Reading & Conversations with Brazilian Poet Salgado Maranhão and Translator Alexis Levitin
This event is free and open to the public! Reception to follow.
- Wednesday, October 18 at 12:30 p.m.
Allen House, UMass Lowell South Campus
- Wednesday, October 18 at 5 p.m.
Boston University School for Global Studies, 121 Bay State Rd., Boston, MA
Salgado Maranhão is the best known poet of his generation in Brazil. Just a year ago, the Union of Brazilian Writers honored him with its poetry award for his retrospective collection A cor da palavra. In 2014, he won the Brazilian PEN Club prize for his book O mapa da tribo. In 2011 he won the poetry award from the Brazilian Academy of Letters for the above mentioned A cor da palavra, and in 1999 he won the prestigious Jabuti for Mural de ventos. At this stage he has won every major literary award available in Brazil. He has also collaborated extensively with well-known Brazilian musicians and composers and his work has appeared on a number of recordings.
Here in the USA, his bilingual collection Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012) led to a 90 day reading tour that brought the two of us to fifty-two universities in the Eastern half of the country. His second book in the USA, Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015), brought us to over twenty colleges and universities on the West Coast, the Midwest, and the Northeast in 2016.
Salgado may be of special interest as an Afro-Brazilian success story, having risen from rural impoverishment to the peak of poetic achievement in his country. We would be available for a bilingual reading and for classes in Brazilian Studies or Latin American Studies. We hope for an honorarium of $1000, plus one night’s lodging and a congenial dinner with our hosts.
Alexis Levitin has translated forty books, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words (both from New Directions). Books published in 2015 include: 28 Portuguese Poets, translated with Richard Zenith, (Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland), Destruction in the Afternoon by Santiago Vizcaino (Dialogos Books, New Orleans), Exemplary Tales by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Tagus Press), and Salgado Maranhão’s Tiger Fur. He has been awarded three Fulbrights and two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships. He has held translation residencies at the Banff International Translation Center, The European Translators Collegium in Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio.
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Questions?
For questions, contact the Saab Center at 978-934-5199.