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Salgado Maranhão
Brazilian Literature

Three Poems

  • by Salgado Maranhão

Editor’s Note: We are happy to feature these poems by Salgado Maranhão, inspired by works by American painter Will Barnet, along with the paintings to which they refer. All paintings ©Will Barnet Foundation, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York. Click here to read in the original Portuguese.

 

Janus and the White Vertebra, 1955, ©Will Barnet Foundation.

 

Beneath the Gaze of Will Barnet
(Janus and the White Vertebra, 1955)    
            

From somewhere
come colors
spreading
          through vertebrae,

coagulating clots
of light,
         though there is no light
near by.

Figures take shape
like limbs
             searching for each other

but, in fact,
                they are mere gestures
meeting in the distance.

Or perhaps secret cries
that cannot be heard,
much like our being
which, the more it reveals itself,
the less it can be seen.

 

Dialogue in Green, 1968, ©Will Barnet Foundation.

 

Beneath the Gaze of Will Barnet
(Dialogue in Green, 1968)            

They are knit of the same
flesh
         of absence, even
when—present—
             they flow together.

For they are dressed
in the skins
               of the night.

(an atavistic heritage
where guilt has no
face and where one plays chess
with nothingness)

Ah,
if I could only lash
their fears,
               underscore
their inmost cells
exactly where nothing ever will be said.

but I am broken
into many,
          subtracted
          from the absence of myself.

 

Idle Hands, 1935, ©Will Barnet Foundation.

 

Beneath the Gaze of Will Barnet
(Idle Hands, 1935)                        

Behold a century
                crushed
amongst its colors; behold

a dream stitched
in flames:
             a solitary hand

grinding down the pigments
of a time that aches
in our blood.

There was a flash of lightning
tearing the law;

a night stripped bare
in the eyes of the dreamer.

A dizzying flight
to make the legend sweet:

a bee drowning
in its own honey.

Translated by Alexis Levitin

  • Salgado Maranhão

Salgado Maranhão, winner of all of Brazil's major poetry awards, has toured the United States five times, presenting his work at over one hundred colleges and universities. In addition to fourteen books of poetry, he has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians.  He has published three collections of his work in English: Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012), Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015), and Palavora (Dialogos Books, 2019). A fourth collection, Mapping the Tribe, will be published in 2020. On Nov. 13, 2017, Salgado received an honoris causa doctorate for his cultural achievements from the Federal University of Piaui in Teresina, Brazil.

  • Alexis Levitin
alexislevitin1

Alexis Levitin has published forty-five books in translation, mostly poetry from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador.  In addition to three books by Salgado Maranhão, his work includes Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal, The Catholic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil and has held translation residencies at Banff, Canada, Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.

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