Languages

"Afroinsularity" is one of two winning poems selected by Airea D. Matthews for the 2021 Words Without Borders—Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest.   Words Without Borders · Poems in Translation Contest: "Afroinsularity," by Conceição Lima, tr. Shook Listen above to Shook read their translation of Conceição Lima's "Afroinsularity"   They left the islands a legacy  of hybrid...

In this excerpt from his novel Quantas madrugadas tem a noite (How many dawns has the night), Ondjaki gives us a farcical view of urban catastrophe provoked by human folly. Then lemme take a step back to fill you in on the whole business: we started with the tick because now I know it came from the tick, but nobody knew at the time, you get my drift? Take it easy, there’s no confusion, there’s a whole bunch of different confusions: first, the dead man had...

In this short piece, Milton Hatoum writes a letter from the future chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic in Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil. I was twelve years old in April of the year 2020. At that time, drones did not yet deliver our food, nor was such a varied menu of pastilles on offer, each of which now holds the flavors, spices, and proteins one once found in a plate of food, and which leave us with the impression that we are eating as well as we ever have. Though it might be puzzling to...

In echoes of the Kafka text from which this poem takes its name, a queer man longs to confront his homophobic father for a lifetime of injury in this poem by Berlin-based writer and artist Ricardo Domeneck. Now that my lord more closely resembles a hunk of meat with two eyes turned toward the dark ceiling from the gurney where likely you will not die alone only because not even able to swallow your saliva yourself in the company of this tube alone that feeds you I ask myself if...

In this nonfiction excerpt, Chico Felitti tells the story of two Brazilian makeup artists who became famous for their radically altered appearances. The cemetery in São Bento, Araraquara, has a grave with no name. It’s the second tombstone in the fourth block on the left, if you walk in through the gate by the coconut-water stand. The family of the man buried there can't afford the R$140 (about $30) it takes to have a grave marker installed. But the man whose ashes rest...

A nameless town grows into a mythic city in this excerpt from Dina Salústio's novel Veromar. The residents of See-the-Sea, most of whom hailed from distant places, made friends easily and had no qualms about baring their lives to anyone who passed by. They particularly liked telling stories about the place, as though sharing its secrets imbued their words with new meaning, bridged distances, and, most importantly, cast tired objects and situations in a fantastical new...

Far from the sun of my home running to Africa running to Europe running to America running across the map running across the globe —Corsino Fortes, “Recode d’Umbertona” (Message to Umbertona)1 in Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme), 1974 The Cabo Verde islands have been a historically important piece on the geopolitical chessboard, variously employed as a map reference point, a supply port, and a link between continents and coasts. The Cabo Verdean...

Filinto Elísio meditates on the border between existence and nonexistence in this short poem. A cry, at birth, and, then, only silence. Inert stone, atomic, nuclear before life. © Filinto Elísio. Translation © 2020 by Jethro Soutar. All rights reserved.

Camões Prize–winner Germano Almeida traces the formation of a new Cabo Verdean identity in this short essay. It was when I was in grade four that I learned that, in addition to being a Cabo Verdean from Boa Vista, I was also a Portuguese from Portugal. It was an extremely gratifying discovery. In the first place because we had just been learning that Portugal possessed numerous immense lands both within and beyond the seas, in Africa and in other parts of the world, and that...

Camões Prize–winner Germano Almeida reflects on his childhood discovery of the world beyond the Cabo Verdean islands in this short essay. In the days of my childhood we used to go and play around the edges of a grave that lay isolated nearly two kilometers from the small town of Sal Rei on the island of Boa Vista, and which we called the “Maria de Patingole” cemetery. We already knew how to read Portuguese relatively well, but this business of “Maria de...

In this poem, Camões Prize–winner Arménio Vieira writes of drifting and belonging in a foreign land. For Ovídio Martins and Osvaldo Osório In point of fact, Lisbon was not waiting there                                                   [to greet us. There we stood, at last, shivering, adrift in the middle of Portela with its...

