Posts filed under 'Brazilian literature'

Autoria Negra: An Interview with Cidinha da Silva

September 7, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia

We sought and insistently seek ways to affirm our existence, to demarcate places for the living human beings that we are.

I first met Cidinha da Silva about a year ago, at the International Literary Festival of Paraty (Flip), in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the time, I had just begun translating Sobre-viventes! (Pallas Editora, 2016), a collection of crônicas that approach Brazil, past and present, through everyday lived experience. In 2010, Cidinha coined the neologism Exuzilhar, a verb that combines the Portuguese encruzilhar (“to cross”) or encruzilhada (“crossroads”) with Exu (an Orisha in the Yoruba religion, the divine messenger or gatekeeper). Exuzilhamento is indeed a driving force of Cidinha’s work, which, as she reveals here, “revolves around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity.” The interview that follows, conducted alongside my fellow translator Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva, showcases the complexity of Cidinha’s creative process and her critical place in contemporary Brazilian literature.

                                                                                 —Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil

Daniel Persia (DP): It’s great to connect with you again, Cidinha, especially after having featured some of your work in our Summer 2020 issue. Can you give us a general panorama of your career as a writer?

Cidinha da Silva (CS): I started publishing literature in 2006, in São Paulo, with a self-financed, independent book of crônicas, Cada tridente em seu lugar. It’s a book that still sells widely, fourteen years later. The fourth edition was just released, with Mazza Edições (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). I had always wanted to publish literature. I wrote crônicas for an online magazine and readers kept asking when we’d have a book. That’s what really got me thinking about publishing my first literary work; I had already published a book of essays in 2003, Ações afirmativas em educação—experiências brasileiras [Affirmative Action in Education: Brazilian Experiences] (Summus).

Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva (AO): Tell us about your creative process. Do you have a daily writing routine?

CS: My writing process has practical, creative, and other dimensions that are somewhat intangible. In practical terms, I’m a relatively organized and disciplined writer; I sit and write at predetermined times. I don’t have any problems with the “blank page,” but sometimes I’m faced with a lack of time to write. My writing routine depends on the volume of work at hand, on how much I need to accomplish to ensure survival: lesson planning; preparing and delivering lectures, workshops, and courses; reading; studying; traveling; keeping up with my online store and promoting my books. The time left for writing is very minimal, it boils down to just a few hours a week. I write very little on impulse; I usually write with a particular book in mind, one that I’m still developing or organizing. I also write a lot of commissioned work, for publications of the national press, primarily, but also theatre and essays.

As for the creative dimension, I prefer to write early in the morning, which is the best time of day for me. I write on my desktop computer, sitting in a comfortable chair in a large office, with a glass door on the balcony and the sun coming to visit me. I collect dictionaries and keep them in reach for consultation. My productivity is greatest in the morning, for about four to six hours (when I’m in a more intense process of production), but from the fourth hour onward, what I really do is reread, revise, consult reference materials. I read everything out loud, several times; that’s how I set rhythm and establish harmony. When I’m mulling over an idea for a new book, I tend to take a lot of notes in my notebooks—scattered things, like names for characters, beginnings of crônicas or short stories. I usually only write down ideas, but when I write down full sentences, they almost always unfold into one or two paragraphs at that very moment, when they’re first being recorded. And so there you have the beginning of a new text.

The unimaginable happens in dreams (of which I remember little or nothing), in conversations, in exchanges with real people, in observing the world, in interacting with stones, plants, flowers, water, earth and fire, and smoke, too. In intuition, which I’ve built over the years, in exercises and life tests, to pay full attention and remain confident. Spirituality communicates with me through intuition.

DP: What are some of the main themes in your work?

CS: Through two of my more recent books—Um Exu em Nova York (2018), a collection of short stories, and Exuzilhar (2019), the first volume in a series of selected crônicas—I’ve come to understand that my aesthetic interests revolve around Africanities, Orixalities, Ancestralities, and the tension and dialogue between tradition (African, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Diasporic, and Afro-Indigenous) and contemporaneity. Other topics include racism, racial discrimination, and racial inequalities, though the central theme really is that tension and dialogue mentioned above. I’m also interested in themes of death, love, soccer, and politics. I write a lot about politics. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2020

August 17, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Samuel Kahler, and Scarlett Castillo

New work from Guadalupe Nettel, Małgorzata Szejnert, and Daniel Galera!

