Description
In Blood of the Sun, Salgado Maranhão--one of the most celebrated poets in Brazil today--weds 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. Maranhão's 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 Sun introduces a thrilling new voice to the English language.
Product Details
| Publisher | Milkweed Editions |
| Publish Date | September 11, 2012 |
| Pages | 192 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781571314536 |
| Dimensions | 8.3 X 5.4 X 0.6 inches | 0.5 pounds |
About the Author
Alexis Levitin has published more than twenty-five books of translation, including eleven collections of poems by Portuguese poet Eugénio 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.
Reviews
--Gregory Rabassa
Alexis Levitin's translation of the Afro-Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão's Blood of the Sun succeeds in negotiating the quirky experimental richness of Maranhão'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 sanguíneo] 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
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