Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
March, 2020The young Brazilian poet Yasmin Nigri’s critically acclaimed debut collection Bigornas ("Anvils") features 70 short and long poems from different moments in her career. The book is divided into four sections: “Yesterday’s Street,” “Receipts,” “Malevich Woman,” and “Anvils.” The first section, drawing on Rilke, comprises longer confessional poems that are both witty and anguished. “Receipts” is about writers and artists who impacted Nigri, including Angélica Freitas, Ana Martins Marques, and Alejandra Pizarnik; the section’s closing poem, “Death,” depicts the author’s mother, their childhoods, and their conversations. “Malevich Woman” is composed of poems that describe a love relationship between two women. The final section, “Anvils,” is composed of 20 hard-hitting short poems. The translations featured here are from the third section, “Malevich Woman.” The poems in this section range from lyrical to erotic, interweaving humor, antithesis, internet memes, and literary citations (the long line in “I Like the Desert,” for instance, was taken from the experimental Portuguese poet Herberto Helder) with social and ecological issues. In selecting and translating these five poems, I have tried to provide a brief window into the beauty and diversity of Nigri’s work.
- Robert Smith
Biography (excerpt) | Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese
September, 2019Marighella: O guerrilheiro que incendiou o mundo is a biography of one of the most controversial and divisive figures in 20th-century Brazil. A communist activist from a young age, an elected state representative, and the founder of the largest armed organization opposing the ruling military dictatorship, this mixed-race poet raised in poverty in Salvador, Bahia would be declared public enemy number one by the country's political police.
The incident described in the excerpt featured here, Margihella's arrest in a Tijuca movie theater roughly one month after the military seized power in 1964, dominated the nation's headlines, shocking the general public for the details of wanton violence and repression. It would turn out to be a mere inkling of the grim future awaiting Brazil under military rule.
Brazil is a nation that has failed to adequately come to terms with this chapter in its history, having opted for sweeping amnesty rather than prosecuting those responsible for human rights violations. The lack of condemnation or a clear resolution has led, in the wake of recent corruption charges against elected officials, to a mood of dangerous nostalgia among many Brazilians currently disillusioned by the failures of democracy. This dangerous nostalgia is partially responsible for the outcome of last year's presidential election, when Brazilian voters chose a far-right candidate who favors torture as a law-enforcement tactic, praises the dictatorship's strong men for their brutal effectiveness, and calls for a return to the good old days when might was right, protest was outlawed, dissidents were exiled and executed, and elections were non-existent.
Written by veteran journalist Mário Magalhães (currently of The Intercept Brasil), Marighella: O guerrilheiro que incendiou o mundo is equal parts historical nonfiction and political thriller, meticulously researched and rich in context, surveying the country's social and political evolution from the World War I era through to the late 1960s. Published in Portuguese by Companhia das Letras in 2012 and winner of the Prêmio Jabuti for biography, the book served as the basis for Wagner Moura's biopic Marighella, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February of this year.
- Matthew Rinaldi
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Short Fiction
November, 2018I first experienced the weird joy of Cidinha da Silva’s fiction in 2015, in a survey of Brazilian prose I audited at Rice University. Da Silva’s writing called out to me, as it will call out to any reader, urgently and without apology. In spite of its buoyancy, though, the joy in writing so evident in the prose, da Silva’s fiction is loudest where it is silent. In her “Dublê de Ogum,” she tells the story of an adolescent boy’s trip to a psychologist. In this psychologist’s office, in the contours of dreams, are the illegible answers to questions never asked. Is fantasy an escape from reality, or an alternative to it? What does it mean to be insane in an insane world? Finally, what does it mean to be black in contemporary Brazil?
“The Stunt Double” demands of its reader some familiarity with Afro-Brazilian culture, especially the Candomblé spiritual tradition. Like Santería in Cuba, Candomblé fused elements of Catholicism with Yoruba and other spiritual traditions governed by the worship of divinities known as orixas. Above (and perhaps beyond) this story’s action stands Ogum, the Candomblé orixa of iron and war who, legend has it, slaughtered disrespectful subjects with a broadsword. It is this narrative tradition, obscure to an American audience but totally familiar to anybody living in da Silva’s Salvador, which makes the story’s title almost impossible to translate. The “dublê” in “Dublê de Ogum” signifies not only a “stunt double,” but a virtual doubling: an embodiment, that is, a literal possession. The boy at the center of this story is split—between New and Old, between cartoon heroes and blacksmith gods—and da Silva’s brilliant language bridges the gap between his two worlds. Similarly untranslatable is the diagnosis with which the story concludes: Filho de Ogum, a Son of Ogum, a sort of elaborate shorthand meaning hot-tempered yet fun-loving, impulsive yet logical, brave yet a bit selfish. In short, this is a story of contradictions.
- JP Gritton
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
November, 2018These short poems from Clarissa Macedo’s award-winning collection Na pata do cavalo há sete abismos (Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2014) present a number of fascinating dilemmas. A literal translation would sacrifice the vitality of the verses, which, notwithstanding their lightness and intensity, contain a striking lyrical sadness. Yet to take excessive semantic liberties or change word order arbitrarily would deprive the reader of the stimulation inspired by Macedo’s unusual and often surprising choices.