In this poem, Camões Prize–winner Arménio Vieira imagines a different future for the Esplanada Morabeza in the capital of Cabo Verde. The Esplanada in Praia, on Santiago de                                             [Cabo Verde on January 29th, 1971 is a sketch for a hydrogen bomb with no frequency calculations it’s a moon-bound      ...

Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” inspires childhood dreams and adult reflections in this poem by Filinto Elísio. We talked about “the first man” to walk on the moon. And that the music played on Apollo 11, it turned out, was “Georgia On My Mind,” sung by Ray Charles. Nha Gina, who worked for us as a housemaid, refused to believe, looking up at the moon, that the Americans had finally gotten there. This was an argument she'd picked...

A woman wanders through an apocalyptic dream in this short story by Fátima Bettencourt. A dream: From the window of my room, I watched the great massacre that I believed was the Last Judgment. Everything around me was being destroyed. Works of art emerged from the ruins. I took one, but it ended up falling and shattering into pieces. From my window, protected by the glass, I looked on, astounded, as the greatest massacre this planet had ever seen took place. Without any further...

Gonçalo M. Tavares tracks the COVID-19 pandemic in this stream-of-consciousness prose poem. NASA cancels lunar research. Matteo eats a forkful of pasta beside the window that looks over Vittorio De Sica street. Sica was the director of The Bicycle Thief. In Lombardy a woman is shouting for someone called Paolo. A sick man in a Lombardy hospital sees the faces of his wife and brother on an iPad held well up in the air by the white gloves of the doctor. The Marriott hotel is...

After learning that he is officially dead, Brazilian writer J. P. Cuenca tries to understand who stole his identity and why. A dead man’s greatest virtue is honesty. —Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas   I found out I was dead when I started to write a book. It wasn’t this book yet. I was living with my wife in an apartment two floors above a restaurant. The kitchen staff would get together on the restaurant’s back...

A homicide investigation takes an uncanny turn in this short story by Luiz Carlos Lisboa. Listen to Luiz Carlos Lisboa read "His Very Last Case" in the original Portuguese. "Walt! Walt! Walter!" Janice repeated in an increasingly strained voice, running her fingers through the white hair of the man lying on the bed. Standing behind him, the maid and a male nurse watched the scene unfold, not moving. Somewhere in the neighborhood a car horn had begun sounding and took several minutes...

The paradox doesn’t escape me: I was born and bred in Mozambique, known as the homeland of poets, and yet for a long time I didn’t consider myself up to the task of truly appreciating poetry in all its depth. This belief was first challenged in early 2017 with the launch of an independent press, Cavalo do Mar, which has published eighteen titles thus far, including the work of the three poets here, whose works haunted me and set me on this ambitious quest of translating...

In these two poems, time bends and life begins to circle.   A Life Diverse A minute goes by a second stares a third smiles but in the corner the minute hovers in wait for me like the eye of a horse trailing the cart. The future dies in reverse, the slug tells me It’s not anxiety or else I’d throw out expectation this gadget without hour hands that shouldn’t rust here inside: I want to be budding memory. But my hands are empty a presage of things astray I try...

In the poems below, Hélder Faife gives free reign to the frolic of children's imaginations, but it's not all child's play.   De(s)igns With every stroke of her pencil   the little girl unfurls dreams and traces childhood’s uncertain roadmaps.  A twisted loom, lines on a page mending sorrows which she weaves into life’s purity. In a scarring script she tattoos the wavering future on the bare skinned wall. Punctuation Without...

In this meditation on death, the poet tries to climb outside of language.   I stepped back from my death it was strange and inhuman to me * and now my eyes are knives slicing the night to                                                          split the mist rising inside like the tears of a poem shedding its sadness over the warm...

References and Further Reading  Alves, Miriam.Mulher Mat(r)iz. Belo Horizonte: Nandyala, 2011. Alves, Miriam. Entrevista. Duke, Dawn (Org.). A escritora afro-brasileira: ativismo e arte literária. Belo Horizonte: Nandyala, 2016.  Barretto, Lima. Obras Completas. Barbosa, Francisco de Assis (Org.). São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1956. Cruz e Sousa, João da, 1861-1898. Obra Completa. Organização de Andrade Murici. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguiar, 1995....

