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In this excerpt from a book-length work of the same name, Eliane Brum explores the sacred mystery of life via the remarkable tales and intuitions of the indigenous midwives that usher children into the world in rural Brazil.   They were born in the humid belly of the Amazon, in Amapá, a state forgotten by the news at the northernmost tip of Brazil. The rest of the country won’t listen to them, tone deaf to the sounds of their ancient knowledge and to...

Santiago had seen the young man watching from afar for some time. While he related his story, he noticed—out of the corner of his eye—that the kid was trying to get Pérsio’s attention. He moved around nonstop, speaking loudly, but Pérsio was entirely immersed in Santiago’s words, a man-boy listening to a tale of fairies, witches, princes. He had even forgotten the burning tip of the cigarette between his fingers, his mouth ajar, eyes open wide, almost...

Felipe Franco Munhoz finds William Faulkner and Jack Daniels don't mix It wasn’t our fault. It was the city of Curitiba, with that coarse appearance common to all cities in the middle of nowhere; it was the recipe we found with a quick Internet search; it was the Jack Daniels we drank that day, straight from the bottle; and—most important—it was William Faulkner. All because we’d decided, after reaching peak levels of whiskey, to act out some scene or other from...

When the Swedish Academy announced Bob Dylan as the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature, the decision was greeted with certain consternation. One pre-announcement prediction even went so far as to emphatically state that Bob Dylan—who was first nominated twenty years ago—would not be the winner. And then came the shocker: on October 13, Dylan was named the most recent Nobel laureate for literature, the second from my home state of Minnesota. (The first, Sinclair...

We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Brazil-based literary journal Revista Pessoa. Through the partnership, Revista Pessoa will feature selected work from WWB translated into Portuguese, while our readers will be able to access articles from Revista Pessoa in English on WWB. The exchange will generate greater global visibility for Words Without Borders contributors in what has been one of the world’s fastest-growing editorial markets in recent years. This is the...

Image: Gabriela Wiener presents with Juliana Frank at FLIP. Photo by Luisa Leme. This year the Festa Literária International de Paraty—the international literary festival better known as FLIP, an annual affair in the seaside colonial town of Paraty, Brazil, smack-dab between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—was intended to be a spartan affair. At least to the extent a major international literary festival can be so. Brazil, we all know, is in crisis both economic and...

Any attempt to introduce Brazil in a single essay is fraught from the outset. The country is, much like the United States, a continental nation, the site of European discovery tales to rival our own, and host to a series of political upheavals. It is also home to a literary history that has at times looked outward for inspiration, and at others inward to construct, via literature, an idea of nationhood that has often seemed elusive. Perhaps a solution presents itself in an idea every bit...

The following is an excerpt from the new translation of João Guimarães Rosa’s magnum opus, Grande Sertão: Veredas, first published in English in 1963. That translation soon fell out of print for reasons that are not entirely clear. As translator Alison Entrekin explains in her introduction to the piece on our blog, “[t]o read Grande Sertão: Veredas for the first time in Portuguese is like setting foot in a foreign country where the...

They were hard to push down, the buttons. Stiff, you might say. Marcelinho strained and scrunched his face, and succeeded. It still worked, even after everything. The buttons had always been stiff, even before Ricardo’s death. The little door was cracked, and behind the plastic Marcelinho said he saw some bloodstains, still. “Don’t be daft, son. That thing’s clean as a whistle. And be grateful that piece of junk still works.” Work is too ambiguous a word....

The Assassination 1. They’ve set up the ambush by a small bridge across a stream. They’ve been hiding among the trees since early morning—and they’re lying in wait. They know that José Cláudio and Maria will have to slow down here. That’s when the first shot is fired. Discharged from a hunting rifle, the bullet hits both of them at once: it goes through Maria’s hand and lodges near the left wall of José Cláudio’s...

“When are you going to write a book like Knife?” “Never, for sure.”   I was choosing the songs to put on the soundtrack of Lua Cambará when I came across the recordings of the spirituals commending the souls of the dead to God. Ten cassette tapes stored in a Styrofoam box. In the northeast of Brazil they still chant songs filled with religiosity during funeral celebrations. The women’s voices seemed to sprout up, beautiful and strange, up from...

Eliseu Cavalcante is a Brazilian photographer based in New York. In July 2013, Cavalcante traveled to Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil to capture the land-rights struggle of the Terena, an indigenous tribe. The resulting project, Esperança Terena, aims to bring awareness about the issue of indigenous land rights in Brazil. During the height of occupations to reclaim territory that traditionally belonged to them, Cavalcante traveled to the Esperança ranch...

I have been trying actively to stave off a case of Brazil-o-philia since the early 2000s when I lived in pre-gentrification Brooklyn. Preventive care for me looked like resisting the allure of capoeira classes, which offered the promise of instant friendship and community, endless references to obscure terminology, a pet name (as a West Indian, it’s hard for me to resist affectionate teasing and nicknames), and a warrior physique. Determined to keep my hot foot off Brazilian soil, I...