This month’s selections of newly translated world literature seem to revolve around the unknown, be it to uphold or dispel it: a Mexican short story collection explores its protagonists’ dark psyches while providing no easy answers, a piece of Polish reportage rediscovers lost voices on nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant experience in America, and a Brazilian novel hilariously tackles a group of friends’ exploits in almost unchartered digital territory during the nineties.

bezoar

Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, Seven Stories Press, 2020

Review by Samuel Kahler, Communications Director

Unusual as they may be, the strange and wistful short fictions in Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories are not only clever in their portrayal of human desire and obsession; they are often wise as well. Nettel, an acclaimed Mexican author, was named as one of the Bogotá 39 and is a recipient of the largest Spanish-language short story collection prize, the Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero. Bezoar is her second collection of stories, published in the original Spanish in 2008 and now translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine.

Over the course of the book, Nettel and her characters have something fresh to reveal about their unique obsessions and secrets (the stories are told from the first-person perspective). But at just over one hundred pages, Bezoar is an all-too-brief journey through the grey areas and dark recesses of hidden passions, lusts, and compulsions.

Depending on one’s subjective definition, the narrators of Bezoar might be considered everyday people who, at face value, live quiet, unremarkable lives: a photographer in Paris, a man strolling through Tokyo’s botanical gardens, a teenager on a summer vacation, and—yes—a voyeur here, a stalker there, and one supermodel under psychiatric supervision. While memorable and idiosyncratic, these are not outsized characters with grand schemes; instead, they look inward and act in near-singular pursuit of resolving psychological issues. Fittingly, their stories are intimate chamber pieces that delight in the details of unfulfilled needs and wants, emotional attachments and detachments, and traces of personal insight that at times reflect a broader general truth about human dissatisfaction. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 24, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Daniel Persia, and José García Escobar

This week's latest news from Brazil, Hong Kong, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news of what’s happening around the world. In Brazil, a newly published collection draws together international voices discussing their experience during quarantine; in Hong Kong, tightened lockdown measures have meant book fairs and events moving online; and in Central America, the Autores en cuarentena event series is taking place online, whilst Carlos Wyld Espina’s essential political essay El Autócrata has been reissued. 

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has no doubt weighed heavily on writers, altering not only their physical workspaces and subject matter, but also their orientation to the art itself. In Brazil, the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) has invited 126 individuals and collectives to reflect on their experiences during quarantine, featuring multimedia work from writers, visual artists, and musicians, among others. Meanwhile, reflections have gone global with Para além da quarentena: reflexões sobre crise e pandemia, which showcases critical discussions from Brazil, Italy, France, Portugal, the United States, and Uruguay. The collection, released in June, is available in free pdf and e-book formats through mórula editorial.

Another new release, Pandemônio: nove narrativas entre São Paulo—Berlim [Pandemonium: Nine Narratives Bridging São Paulo—Berlin], takes a more in-depth look from two of the world’s major literary hubs: São Paulo and Berlin. Organized by Cristina Judar and Fred Di Giacomo, Pandemônio touches on the pandemic, the ongoing economic crisis, and the advance of authoritarianism, highlighting similarities and differences between São Paulo and Berlin. Featured authors include Aline Bei, Cristina Judar, Jorge Ialanji Filholini and Raimundo Neto (representing São Paulo) and Carola Saavedra, Fred Di Giacomo, Alexandre Ribeiro, Karin Hueck, and Carsten Regel (representing Berlin). Pandemônio illustrates the strength of collective testimony, highlighting how stories have the power to bridge experiences from distant corners of the globe. The book is available for free online at www.pandemonioantologia.com, and through Amazon. A full English translation will be released in August. READ MORE…

Os bichos me fantasticam: On Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark

July 8, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Austyn Wohlers

Both Lispector and Clark use human contact with animals as a way to get closer to a paradoxical self-alienation that leads to self-actualization.

