Our translation series returned with a trilingual evening —Portuguese, Spanish, and English— dedicated to Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto, with Spanish translations by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg and English translations by Richard Zenith.
Playful and rigorously faithful to rhythm, Cabral de Melo Neto was guided by a modern, almost engineering-like idea of what poetry could be. The arid landscapes of northeastern Brazil and life in the sertão shaped his extensive body of work, and his modernist poetics had nothing to do with folklore: landscape, for Cabral, was never meant to express overflowing sentiment, but to reveal the possible shapes of thought embodied in language. His work went on to revolutionize Brazilian poetry.
We read from Education by Stone (A Educação pela Pedra), moving the poems without interruption between Portuguese, Spanish, and English, following the contours of an architecture built collectively over the course of the night.
To close the evening, we had music by Marcela Joya, who spun tracks that interpret Brazilian sounds: a mix of salsa, funk, and jazz that told the story of how the world hears Brazil.