Franciane Conceicao Silva considers how racial relations in Brazil have affected literary history.  As the inquisition questions my existence and belittles the blackness of my body-word in the semantics of my verses, I carry on [ . . .] I carry on in search of other words, words that are still damp, voices drowned.   —Conceição Evaristo In my take on Afro-Brazilian literature in Brazil, I chose to consider first the works that had the most cultural...

A mugging reveals a man robbed of more than his money. For Edgard Hasselman Of all my acquaintances, I’d known this young man the longest. Forged on the street, in brief encounters in the cafés, our relations became increasingly friendly. At first, I took him for an invariably jovial person, indifferent to the more inconsequential things of this world, a skeptic in his own way; but before long, beneath this polite mask, I began to realize he was something of a whiner, a...

In the following three micro-stories from Aflitos by Jean Wyllys, men and women handle defeat with toxic—even murderous—reactions. The Course of Happiness The room in disarray, two used condoms strewn on the floor. The sun, which entered through the wide open window, aggravated her headache. She tasted bitterness in her mouth and heard the shower running. She quickly ran to the bathroom and came across a masculine silhouette behind the box. The still unknown person...

In these three poems, Ricardo Aleixo explores how to be a Black man, how to know someone, and how to protest and resist. Video: Ricardo Aleixo reads “My Man” in Portuguese.   My Man I am whatever you think a Black man is. You almost never think about Black men. I will always be what you want a Black man to be. I am your Black man. I’ll never be only your Black man. I am my Black man before I am yours. Your Black man. A Black man is always somebody’s...

In these four poems, Cristiane Sobral breaks down the door, is spat on by a dragon and deliberately burns the beans in the pot.   Black Eye I am a black renegade I refuse the mirror daily Which tries to massacre me inside Which tries to deceive me with white lies Which tries to discolor me with its rays of light I am a black renegade Determined to face the system I drum up the black without a hitch I bum-rush the stage I am a black renegade I advocate a necessary...

The author remembers how his father asked for American cookies from the hospital bed, and how, after a tumor claimed his life, no one ate the oranges in the garden.     In memory of José João Serrano Peixoto   The day begins to stir and things around me begin to stir a little also. I open the shutters. The flowers in the vases lift themselves toward the slender light that bathes them. The light skims low over the earth, like a plague stretching...

A moth, a light, a universal yearning feature in Yao Feng’s contemplative poem.   The light retires to the lamp and suddenly all is dark again who out there has caught the night-moth and instructs it in shadow? After countless drills the torn-winged moth no longer knows how to fly and trails through the twilight crawling snail-slow toward the light.   © Yao Feng. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2018 by Julia Sanches. All rights reserved.

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...

A Tragicomedy in Science Fiction Roberto Athayde’s extraterrestrials invite terrestrial concerns around man’s place in the world and in the universe at large.   Characters DR. ANTARIS   A Brazilian astronomer, an aficionado of UFOs. LOUIS               His assistant, an attractive young man. PERO                A...

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....

“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...

To Sergio Keuchguerian “You’ve never heard of a curse never seen a miracle never cried alone in a filthy bathroom nor ever wanted to see the face of God.” —Cazuza, “Only Mothers Are Happy” Only after ringing the doorbell many times did he finally hear the rumble of footsteps coming down the stairs. And he recognized the worn rug, once purple, later just red, then each time a lighter shade of pink—now, what color?—and heard the tuneless bark...

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...

Listen to Edival Lourenço read "Ephemeral Invention" in the original Brazilian Portuguese. 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...

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...

You undulate, soaked in iodine and sun around the cold outline of a universe: profound, public, oceanic, the mindset of a country: a tank of pleasure, of collective loss, shimmering in different grades of sepia since sepia is the shade of fine sand, and sand             is the color here, and ocean-blue. The night is at rock-height trying to pronounce your name: hot, salty in my mouth. How to explain the heat a language...

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...