In these translations, priority was given to structural elements and sound, focusing not on how long the verses would be in print but on their size and value in terms of breath. Rather than counting syllables, I tried to create lines that adhered to the originals’ weight, rhythm, and duration in order to suggest the successions of moods I found in the originals, which move agilely between pensive and galloping. In crossing the bridge, I tried to concentrate not on reproducing individual phonemes but on building holistic relationships between sounds that created similar sensations in English that the originals create in Portuguese.
- Robert Smith
100 Refutations | Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
June, 2018Adelaide Ivánova is a Brazilian journalist and activist working with poetry, photography, translation, and publishing. She is the author of several books, exhibitions, and other creative works and is currently editing the anarchist-feminist zine MAIS PORNÔ, PVFR!. She splits her time between Cologne and Berlin.
100 Refutations | Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
June, 2018Marília Floôr Kosby is the author of three poetry collections: Mugido [ou diário de uma doula] (Coletivo Garupa, 2017), Os baobás do fim do mundo (Novitas, 2011; Après-Coup, 2015), and Siete colores e Um pote cheio de acasos (Flor De Tuna, 2013). A scholar of social anthropology, she was the recipient of both the Prêmio Açorianos de Literatura 2016 and the Prêmio Boas Práticas de Salvaguarda do Patrimônio Imaterial IPHAN/2015 for the essay “Nós cultuamos todas as doçuras: a religiões de matriz africana e a tradição doceira de Pelotas” (Après-Coup, 2015).
100 Refutations | Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
June, 2018Márcia Wayna Kambeba is a member of the Omágua/Kambeba indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon. She has a master’s degree in geography and is a writer, poet, composer, singer, storyteller, photographer, teacher, and lecturer. She is currently working on a project that combines literary and musical compositions to portray the resistance, culture, and identity of indigenous peoples. She lives in Castanhal, Pará in Brazil.
This poem was originally written in Tupi Kambeba, then jointly translated by Márcia Wayna Kambeba and Jan Oldenburg into Portuguese, and then from Portuguese into English by Jan Oldenburg.
100 Refutations | Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
May, 2018A poet and professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Lívia Natália is the author of five poetry collections: Água Negra (2011), Correntezas e Outros Estudos Marinhos (2015), Água Negra e Outras Águas (2016), Sobejos Do Mar (2017), and Dia Bonito pra Chover (2017). In 2016, her poem “Quadrilha,” which describes the grief of a woman whose lover was killed by the Polícia Militar, was censored throughout the state of Bahia. All copies of the poem—which had been displayed publicly on billboards as part of the Poetry in the Streets project in Ilhéus—were ordered to be destroyed.
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry (excerpts)
March, 2018Losango Caqui (1926) is one of Mário de Andrade’s poetry collections published within the period of Brazilian Modernism. This slender volume is situated in an important phase of rupture, written and published in between his two most influential poetry books—Paulicéia Desvairada (
Paulicéia Desvairada, published in English as Hallucinated City (trans. Jack E. Tomlins, 1968), is often critically placed within the Anthropophagy theory, inspired by the native indigenous Brazilians, who were known to have practiced cannibalism on their war captives as a means of absorbing the strength of their enemies. Subverting the idea of the indigenous as being colonized, modernist narrative portrays the indigenous as the powerful ones, therefore able to devour and synthesize diverging sources, digesting what’s European not out of subjugation but in order to create something better.
Losango Caqui ("Khaki Diamond") is, in many ways, a continuation of some of the same themes and avant-garde formal ideas from Hallucinated City. Andrade’s use of free meter introduced revolutionary European ideas into Brazilian poetry, which was previously strictly formal. At the same time, his focus was slowly shifting to a more nationalistic agenda. In this book, one can foretell the author’s subsequent turn to primitivism, as his exploration of national identity would consolidate itself in his following poetry volume, Clã do Jabuti(1927).
My intent while translating these poems was to further explore the ambiguity of Andrade’s poetic discourse, as well as the harlequin’s conflicting views on urbanization, multiculturalism, immigration, and colonialism, amongst other things.
- Ana Paula
Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Short Fiction
September, 2017When I first met Marcílio França Castro at a coffee shop during Brazil’s 2016 winter, he showed up toting a bag full of presents for me. When he dumped the bag onto the table, out came books, like he was some sort of mix between Jorge Luis Borges and Santa Claus. What most impressed me was his eagerness to promote Brazilian literature in general; his own books were joined by several from his peers. And perhaps Borges is a good comparison for Marcílio; indeed, his writing calls to mind Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar. Yet he does not simply imagine other worlds; he brilliantly perceives unsuspected oddities in places of absolutely no interest. In his short stories, which range from traditional length to flash fiction, and with a prose that is at once economical and yet never lacking in precision, Marcílio França Castro transforms his culture’s most unsuspecting spaces into fantastic reading. The author and I have worked together in producing translations for many of his stories, overcoming differences in idioms, metaphors, sentence structures, and other obstacles found in the passage from Portuguese to English. Most importantly, this project kept me sane during the subsequent North Dakotan winter of 2017.
- Heath Wing
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).