Blood of the Sun: Poems

(Paperback, Bilingual edition)

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InBlood of the Sun, Salgado Maranhoone of the most celebrated poets in Brazil todayweds the powerfully socio-political to the metaphysical.

Masterfully translated by Alexis Levitin and presented in both Portuguese and English, this collection plunges into the concrete and the conceptual. Butcher shops, sex, and machine guns sit in spirited dialogue with language, absence, and time. Cannibalism offers an opportunity to reflect on random killings and the plight of modern man. The resulting poems are varied as well as unified, brilliantly textured and layered. Maranhos language sings in forms fixed and free, filled with a jazzlike musicality and fluted rhymes. In paining me my pain makes me a dean, one poem reads. Whose vice is claiming virtue as his own. / Am I saint or devil, or in between / Am I a killer who is yet unknown

Sensually provocative, defined by an aesthetic at once traditional and postmodern,Blood of the Sunintroduces a thrilling new voice to the English language.

Reviews

"Brazil's northeast is a dry and ancient land. Little visited, it has come to be known outside the country for producing some of its best writing. In Blood of the Sun , Alexis Levitin has given us a perfect English rendering of Salgado Maranhao's deft expression of the tonality of this people and land." --Gregory Rabassa "Alexis Levitin's translation of the Afro-Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhao's Blood of the Sun succeeds in negotiating the quirky experimental richness of Maranhao's Pre-Columbian, Amazonian, and Yoruba influences with his traditional rhymed lyrics and jazz-like syncopations. We journey to Brazil's agricultural northeast and out of the expected ballyhoo of Carnival into 'the desolate shelter/ of the flat/ land' and 'beneath the gaze of exhausted time.' We see 'the ritual jewels of Lilian Reyes O/ reign in the entrails/ of vibrant trance.' Levitin skillfully alerts us to the presence of a complex and offbeat poet whose work merits a wide audience." --Colette Inez "The publication of Blood of the Sun [Sol sanguineo] is the felicitous outcome of a spectacular collaboration between one of the most influential and innovative contemporary Brazilian poets and one of the most accomplished English language translators from the Portuguese." --Luiz Fernando Valente, Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University, from the Introduction

Author Bio

Salgado Maranhao won Brazil's prestigious Premio Jabuti in 1999 for his book Mural of the Winds. In addition to nine books of poetry, including The Snake's Fists, The Kiss of the Beast, Tiger's Fur, and the very recent (2010) Collected Poetry, he has written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil's leading jazz and pop musicians. Alexis Levitin's translations of Maranhao's poems have previously appeared in BOMB, Brasil/Brazil, Dirty Goat, Fourth River, Measure, Osiris, Per Contra, Pleiades, Sirena, Spoon River Poetry Review, Subtropics, Turnrow, Words Without Borders, and Xavier Review. Alexis Levitin has published more than twenty-five books of translation, including eleven collections of poems by Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade. His translations have appeared in more than numerous anthologies and hundreds of literary journals including Grand Street, Partisan Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. He has received four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Fulbright Awards, and a number of other prestigious awards and residencies. Levitin teaches in the English program at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.