The lawyer beside me shrugs in silence. His body language seems to suggest that some stories can’t be captured in words. He tries nonetheless. To make his narrative more palatable, he loosens his necktie and speaks slowly, as if rationing out his words . . .. He’s a middle-aged man, tired and earnest. We’ve been talking for a while in the hotel bar. Drink in hand, he braces himself to tell of an episode he lived through, back when he was still in the Dominican Republic,...

Plan Find out what is the best-paid line of work. Do a cram course. Sit the university entrance exam in that field. Be top of the class. Get a job. Plug away, single-mindedly, until I have amassed twenty million dollars. Quit. Buy a plot of land in Araraquara. Build an underground hangar. Acquire the most modern industrial printing presses. Hire excellent artists and graphic designers. Set them up in the bunker. Find out which are the ten countries where Shakespeare’s plays are...

II   When Natanael arrived, the first thing he wondered was, “Am I in the right place?” The taxi driver could not understand why my friend wanted to get out at that spot on the riverside road. Now Natanael found himself on the verge between the several lanes of the highway and the concrete incline that sloped down to the half-dead river. To avoid the stench, he followed Faustine’s advice and put his hand in his pocket, drawing out a handkerchief perfumed with...

Becoming Ishmael in Moby Dick, whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, it is time to take to sea. And armed with next to nothing, just the word that is almost less than a breath a gust with which I fill the sail and part in two the air and the water that carry the soul’s wing and the body’s hull to meet the beautiful beast that beckons from the horizon with his gaze green and lively: the Not-known, the...

the cruelest part was that as beautiful as much as her features flaunted a genetic pedigree of bonafide aristocracy and her hands deftly wielded needlework and roast chickens and her tresses attested to tortoiseshell combs and splendid grooming the fascination would always remain with the mermaid’s tail i won’t repeat the story after andersen & co we all know the rough path first the impossible desire for the prince (doll in formal attire) then awareness of powerful...

Why do all crazy people have the same paranoias? They’re always being followed by a secret agent. The CIA is nearly always involved. My own case (swallowing a chip) was only possible thanks to the CIA and the KGB. The chip had a strange effect inside me and gradually I came to understand how it worked. Rimbaud was the one who helped me with this. He checked my blood pressure with a machine he himself had invented. They were strange ways to check blood pressure. He had a medicine...

I sixteen degrees on Paulista             I had the verse so well structured this morning and drive in the flow of traffic                         never has there been a more lovely place                         nor a more loyal citizen II you are called a concrete jungle           a city...

It’s like taking your skates off after hours rolling about and finding that your feet and the ground no longer understand each other. You want to glide, float past people and things, but you can’t. So you think, OK, let’s get on with it, walking it is, one foot after the other please, but even so it takes a while to come together, because you’ve still got your skates on, in a sense. The brain says Walk, the feet say Skate. And if someone should...

A mother’s love, a hernia love that even when distant, even when dead is an inheritance that crosses the gap with the tentacles and gambits of a spider, tantalizing, and that clings, grasps on the inside: it will die with me, furious. Loyal tattoo, immune to the time of origin. From the collection Lar. Published 2009 by Editora Companhia das Letras, São Paulo. © Armando Freitas Filho. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2013 by Stefan Tobler. All rights...

Under my skin, my father invades me. Quietly, slowly: in my striated nails, along the fat visible vein, in my stomach that has succumbed, in my scrotum that has loosened, he flakes off my skin that dries out and wrinkles under my armpits. In my face, my eyes face the invader’s transfusion and it’s still to be confirmed whether in the last days’ light he will stay or shoot off before I resign myself to him. From the collection Lar. © Armando Freitas...

The table is set, immaculate, serene. Nobody's seated yet and it will be a little while until anybody does sit down and tuck in. But the time has come for us to sit together and eat together and move on. The house carries on. The convenience and grocery stores carry on. So too the bills, the expenses. Two days have gone by without anyone in the house crying. When I go through the living room at night my mother's bedroom light is off. Silence. She sleeps, everyone sleeps. In this...

Full       moment: live bird attentive to. Tense in             the instant  –immobile flight– full presence bird and             sign   (white, open and alive             attention).   Immobile bird. Live bird attentive to. “Vigília”  © Orides Fontela , from the collected poems Poesia Reunida [1969–1996] (São...