One of the greatest pleasures of a text can result from its echoes throughout other mediums, when we startle upon the themes and traits of our most cherished authors beyond the page. In this essay, Austyn Wohlers traces the dialogue that forms between lauded Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and visual artist Lygia Clark, most notable for their mutual application of animality and wildness.

Clarice Lispector’s fascination with animal life is one of her defining qualities as a writer: readers may be familiar with G.H.’s fateful encounter with a cockroach in The Passion According to G.H., or Lucrécia’s bodily identification with horses in The Besieged City. Her ideas about how animals affect the humans who encounter them were complex, as one can see in this excerpt from her posthumously-published novel A Breath of Life, referencing Lispector’s real-life dog Ulysses:

Contact with animal life is indispensable to my psychic health. My dog reinvigorates me completely . . . All he does is ‘be.’ ‘Being’ is his activity . . . When he falls asleep in my lap I watch over him and his very rhythmical breathing. And—he motionless in my lap—we form a single organic being, a living mute statue.

This description of animal-human contact as a “living mute statue” reminds me of Lispector’s contemporary (and fellow Brazilian) Lygia Clark’s Bicho sculptures. Mostly created in the early 1960s, the Bichos were a series of unique sculptures largely designed to be handled, manipulated, and warmed by the viewer as one would hold a small animal. In The Abandonment of Art, Cornelia Butler writes that she “imagined the encounter with [the Bichos] as something like an exchange between two organisms”—forming, in other words, the same “living mute statue” that Lispector describes. Both Lispector and Clark use human contact with animals as a way to get closer to a paradoxical self-alienation that leads to self-actualization: Clark’s empty-full (vazio-pleno), described by Suely Rolnik as the moment “when the silent incubation of a new reality of feeling is underway,” and Lispector’s wild heart—the thing itself—the it.

The word bicho does not have a direct cognate in English, and is usually translated as “beast,” “critter,” “animal,” or “pet.” The word in Portuguese has a diminutive quality, so the cutesiness imparted by words like “critter” and “pet” convey the tone well, and communicate the lighthearted spirit with which Clark expects viewers to play with the Bichos while palliating—or perhaps humanizing—their more serious, transformative, “living mute statue” nature. Interestingly, the word bicho appears often in Lispector’s writing, and though Lygia Clark’s usage is often translated as “critter,” Lispector’s is translated as the more serious word “animal.” Elizabeth Friis provides a few examples from Lispector’s novel Água viva in her essay “In my Core I have the Strange Impression that I don’t Belong to the Human Species: Clarice Lispector’s Água viva as Life Writing?”:

Ás vezes eletrizo-me over bicho.
Sometimes I get electrified when I see animals.

Os bichos me fantasticam.
Animals fantastricate me.

Não ter nascido bicho é uma minha secreta nostalgia.
Not having been born an animal is a secret nostalgia of mine.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2020

June 15, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Eva Wissting, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

New publications from Brazil, Japan, and Poland!

This month, our selections of newly published literature from around the globe seem to cohere under the umbrella of trauma and memory, and the way they inevitably turn into narratives in the process of retrospection. From a Polish work of non-fiction that traces the sufferings of Poles during WWII, to the journals that document a Jewish immigrant in Brazil, to the strange and unspoken secrets of a small village in Japan—these works are of both documentation and imagination.

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A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm, World Editions, 2020

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

It is a grim fact, one that acquires increasing urgency in recent years, that those who were alive to experience the horrors of the Second World War are getting older: before long, we will no longer be able to talk to people who have direct experience of those times. Thus, we are increasingly grappling with the problem of second-generation memory: with the matter of how the descendants of survivors preserve and pass on the stories of the past for future generations, and with questions as to whether, or how, those descendants inherit the trauma of their ancestors. Anna Janko’s A Little Annihilation is a powerful meditation on these issues.

