Salgado Maranhão is a Brazilian poet who rose from rural poverty to win Brazil’s highest award, the Premio de Poesia da Academia Brasileira de Letras, for his collected poems, The Color of the Word, published in 2011. His poetry overflows with a love of the sun-scorched land of his birth and a love of the liberation that language can bring. In addition to eight books of poetry, including Mural of Winds, The Snake’s Fists, The Kiss of the Beast, and the recent Tiger Fur, he has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians. He will be touring the United States for the next three months reading with Alexis Levitin, the translator for his newly published book Blood of the Sun.
Alexis Levitin’s thirty-two books include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. His most recent book is Brazil: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, 2010). His forthcoming collections are a translation of Eugenio de Andrade’s The Art of Patience (Red Dragonfly Press, 2012) and Salgado Maranhao’s Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012). His translations have appeared in over two hundred magazines, including Kenyon Review, Grand Street, New England Review, The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, and APR. He has received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency and is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at SUNY-Plattsburgh.
Fall 2012
Table of Contents - Vol. VIII, No. 3
Poetry Fiction Translations Reviews
Salgado Maranhão
The four poems are drawn from Maranhão's recent A pelagem da tigra, a book stirred by passion of the flesh and passion of the word. It sprang from a brief and electric Parisian love affair. The upcoming English translation of the book by Alexis Levitin is titled Tiger Fur.
We are the lost coat of autumn. And the intimate
dimension in which the abyss affirms its gaze.
We are that blank darkness on the trail where
words
strip bare: something that (between teeth) scintillates
a silent
clamor: plotless, loveless, erasing tomorrow’s morning.
Love breathes in a puma’s shadow.
Somos a pelagem perdida do outono. E a íntima
dimensão em que o abismo impõe seus olhos.
Somos esta treva branca no rastro em que as palavras
se desnudam: algo que (entredentes) reluz um clamor
silente: desenredos, desamares a rasurar manhãs
no amanhã.
O amor respira à sombra de um felino.
A physical music falls on us; a larval
weave of dreams dyeing cornea and lymph.
In autumn’s supplication (stripped of flesh) only the singing
casts light on what we never were
–and what emerges from the word, tree of my toil.
Mar Aberto 2
Sobre nós incide uma música física; um tecido
larvar de sonhos tingindo a córnea e a linfa. Na
súplica (escarnada) do outono apenas o cantar
alumbra o que não fomos
– e o que aflora da palavra desta lavoura.
The heart reigns (crustacean and flower), solitary in its
container, sinking its stone into the sea; and it reigns in the
temple
of mirrors: weaving and weaving in disarray its worship of
the hidden, its anti-world curled still.
In the shell of the breast the heart (encrusted) ovulates
a pearl.
Mar Aberto 3
Reina o coração (crustáceo e flor) ermo em seu
contêiner a fundir a pedra ao mar; e reina ao templo
dos espelhos: vai fiando em desalinho seu culto ao
oculto, seu mudo antimundo.
Na casca do peito (incrustado) o coração ovula
pérola.
Maybe it is just this
obsessive
morning—this
exile
piercing the eyes—
the only beam of light.
And the flight
spelled out on marble
in the face of circled ruins
and the dance of divining shells.
Maybe there is
nothing but a ray,
a flash
transfixed
where a god is licking
memory.
Talvez seja só esta
manhã
obsessiva – este
exílio
que atravessa os olhos –
a única réstia.
E o vôo
soletrado ao mármore
ante o circo de ruínas
e a dança dos búzios.
Talvez não haja
mas que um raio,
uma centelha
encravada,
onde um deus lambe
a memória.