Soran was an anagram. That’s what he told me. He also told me he’d paid a very high price to get his hands on the watch. He took an old pocket watch out of his jacket pocket, all gold. I noticed it had once had a cover, a protective cover. He swore it had belonged to Professor Soran. I asked who the hell was Soran. He told me Soran was an anagram. He snatched the watch back from my hands and returned it to his inside jacket pocket. So, how much you gonna give me for it? A...

"The Walther's hot, if they catch you with it, we’ll get dragged into it. After you do the job, throw it away, in the ocean or the lake." "Leave it to me," I said. The Dispatcher went on. "Remember the Glock and the shit storm it caused?" As if I could forget the black guy who pretended he was living in the rocks with the cockroaches but wasn’t one of us, and smelled of scented soap and wore a fancy watch and when he stuck his hand in his waistband to pull out the...

Fluttering locks of reddish hair whipped by the wind and rain, smooth and radiant skin, she is Botticelli’s Venus walking down the street. (The one in the Uffizi, born from a seashell, not the one in the Staatliche Museen, with a black background, which is similar but has dry hair arranged around the head, descending evenly down the body.) Don’t think that I boast any extraordinary perspicacity, but the fact is that even if the woman I observe is as motionless as a statue, I...

When it all began, that is, when the Skeptic Party rose to power in the United Kingdom, in 2070, I was completely in favor. The group’s plan to completely forbid religious practice pleased me greatly. I was brought up in an intellectual environment, the son of a family that never believed in any god and always associated the religious figure with some guy with a double-digit IQ or a fanatical human bomb. I admit, I voted for the Skeptic Party as soon as it came into existence. But...

Deceased yesterday morning, aged ninety-one, the English scientist Allan J. Winchmaster, the father of Genetic Architecture, better known as God. Winchmaster was found dead in the easy chair of his country home, in the area surrounding Bristol, England. The cause of death has yet to be determined. Winchmaster suffered from stomach cancer, but there is the suspicion that he may have been poisoned. In recent decades, the scientist lived with constant death threats. His body was cremated in...

November 16, 1922 Marcel listened to his neighbor’s grandfather clock striking the end of one more November day. Celeste had assured him that it was impossible to hear any clock in his room, but his heightened sense as an insomniac picked up the sounds—even the muffled ones—of his home and those next door. His bed was strewn with papers and notebooks, and his inkwell balanced unsteadily on a board that served as his writing desk. He had been working for more than...

In memory of Luiza Felpuda I “Hermes!” The whip cracked against the worn wood of the table. Louder, almost shouting, almost angrily, he repeated: “I called Hermes! Which of you numbnuts is that?” I stepped forward from the back of the room. “I am.” “I am, Sergeant, Sir. Repeat!” Naked like me, the others were watching. The only sound was of the rusty ceiling fan blades turning, but I knew they were laughing quietly, nudging one...

Mastroianni Day [Exp–Adj]: in accordance with the universal lexicon, a day is deemed to be “Mastroianni” (from Marcello, Italian actor, 1924–96) when spent merrily sauntering about in the company of beautiful women, blown along by the whim of circumstance, devoid of any sense of purpose. The classic “Mastroianni Day” requires a three-piece suit, dark sunglasses, and, preferably, a hat. Some lexicographers would also include compulsive self-adulation,...

Fifteen years ago I moved from my native Rome to this small town embedded on a hill called Anticoli Corrado. I left Rome not in search of a calmer life but because the daily contrast with the greats of the past pained me. Accepting one's own mediocrity does not mean having to see it reaffirmed at every step one takes, we can agree on that. Another factor was that living in Rome was very expensive for a man like me, not exactly poor but of limited means. How would I describe Anticoli...

I don’t know when she discovered that I could no longer see.  Not even I had completely discerned this; I would look at books and judged that I could still see the pages, read them, understand them.  She, knowing the truth, was already devising her plan.  The process of distancing myself from books lasted many years.  And yet I felt closer and closer to them.  I read less each day, but since I worked in a library, I could feel them, smell them, leaf through...