In this reckoning with the past, Janko describes the destruction of the Polish village of Sochy by the German military on Tuesday, June 1, 1943: the inhabitants massacred and buildings burned to the ground over the course of a mere few hours. Nine-year-old Teresa Ferenc, Janko’s mother, was among the survivors. In recounts of conversations, her mother describes her memories of that day—most especially, witnessing the death of both of her parents. Janko also chronicles interviews with other survivors from the village, interweaving their stories and noting the discrepancies between them, while describing efforts to tabulate the exact number of lives lost. The impossibility of establishing precise details is a crucial reminder of the intertwined nature of history and memory, a refutation of the common notion of their opposition, as well as a reflection on the challenges of documenting a massacre.

For some English-language readers, Janko’s text may be the first work they have encountered that discusses the sufferings of non-Jewish Poles during the Second World War. For Americans especially, to learn about Nazi atrocities is generally to learn about their efforts to exterminate European Jews, without a detailed understanding of how their eugenicist ideology shaped their policies and strategies in a broader variety of ways. Confusion over the fact that Poland was occupied territory has led to mistaken statements about “Polish death camps” (most notably, perhaps, when President Barack Obama used the term during a ceremony awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski in 2012; he later apologized for the error)—as Janko angrily reminds readers. “In my opinion it would be best if Germany gathered up all the camps they left behind in Poland. So that no one would be mistaken any longer.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Marigô” by Cidinha da Silva

May 19, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia

“Can I call you marigô, too?”

A lexical misunderstanding leads to a hilariously awkward exchange in Cidinha da Silva’s “Marigô,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. “Marigô” is an exemplar of the crônica form, a uniquely Brazilian genre of journalistic writing that combines slice-of-life anecdotes with (often ironic) social commentary. Cidinha da Silva, one of Brazil’s most dynamic and prolific contemporary writers and cronistas, utilizes the third-person present tense to capture the conversational nature of the form, mimicking the complex rhythm and set-up of a joke. Here the punchline not only provides laughs, but also a wry statement on Afro-Brazilian identities and the cultural importance of language.

Samantha worships her friend Dandara—for her beauty, her culture, her intelligence, her knowledge of the world, and, above all, her integrity of purpose. Samantha views Dandara as an activist even when talking with her mother on the phone. Every time Dandara calls—which isn’t just once a day—she greets her mother with an “Oi oi oi, Marigô, calling just to say hello!”

Samantha’s face lights up every time. Somehow she got it in her head that Marigô meant “mother” in Yoruba. At home, she wrote down the word in her small dictionary-diary, where she’s been recording the African words that circulate daily in Brazil. She has a ton already—it’s just a matter of finding the right time to start using them in her stories. Dandara thinks her co-worker is an Afro-nut, the kind of person who wants to transform anything and everything into an episode of African rebirth.

On Dandara’s birthday, her mother decides to surprise her and shows up at her work to take them to Rhinosaurus’s, her daughter’s favorite fast food joint. While waiting for her daughter in the parking lot, she amusingly reads Barack Obama’s biography. Samantha ends up leaving work before Dandara; when she sees two black hands behind a steering wheel holding a copy of the biography of the president of the United States, she goes Afro-nuts. Only a fascinating person would read such a book, she thinks. She has to introduce herself, has to get to know that woman so she can soak up all of her knowledge. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

December 13, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daniel Persia, Eva Wissting, and José García Escobar

The latest news from Brazil, Central America, and Sweden!

This week our writers report on a stage adaption of Clarice Lispector in New York, new publications in Guatemala and El Salvador, and the Nobel Prize for Literature ceremony in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

December has already been a notable month for Brazilian literature across the globe, with Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart making its onstage (off-off-Broadway) debut in New York City. Lispector’s first novel takes on a stream-of-consciousness narration as it traces the life of its protagonist, Joana, from her middle-class childhood through an unhappy marriage—never afraid to delve into her deepest, innermost thoughts. Under the direction of Ildiko Nemeth at The New Stage Theatre Company, the stage adaptation places the brilliant language of Alison Entrekin’s 2012 translation in the hands of a highly memorable cast, supported by video projections and costume designs that are at once subtle and revealing. BroadwayWorld critic Derek McCracken praises the show’s “poetic, organic and otherworldly feel . . . [it] conjures up the mood and elements of a love story that got ghosted.” If you find yourself in New York, Near to the Wild Heart will be playing at the New Stage Performance Space until January 18, 2020—don’t miss out!

