Conversations about Culture, Literature & Translation: Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin

  • Starts: 5:00 pm on Wednesday, October 18, 2017
  • Ends: 7:00 pm on Wednesday, October 18, 2017

A native of Brazil’s dry, impoverished northeast, Salgado Maranhão is a leading contemporary Brazilian poet, as well as a songwriter for many of Brazil’s most prominent jazz, samba and pop musicians. The son of a black fieldworker (mother) and a member of the white plantocracy (father), Salgado Maranhão describes himself as “born both to slavery and the manor house.”

Salgado Maranhão won the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti in 1999 with Mural of Winds. In 2011, The Color of the Word won the Brazilian Academy of Letters highest poetry award. In 2014, the Brazilian PEN Club chose his recent collection, Mapping the Tribe, as best book of poetry for the year. In 2015 the Brazilian Writers Union gave him first prize, again for The Color of the Word. His newest book is Opera of Nos, launching in September in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to ten books of poetry, he has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians. His work has appeared in numerous magazines in the USA, including Bitter Oleander, BOMB, Cream City Review, Dirty Goat, Florida Review, Massachusetts Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Here in the USA, he is represented by two bilingual collections of poetry: Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015).

Alexis Levitin's thirty-nine books of translation include Clarice Lispector's Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade's Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent books include Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012), Eugenio de Andrade’s The Art of Patience (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013), Ana Minga’s Tobacco Dogs (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2013), Santiago Vizcaino’s Destruction in the Afternoon (Diálogos Books, 2015), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press, 2015) and Salgado Maranhão’s Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015).

Location:
Pardee School of Global Studies, 121 Bay State Road (1st floor)
Link:
http://www.bu.edu/las/2017/09/26/readings-conversations-with-brazilian-poet-salgado-maranhao-and-translator-alexis-levitin/