Ceará Book Chamber, with the support of SEBRAE, the Secretariat of Culture of the State of Ceará, and the Government of the State of Ceará, the project hopes to open up, for as many people as possible, the possibility of acquiring the habit of reading as a form of entertainment and education.

The Brazilian Academy of Letters has elected writer and diplomat João Almino as a new member, taking up its 22^nd Chair, previously occupied by the recently deceased physician and academic Ivo Pitanguy. Some of Almino’s fiction work has been translated into English, French, Spanish and Italian, and he’s also written non-fiction books about historical and political philosophy.