While Entrekin’s words have been making their way onto the mainstage, the well-known Australian translator has been busy sharing her latest endeavor: a new English-language translation of the classic, Grande Sertão: Veredas. Entrekin participated in the 11th International Connections Itaú Cultural event, held from December 3-4, 2019 in São Paulo, Brazil, where she delivered the last installment of a three-part translation workshop. Dozens of other writers, academics and critics—including American translator Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, Japanese translator Chika Takeda, and French translator and editor Paula Anacaona—engaged in dialogue on the role of Brazilian literature and cinema around the globe. Also among the topics discussed was the state of Brazilian and Portuguese studies at higher education institutions, as many universities shift departmental focus from national to transnational literatures. Each of the panels was recorded, and the complete series can be accessed for free online, courtesy of Itaú Cultural. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Theory of Affections” by Luca Argel

November 19, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Daniel Persia

I always thought that this was a universal truth.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, Luca Argel spins a simple observation into a theory of relation and attachment. Trafficking in clichés that are made vivid by honest prose, this piece of micro-fiction outlines an order of love in what is often considered an extremely sterile place, devoid of culture: the supermarket. For the narrator, the simple task of prioritizing food on a shelf based on the date it was produced or purchased leads to a revelation about duration and relationships. It is not often that fiction so accurately represents the metonymic understandings that are developed at young ages by considering relations between things and people. Argel’s writing suggests that metaphor is alive and well in the mind of a child; and these metaphors stay with us as comforting touchstones throughout our lives.

I’ve enjoyed supermarkets a lot more ever since I left my parents’ house. I remember my mother telling me that they always place the almost-expired products in the front, and the newer ones in the back. I always thought that this was a universal truth: “all supermarkets have a policy of storing newer products in the back and older products in the front, so customers grab the older ones first.” But that’s not always the case. Today, for instance, the peas on the back of the shelf have the same expiration date as the peas on the front of the shelf. Generally, in the canned goods section, this rule doesn’t apply. But it does in the bakery section; in the bakery section, it never fails! You always need to look for the fresher products, for the ones that will last longer. When we got home, my father would arrange the groceries like that: recently purchased food went to the back of the pantry, while everything that had been there for a while came to the front. At a certain point in my childhood, I began to suspect that my parents had met at a supermarket. One day, she was looking for the freshest heart of palm; he was in the aisle behind her, looking for the freshest mayonnaise, and when they got to the back of the shelf, they realized that the shelf didn’t have a back, one looking right at the other.

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In Memoriam: Victor Heringer

March 29, 2018  |  in News  |  by Alice Sant'Anna, Lara Norgaard, and Rita Mattar

Borders, designed to be crossed and, whenever possible, abolished, were recurrent themes in Victor's oeuvre.

Today we bring you a reflection on the life of Brazilian writer Victor Heringer. Victor’s elegant and thought-provoking non-fiction piece “Notes for a General Theory of the Arriviste” was featured in the Summer 2017 issue of Asymptote where we have been long-time admirers of his work. Victor, who would be thirty this week, passed away on March 7, 2018. Today we celebrate his literary work.

Victor Heringer was a multi-genre, multi-faceted artist. It’s not enough to remember him as “Victor, the poet” or “Victor, the writer.” Victor drew and made films and sound installations. He wrote poetry, nonfiction, novels. It was as though the borders between genres were not so fixed or important. Indeed, borders, designed to be crossed and, whenever possible, abolished, were recurrent themes in his oeuvre.

“Being Brazilian, and especially being from Rio de Janeiro, was something I had to learn how to do,” said the writer, born in Rio in 1988, in an interview. “I spent my childhood moving between cities and countries, mostly Argentina and Chile. For a few years, I was sure I would stay in Santiago forever and become a Chilean citizen. When I came back to Brazil as a teenager, it took me a long time to lose the accent. I felt Chilean. In Chile, I’d felt Argentinian; in England, Brazilian; in Peru, where I am now, I’m starting to feel that I am nothing at all, maybe just a stateless person with documents and a few languages mixed up in my head.”