For five years, Berenice waited for a chance to dematerialize her cousin, an objective she almost fulfilled the first time Dorotéia took part in the May Crowning, in the church on the square. It was an event staged on several tiers of wooden bleachers, where blue, pink, and white angels were arranged according to the vicar’s whim. The latter were the elite. Only elegant, fair-skinned, well-behaved girls got to wear white. On the top tier, suspended only by the Virgin...

               God is our cleaning woman                                         Adília Lopes                  for nélio paulo at...

As day dawned in the small town, old Ruschel was already at work assembling the platform, with the care of someone preparing a gallows. The event was scheduled for eight p.m. sharp, and no delay would be tolerated. “They’re the owners of time, the city, and everyone here. I’m just a humble laborer, but punctual, impeccable, perfect.” This was more or less what the old German murmured as he sawed and nailed the thick wood and carefully trimmed and sanded laths....

I’m afraid of turning on the TV and, like someone going into the Underground at rush hour, of having my intelligence stepped on, whether out of carelessness or malice. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to.” Curled up in a corner of the room, I turn on the telly, pretending I’m not there; but if I stumble across some brutal-looking individual, I turn it off right away. Then I close my eyes and dream up a fish. An old fisherman from Pernambuco taught me how. I...

A Letter from Appeals Court Judge X to the Chief of the Imperial Court Police The Court, September 20, 1875 Your Excellency must excuse the tremulous handwriting and the rambling style, both of which will soon be better understood. Today, in late afternoon, after dinner as I awaited the time for the Casino, I stretched out on the sofa and opened a volume of Plutarch. Your Excellency, who were my classmate, will recall that since early days I have suffered from this devotion to things...

How a mad queen, a fearful prince, and a corrupt court deceived Napoleon and changed the history of Portugal and Brazil forever At the end of the summer of 1808, exactly 200 years ago, an unusual event took place as the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro looked on incredulously. Early in the afternoon on March 7, a naval squadron carrying the crown prince of Portugal, Dom João, and the Portuguese Royal family sailed into Guanabara Bay, fleeing French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's...

At the very beginning of the twentieth century, at the height of the rubber boom, my paternal grandfather left Beirut for the Bolivian territory of Acre, where he worked as a peddler on the rivers from Rio Branco to Xapuri. He was one of the first Lebanese immigrants in my family. Eight years later, he returned to Beirut with pictures and stories about the Amazon region, which he passed along to his children and relatives. It's said that he told fantastic stories of shipwrecks, duels,...

One night, many years ago, I was strolling with a friend on the terrace of the São Pedro de Alcântara Theater. It was between the second and third acts of the play The Sentence, or The Tribunal of the Jury. All I remember is the title, and it was precisely the title that brought us to talk about an institution, and for my friend to tell a tale that I have never forgotten. *** I've always been opposed to juries (my friend said). Not because of the institution in...

This excerpt from a novel by Brazilian writer Cristovão Tezza depicts a new father’s revolt after his son is born with Down syndrome   The most brutal morning of his life started with interrupted sleep—the relatives were arriving. He was happy, it was visible, a rather groggy happiness due to his insomnia the night before, plus the shots of whisky, the intensity of the event, the series of little oddities in that official space that wasn't his. Once again he...

When Elisângela threw the box out, with all the authority of a woman who wears the pants, he didn't really care. To tell the truth, what shocked him most was that it had been two years since he'd last opened it. He was hiding out in Dourados, at the house of a cousin who didn't know that he was on the run and welcomed him with open arms, especially after the money he'd sent him to buy a plot of land. Those were the good old days, back when he could send money to...

My father abandoned my mother a few months after I was born. So my mother and I had to move into the home of my maternal grandmother. My mother had only one brother, Uncle Otávio, a failed economist who worked for an import firm for a pitiful salary. A friend of his was elected president of the nation and made him head of a large state entity, where he had the opportunity to get rich through corrupt measures, allowing him to give his mother, my grandmother, a life of luxury. She...

