Conveyances: Poet Salgado Maranhão and Translator Alexis Levitin Join the PALABRA Archive

The following is a post by Henry Granville Widener, Portuguese Language Reference Librarian, Hispanic Reading Room, Latin American, Caribbean, and European Division

Words connect us in so many ways. Whether spoken, sung or written, they can act as the sinews that link our senses and emotions to one another. When I listen to the Library of Congress’ vast collection of recordings, sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch all blend together with memories and feelings. As Zora Neale Hurston sings Po’ Gal for the Works Progress Administration, I can feel the hot Florida sun, along with a deep sense of longing that is the blues. Likewise, Pablo Neruda’s reading of Alturas de Machu Pichu places me on the cold, hard wood of the pews of an old Spanish mission as a voice intones from the pulpit and echoes off of its adobe walls.

With this first in blog in the series Conveyances, the Library of Congress’ International Collections would like to explore the ways in which the translated words held in the Library’s collections link us across continents, cultures and centuries. Our first installment explores our recently published recording of Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão, who, alongside longtime friend and translator Alexis Levitin, read from Maranhão’s Sol sanguíneo (Blood of the Sun) and discussed Maranhão’s life with letters, as well as the joys and challenges of translating poetry from Portuguese into English.

During the recording, Salgado Maranhão recalls his birthplace, the scorching countryside of the Northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão, which he describes by reciting his poem Blood of the Sun, pt. 4 from memory. To the poet, this was a “medieval, almost Biblical” land which lacked money, electricity, and medicine. Villagers could count on just two visits from a Catholic priest per year. This village “had nothing but people and their capacity to overcome in a land so challenging for human survival.”

In this environment, Salgado Maranhão was surrounded by the beauty of words. According to the author, growing up in a quilombo, or a village founded by Africans resisting enslavement, “gave me poetry.” While no one could read, Salgado Maranhão recalls a community “refined in terms of cultural knowledge and human interaction”, beginning with his mother, “a profoundly knowledgeable woman.” To his late mother, Salgado Maranhão offers the poem Mater, recited from memory during our recording session.

At age 15, in search of work and an education, Salgado Maranhão moved to Teresina, the capital of the neighboring state of Piauí. There, the first thing he noticed was solitude, an anonymity that he had never known in his village of about 40 houses. “No one noticed my arrival. I saw that there I would be nothing, no one.” According to Salgado Maranhão, his life was saved by a library, where he first encountered the works of authors the world over, including Camões, Gonçalves Dias, Fernando Pessoa, Flaubert, Balzac, and Goethe.

Later in life, libraries would continue to contribute to Salgado Maranhão’s worldwide travels in poetry when Valéria Gauz, a librarian at Brown University, first introduced Professor Luiz Fernando Valente to the poet’s work. Through Professor Valente, in 2007 Salgado Maranhão visited the United States and met translator Alexis Levitin. The two have worked together to translate five of Salgado Maranhão’s books into English.

According to Salgado Maranhão, his work with Levitin goes beyond a simple transfer of words. According to the poet, one often encounters translations that beg the question “where do people talk like this?” To combat this disconnect, Salgado Maranhão “allows for a widening of the signifier” in order for Levitin to explore the English language in search of words that are “palatable to those who are from here [the United States].”

For the two authors, the poems Mater, cited above, and Êxtase are “emblematic of the work of translation” and the many challenges it entails. In Mater, the obstacle for Levitin was cultural: though the poet and translator are not far apart in age, they were born worlds apart. To Levitin, an American, it was unthinkable that Salgado Maranhão would not have an album of photographs of his mother. Through conversations and many recitals alongside Salgado Maranhão, Levitin overcame his misunderstanding and corrected his translation.

The use of rhythm and repetition in Portuguese in the poem Êxtase gives it a powerful turn of phrase at its end:

To Levitin, translator and poet are bound together by a belief that “the most important thing in poetry is the music of the language…When we work together, we listen very carefully to the cadences, the rhythms, and the consonances and the assonances in both languages. That is the heart of our work together… To create a translation that is true to the spirit of the original, the translation first of all has to be alive…That life comes to it through sound.” In fact, so alive is Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin’s work of translation that those with a copy of the 2012 edition of Blood of the Sun will notice differences between the printed text and our 2023 recording, as well as the above transcriptions. So get your pens (for personal copies only!) and ears ready and enjoy the movement and the song that is Salgado Maranhão and Alexsis Levitin’s wonderful work.

LEARN MORE

The PALABRA Archive

Works by Salgado Maranhão in the Handbook of Latin American Studies

• Maranhão, Salgado, Avessos avulsos, 2016.
• Maranhão, Salgado, A sagração dos lobos, 2017.
• Maranhão, Salgado, Blood of the sun: poems, 2012.