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My 2017: Lara Norgaard

December 21, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Lara Norgaard

I think about how collective memory—that living, ever-shifting phenomenon—shapes the stories we tell ourselves today.

It’s time to kick off an annual tradition! From today till the end of the year, Asymptote staff will take turns reflecting on his or her year in reading, revealing the pivots they took in their consumption of literature, and the intimate ways those pivots informed their lived experience. First up, our Editor-at-Large for Brazil, Lara Norgaard.

In the first painful weeks of 2017, I found myself looking to the past to make sense of the present. How did we get here? That was the question that repeatedly echoed through my head, like a drumbeat, during inaugurations, rallies, executive orders, new legislation. How did we get here?

It was on a flight to Buenos Aires during those first painful weeks of January that I gained insight into why this is so difficult a question to answer. I’d packed an old copy of the Argentinian-Chilean-American playwright Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden (1990) and, as the plane took off, found myself transported back to the first years of democracy after Pinochet’s fall from power. A woman who had been kidnapped under the dictatorship faces the very man who tortured and raped her: he enters her home, randomly, after helping her husband Gerardo get back home when he is stranded because of a flat tire. She takes justice into her own hands, staging a trial in her living room, while Gerardo, who is a member of the truth commission investigating deaths incurred by the military regime, urges her to follow democratic procedure even if the state might never recognize her story or bring the man to court. In his stunning English-language play about post-dictatorship politics, Dorfman captures a private memory that is at odds with public discourse. Though the fairly recent periods of fascism in South America predate the global bubbling up of right-wing energy in 2017, official narratives of those regimes remain incomplete.

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Translation Tuesday: Poems by Roberto Piva

November 14, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Maíra Mendes Galvão and Roberto Piva

I am the acid trip / in nighttime boats

Today we present the Brazilian poet, Roberto Piva, translated by Asymptote Editor at Large for Brazil, Maíra Mendes Galvão. At once spiritual and carnal, Piva’s poems are rooted in the chaos of the metropolis, the dirt and grime of the urban underworld, all with a Surrealist and sometimes Romantic tinge, at the heels of André Breton, Murilo Mendes, Lautréamont, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His utter divergence from the formal constraints of constructivism and the then-flourishing Brazilian concrete movement, as well as his reliance on the sensorial, rendered him one of the “poetas malditos”—maligned poets—an outcast even from the infamous yet famous Brazilian “marginal generation.” “Piazza I” first appeared in Piazzas (1964), while “Poema Vertigem” (Poem Vertigo) was published in Ciclones (1997).

Piazza I

One afternoon
is enough to go mad
Or to hit the Museum to see Bosch
a winter’s afternoon
on a grave patio
where garòfani milk-shake & Claude
obssessed with angels
or vast engines that spin with
seraphic grace
playing the banjo of Remembrance
without the love found tasted dreamed of
& long municipal vivaria
without seeking to understand
imagine
the eyeless marrow
or virgin birds
it just so happened that I saw again
the simple mortal tower of Dream
not with real & cylindrical fingers
Du Barry Byron the Marquess of Santos
Swift Jarry with the noise
of bells in my barbarian nights
the chariots of fire
the trapezes of mercury
are hands writing & fishing
eschatological nymphs
small cannons of blood & the large open eyes
for some miracle of Luck
I am the jet set of damned love
INSIDE THE NIGHT & ITS ILLUMINATED CRAMPS
the parrots of death with Aristotle at the stern of thunder
THE WILL TO DRIFT AROUND LOVE’S DATA
spinach in the morning & cream cheese
sporty-souls with flowers between their teeth
my orange opening up like a door
YOUR VOICE IS ETERNAL I see the ashen hand tearing
the wall of the world
WE ARE IN LIFE DEFINITELY

READ MORE…

In Conversation with Ferrez, the Father of Literatura Marginal

October 17, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Kathleen McCaul Moura

We don't wait for writers to come to the periphery, we create our own kind of art.