Ernst Spengler was alone in his attic apartment, ready to throw himself out the already open window when, suddenly, the telephone rang. Once, twice, three times, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, Ernst answered. Mylia lived on the first floor of 77 Moltke Street. Seated in an uncomfortable chair, she was thinking about the basic words of her life. Pain, she thought, pain was an essential word. She had undergone one operation, then another,...

First things first: I didn't write the book everyone thinks I wrote, the one that has been showering me with fame and riches since its publication, just over one year go. Although many people might find that strange—while others might say, I knew it, he never fooled me—the work was entirely finished when I found it, scattered in scrawls all over the walls of an apartment just like my own: all I did was edit it. They Kill Writers, Don't They? was written by a fellow...

In the Dona Berta garden, there's a bench. The only one left. All the others have been torn up, turned into loose planks bound for firewood. On this last remaining bench there lives an old man. Every night, seat and man, wood and flesh, cuddle up together. It's said the old man's got stripes on his skin, patterned by the shape of the planks, his outer skeleton. The elderly gentleman has been given a name: Vlademiro. He's been named after the avenue that passes by there,...

The day, along with Ismael, was dying. Under the blanket his still young body shuddered, the body of a man whose life had not been very productive. At his side, his wife Isaura, also still young, attended him in his final moments. Ismael was dying. And Isaura was by his side. And, in the agony of death, Ismael confessed: "Isaura, my love, I want to die with a clear conscience. In the grave and portentous hour in which I depart this world, I want to relieve my conscience so I may begin...

The couple stopped in the middle of the way to rest. They were both tired of fleeing and took shelter in a cowshed near an empty road. Soon the woman felt the first warnings. It was a providential stop; the most appropriate time and place for the birth of the child. That night, under the intense light of a star, the woman intensely suffered the pains of delivery. It was late at night when, between her muffled moans, they heard a strange wail. Perplexed, they looked at the newborn...

I take light from the closet drawers. The first day of fall. And all those years at the bottom. Before, it wasn't me. It was a house under construction. I before myself. Now I dismantle the summer, dresses flying, naked feet beside a dress. Time loses itself in the change of the seasons, but in this loss someone exists in me. A voice laughs deep within the closet. The sun so low, in the bottom drawer.

José Eduardo Agualusa, 46, is a growing name in world literature. Born in Huambo, Angola, Agualusa has already been embraced across the Portuguese-speaking literary world—especially in Brazil and Portugal, where his novel Creole was a best seller and awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature. Now that he has received this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the U.K. for his latest novel, The Book of Chameleons, readers in English, too, may finally begin...

I do not like parties. The idle chat, the smoke, the fatuous talk of drunks, I find them all tiresome. Plastic plates annoy me even more. And plastic cutlery. And plastic cups. I'm served roasted rabbit on a plastic plate, forced to eat it with plastic cutlery, on my lap because there's no more room at the table. Inevitably the knife breaks. The meat is thrown onto my trousers. I spill my wine. Besides which, I can't stand rabbit. I make a great effort not to be noticed, but...

I want to be like the flower that dies before getting old. That's what Modari, the fat Indian girl, used to say. She didn't die, nor did she grow old. She just got fatter and fatter. By the time her adolescence was over, she'd grown huge, globese. She reclined on her bed cylindrically, unable to move, filling the feathery fabric with fluff. And because she cast so much shadow, moss even began to grow in the folds of her flesh. Her life was one of distraction. They would...

I go to Lisbon on business fairly regularly. I get on a plane to go there, if not every month, then at least every six weeks or so. I understand the language well enough not to need an interpreter, having spent a good deal of my childhood and adolescence in Brazil, where my parents lived for some years, again for professional reasons. I know the city reasonably well too. Places we travel to frequently eventually do start to feel familiar, at least superficially, even when, at a deeper...

Having lived many years in the scrub grass in the way of birds The boy took on a bird's kind of stare— He obtained a fountainesque vision. He observed things the way birds observed them. All the unnamed things. Water wasn't the word water yet. Rock not the word rock. They just were. Words were free of grammar and could inhabit any position. So it was the boy could inaugurate them as he pleased. He could give rocks the costumes of the sun. He could give song the...

