Adriana Lisboa (b.1970) has degrees in music and literature. Among other books, she has published Symphony in White, which won the Jose Saramago Award, and Hanoi, chosen as the book of the year by the Independent, as well as two poetry collections. Her poems and stories have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Granta, Asymptote and The Indian Quarterly.
Matheus Guménin Barreto (1992) is a poet and translator. He is currently a Ph.D. student in German Language and Literature at University of São Paulo (USP), University of Leipzig and University of Salzburg. He published the following collections of poems: A máquina de carregar nadas (2017), Poemas em torno do chão & Primeiros poemas (2018) and Mesmo que seja noite (2020). A new book will be published in 2022. His poems were translated into English, Spanish, German and Catalan. He joined Printemps Littéraire Brésilien 2018 in France and Belgium at the invitation of Sorbonne University. His translation works include poems and prose excerpts from Bertolt Brecht, Elfriede Jelinek, Ingeborg Bachmann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Peter Waterhouse, Rainer Maria Rilke and others.
The poem “[is it lawful a poem]” (translated by Rubens Chinali) was first published in Contemporary Brazilian Poetry (2020).
She was born in São Paulo, but lived in the Northeast and South of Brazil, leaving Florianópolis in 2000 for bolder flights to England and the USA, with the objective of improving the English language, living fantastic experiences. In poetry, her main focus is to work in a multimiditic and contemporary language (concretism) a revolutionary (ontological) psychology search in the lived reality (self-fiction) and in the Cultural exchanges a young and feminine audience, in transcendence.
Isabel Furini is an Argentine writer, poet and educator. He has lived in Brazil since 1980. He is a columnist for the newspaper Paraná Imprensa. He published 35 books in Brazil, among them: “Os Corvos de Van Gogh” and “,,, e outros silêncios”; he participated in an anthology in Buenos Aires. She is an Ambassador of the Word of the César Egido Serrano Foundation (Spain). His poems were awarded in Brazil, Spain and Portugal.
Adriane Garcia (Belo Horizonte, 1973) is a Brazilian poet, writer, theater educator and actress. He graduated in History from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and specialized in Art Education at UEMG. Her first book, "Fables for adults to lose sleep", won the Paraná Prize for Literature in 2013, in the poetry category. In 2017, she was the curator of the Belo Horizonte International Literary Festival.
I saw Bonnie and Clyde
Dying
So many times
I started to
Believe
Only on
Bank robberies
As beautiful as Bonnie
And Clyde
Loving each other
Under the bursts
Was dreaming on
Movies
As if you
Robbed me
A hollow
Love is this
Adrenaline
That ends up in one of the
Getaways.
Translated by Samantha Batista
The color white reflects the sun
And sends the heat away
From Earth
If Earth warms up
The ice melts
And Earth does warm up
The seaweed that is born under the ice
Feeds the krill
Wihich feeds the whale
If there's no ice
There's no krill
And there's no whale
I know it's obvious
But I already spoke of love
And you didn't even listen.
Translated by Beta Guedes Cummins
I am whatever you think a black man is. You almost never think about black men. I will always be what you want a black man to be. I am your black man. I’ll never be only your black man. I am my black man before I am yours. Your black man. A black man is always somebody’s black man. Or they are not a black man at all, but a man. Just a man. When they say that a man is black, what they mean is that he is more black than he is man. But all the same, I’m a black man to you. I’m what you imagine black men to be. I can spill onto your whiteness the blackness that defines a black man in the eyes of someone who is not black. The black man is the invention of the white man. It is believed that to the white man falls the burden of creating all that is good in the world, and that I am good, and that I was created by whites. That they fear me more than they fear other white people. That they fear me, but at the same time desire my forbidden body. That they would scalp me for the doomed love they bear for my blackness. I was not born black. I’m not black every moment of the day. I am black only when they want me to be black. Those times that I am not just black, I am as adrift as the most lost white person. I am not just what you think I am.
Translated by Dan Hanrahan
The one who
hurls stones
of lightning
against the house
of the meddler.
Leopard,
husband of Ọya.
Leopard,
son of Yemoja.
Shango boils
yams
with the wind
that leaves
his nostrils.
He gives a new name
to the Musulmi.
He is still alive
when they think
he is already dead.
Orisha who kills
the first
and who kills
the twenty-
fifth.
Shango chases down
the Christian
with his cry,
cloud
that overshadows
a corner of the sky.
Leopard
with coruscant gaze,
do not allow
death
to take me
one single day
before my time.
I died how many times
in the longest night?
In the motionless night,
heavy and long,
I died how many times
on the night of calunga?
The night does not end
and here I am
dying again
nameless and again
dying with each
hole opened
in the musculature
of the person I once was.
I died how many times
in the bleeding bruised night?
In the night of calunga
so long and so heavy,
I died how many times
on that terrible night?
The night most death
and there I was
dying again
voiceless and again
dying with each
bullet lodged
in the deepest depths
of what I remain
(and with each silence
of stone and mortar
that sheds the white
of your indifference
onto the shadow
of what I no longer am
and never will be again).
I died how many times
in the night of calunga?
In the brackish night,
night without end,
the oceanic night, all
emptied of blood,
I died how many times
in the terrible night
the night of calunga
in the Bairro Cabula?
I’ve died so many times
but they never kill me
once and for all.
My blood is a seed
that the wind roots
in the belly of the earth
and I am born again
and again and my name
is that which does not die
before making the night
no longer the silent
partner of death
but the mother that births
children the color of night
and watches over them
as a panther
who shows, in the light
of her gaze and in
the sharpness of her teeth,
just what she will do
if the hand of evil
even imagines
troubling the sleep
of her cub.
I’ve died so many times
but I am always
reborn stronger
brave and beautiful—
all I know is to be.
I am many, I extend
across the world
and across time inside
me and I am so many
one day I will make
life live.
Translated by Dan Hanrahan