Brazil’s São Paulo is the largest city in Latin America, with a population of around 20 million people. Where Rio de Janeiro, a few hours up the coast, delights tourists with its beautiful scenery and relaxed beach lifestyle, São Paulo often horrifies visitors. Dubbed ‘blade-runner in the tropics’ by the Serbian-born musician DJ Suba, who was one of Brazil’s most important producers, the city can seem, at first, like a dystopic mess of concrete towers and roads which continue endlessly into a shimmering grey horizon.

What makes the city so vast is the miles and miles of densely packed poor neighbourhoods that border the city. Locals call this a peripheria—the periphery—or as margins—the margins. This border was built over the last few decades by immigrants to the city. Finding jobs but nowhere to live they began building their own homes on the outskirts of São Paulo. Poorly constructed houses and unplanned streets with very few amenities, the periphery has been described as medieval by some local commentators. Life here is often characterised by violence, crime and isolation. Locals with low-paid service jobs in the centre of the city often commute four or five hours a day to get to work because of problems with roads, transport, and traffic.

All of this makes the fact that the São Paulo periphery is home to one of the most popular Brazilian literary movements in recent years all the more surprising. Poetry salons, called Saraus, happen all around the periphery every day of the week, where writers and poets recite compositions detailing life in their neighbourhoods. The best of these events are packed with people of all ages and from all backgrounds. There are very few established writers who have not made the pilgrimage to a periphery Sarau. The movement even has its very own bookshop, devoted to all that is marginal, located in the centre of the city.

The author Ferrez is known as the father of the Literatura Marginal movement. His novel, Capão Pecado, published in 2000, was one of the first contemporary accounts of life in the periphery by an author who grew up there. Its descriptions of violence, use of city and hip-hop influenced slang, and characters who often seem to have no future made the book a classic and Ferrez himself a household name. When he coined the phrase Literatura Marginal, he became a symbolic role model for a generation of marginal writers.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Waters of the World” by Clarice Lispector

August 4, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Katrina Dodson

And that was what she’d been missing: the sea inside her like the thick liquid of a man. Now she’s entirely equal to herself.

There it is, the sea, the most unintelligible of non-human existences. And here is the woman, standing on the beach, the most unintelligible of living beings. As a human being she once posed a question about herself, becoming the most unintelligible of living beings. She and the sea.

Their mysteries could only meet if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds made with the trust by which two understandings would surrender to each other.

She looks at the sea, that’s what she can do. It is only cut off for her by the line of the horizon, that is, by her human incapacity to see the Earth’s curvature. READ MORE…

In Conversation: Portuguese translator Alison Entrekin

February 18, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by Eric M. B. Becker

Do you use a special filter to replace whatever has been lost, or do you leave the photograph unadulterated?

Eric Becker: Before we get into more details about Brazilian literature itself—how is it you came to literary translation, and why Brazil?

AE: As is probably the case with most literary translators, I didn’t just wake up one morning and think “I want to be a literary translator.” Rather, it came to me slowly. I had originally studied Creative Writing at university in Australia, and wanted to be a writer. But fresh out of university, I married a Brazilian and moved to Brazil. I did what many foreigners do when they first arrive here: I taught English. But it wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing. I realized I had a flair for language and did a course in translation, with the sole intent of becoming a literary translator, even though I had read barely any Brazilian literature before that. I just had a hunch that the creative writing and translation skills could be a useful pairing.

EB: You’ve been translating now for about a decade and a half. What is it you’ve learned or what has changed in your practice during that time?

AE: Well, apart from settling into a way of working that works for me, I’ve developed countless theories about the differences between Portuguese and English, between Brazilian literature and English literatures. In fact, with every new book I translate, I either further one of my pet theories a little or more, or develop a completely new one.

For example, I am endlessly fascinated by how certain literary aesthetics can be received so differently from one culture to the next. The very grammar of the Portuguese language, and the culture in which it is embedded, have given rise to such different perceptions of what constitutes “good style.” Sentences that are witty in Portuguese can come across as pedantic or convoluted in English.

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