de estado febril

As a connoisseur of both poetry and translation, I’ve been intrigued since college by and dedicated to the art of transposing poetry between languages, which I practiced doing for years in blogs that do not exist anymore. For the past couple of years, I’ve been dedicated to putting together my passion and skills and translating poetry professionally. With that in mind, I proposed to Thais—whose work I’ve known and admired for several years now, since before her first book was published in 2021—that we select some of her poems for me to translate, and I was delighted when she agreed. My biggest challenge while working on her poems was to choose the words that would paint the same picture in English that Thais had painted in Portuguese, as her poems are very visual for me. There was a lot of tweaking until I reached the final form, which you find published here. For example, in “celestial bodies,” the original poem says, literally, “they decide to put their hands to create.” Thais used the verb “put,” not “use,” which would have been the more common verb. But “put” did not sound right in English, and I walked around my flat willing my brain to give me something better—and if I may say so myself, “to busy their hands” ended up being a great choice.