The following is an excerpt from Lúcio Cardoso’s Chronicle of a Murdered House, forthcoming in December 2016 from Open Letter Books. My name is Aurélio dos Santos, and for many years I have been established in our small town with a business selling medicines and pharmaceutical products. Indeed my shop could be considered the only such establishment in the town, for there is little competition from the stall selling homeopathic remedies on the Praça da...

Imaginary distances part from this spot, mirages which tell of the true distances between us. A man planted in front of the window is a ghost of himself suspended by improbable lines and colors. We are him and he is all of us as if we were yet the city around him. We are him and his slumped shoulders. We are him and his face gnawed by fish. We are him and the narrow streets that cut across him and stick through him like poles shackles and other senseless forms of nostalgia (like all forms...

if you want to journey to ithaca call ahead because it looks like everything in ithaca is full restaurants, bars cheap hotels pricey hotels you can't travel to the ionian sea anymore  without reservations  and the ten-hour trip feels like ten years stopping in egypt? don't even think about it and the duty-free shops are full of perfumes you can buy with a credit card. your whole life you've wanted  to visit greece it was a childhood dream conceived in adulthood...

After Ferreira Gullar It’s this body through which I discern myself a body made of flesh and desire of limestone and fuel of sap and ecstasy of clay and wind carbon fiber and shit. This body which, prone to dejection, at times boasts such grandeur such nobility a window onto my own illusions that, as I walk the streets, others anoint with the same name my mother gave me the one the notary public recorded in his notepad. A body —head torso and limbs skin guts smiles and...

Mind if I sit in the front? I’m going to Avenida Angélica, corner of Rua Maranhão, know where it is?  Pardon me, sir, but I need to get something off my chest. If you don’t want to, don’t pay any attention to the crazy things I’m about to say. You can see I’m a normal guy. At home, I always did everything right. I even went to Couples Meet Christ. I always liked sex more than she did. Even when we were first married, it was clear. Lots...

Unless you’ve been taking a break from the international headlines, you’ve no doubt caught wind of the turmoil sweeping Brazil in recent weeks, culminating with Brazil’s chamber of deputies taking the first step toward the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, a move many maintain is a soft coup. While there’s much room for debate—whether the impeachment in the works constitutes a coup or whether the fiscal acrobatics Rousseff engaged in constitute an...

At the tail end of my nine months in Rio de Janeiro last year, after first living in centrally located Laranjeiras followed by a brief stint beachside in Copacabana, I decided I need a change of scenery if I was going to make any real progress on my project: researching and translating contemporary Brazilian poetry with a strong sense of place. A friend spotted an ad for a house along the iconic bonde (tram) line, in the old bohemian neighborhood of Santa Teresa. As I followed the tracks...

On October 8-11, 2015, the Javits Center hosted the tenth edition of the New York Comic Con, gathering a crowd of 170,000 fans, many in costume, eager to meet creators and characters. Among so many masks, tights, and capes, there was also space for international comics, discussed on two panels during the event.   Different is Cool: Gabriel Bá & Fábio Moon The 39-year-old twins from Brazil who write and draw graphic novels—sometimes in collaboration, other...

Recently, New Directions released Clarice Lispector's The Complete Stories (reviewed here in the New York Times), translated by Katrina Dodson and edited by Benjamin Moser. During Moser's recent stop through New York, Words without Borders editor Eric M. B. Becker sat down with Moser and Brazilian writer Edgard Telles Ribeiro—whose mother was a close friend of Lispector—to discuss the writer who has been described as the Brazilian Virginia Woolf and the greatest Jewish...

This year's FLIP (Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty, or Paraty International Literary Fest) had a certain desolate feeling for me at times. Maybe it was the weather, cloudy with intermittent rain, that contributed to the nostalgic tone. The last time I was there, in 2013, it had been a sunny week and I was writing for an online literary magazine, meeting writers I admired, two weeks after coming back from New York City, where I had been researching experimental poetry in...

A novelist, poet, and short story writer, Adriana Lisboa’s works include the novels Symphony in White (winner of the José Saramago Prize), Crow Blue (named one of the best books of the year by The Independent), and Hanoi (one of O Globo’s best books of the year), the poetry collection Parte da paisagem, and some children’s books. She has had her books published in more than fifteen countries. Lisboa studied music and literature, and has worked as a musician,...

What if Brazilian imperial prince Dom Pedro Afonso had survived instead of dying as a child in 1850? By the end of the 1860s he would become a hero at the War of the Triple Alliance after capturing the Paraguayan tyrant Solano Lopez. Relying on his heroic male heir, emperor Dom Pedro II abdicates in favor of Pedro Afonso in 1886, who will rule as “Dom Pedro III”, the most beloved monarch of the Empire of Brazil. His coronation will assure the survival of Brazilian imperial...