There was a high wall between our houses. Difficult to send her a message. There was no email. Her father was a jaguar. We tied notes to a rock bound to a rope and I threw the rock into her backyard. It was glorious. But sometimes the note got stuck in the branches of the guayaba tree and then it was agony. So it was in the time of jaguars. Translation of "Namorada." Copyright Manoel de Barros. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2007 by Idra Novey. All...

Today, for some unknown reason, I've decided to share with you certain indiscretions that even my wife is unaware of. Of course this is just a figure of speech, for the truth is that women seldom know everything that their husbands think and above all what they do, it being necessary only to add—for the consolation of any possible female readers or, for that matter, to feed the cynicism of my male readers—that the opposite is ever truer, because everyone, men and women...

"But Comrade António, don't you prefer to live in a free country?" I liked to ask this question when I came into the kitchen. I'd open the refrigerator and take out the water bottle. Before I could reach for a glass, Comrade António was passing me one. His hands made greasy fingerprints on the sides, but I didn't have the courage to refuse this gesture. I filled the glass, drank one swallow, two, and waited for his reply. Comrade António breathed. Then...

Dolores' mouth was clean. She brushed her teeth some six times a day; flossed one by one, two by one, up, down, around. Every day the interdental brush probed into hard corners. Diligent rinses and ablutions. A clean mouth. "Wash your mouth out, girl!" She heard the voice of her cross-eyed aunt, skirt tied up like a pair of knickerbockers. "Your mouth is your calling card," she would say over and over. "Did my mother die because her mouth got dirty?" Dolores asked her dolls in...

I was White and had fianchettoed my bishop. Berta was mounting a strong center pawn position. "This is the office of Paulo Mendes," my voice said on the answering machine, giving whoever had called thirty seconds to leave a message. The guy said his name was Cavalcante-Meier, as if there were a hyphen between the two names, and that they were trying to frame him for a crime but–click–his time ran out before he could say what he planned to do. "Every time we're in a...

Alberto Martins's History of the Bones opens with the narrator receiving a phone call from the provincial seaside cemetery where his father is buried. In a brief conversation, he learns that that block of the cemetery is being used for other purposes, so he will need to exhume his father's bones and reinter them elsewhere. At the cemetery, the narrator discovers that the crematorium of this rundown city (the city of his childhood) no longer operates. So he leaves the graveyard,...

On the phone he said he was a young writer who wished to speak with a representative of Ilhéu Publishing and, for lack of anyone else at the time, I made myself available to see him. Shortly afterward a man of indeterminate age introduced himself. Ceremonious, humble, weighing each word, he extended almost fearfully a timid hand. (I wondered whether that was the attitude of all authors when they approach a publisher for the first time.) He was carrying a crumpled plastic bag that,...

He described himself down the phone as a young writer who was keen to meet with a representative of Ilhéu Publishing, and in the absence of anyone else at that moment I agreed to receive him. Shortly afterwards a man of indeterminate years was announced. Rather formal, modest, weighing every word, almost fearful, he held his hand out to me hesitantly. (I wondered whether all authors behaved like this when meeting a publisher for the first time?) He had brought with him a crumpled...

Editors' Note: This month we present the first in a series of dialogues: two translators produce versions of the same text, then discuss their choices and approaches. Here Daniel Hahn and Clifford E. Landers consider their renderings of Germano Almeida's "The Best Seller." Links to their respective translations appear at the end. In the spirit of the discussion, we have retained the translators' orthography. Daniel Hahn: Let me start by asking you a question—or rather,...

I brought flowers They're not all white, Mother But they're morning's fresh flowers They opened yesterday I kept them by me all night While straining the honey And weaving my dress It's not white, Mother But it will do for the sacrificial table I brought the tacula* cream Used in Grandmother's day It's not thick, Mother But it covers my body I brought the candles Of wax and bees' wings They're not pure, Mother But they can burn all night I...

When I write, I never think of the reader. But last week, late at night, I was reading a story by Jorge Luis Borges at a table in a bar when a man of my age came over to me with an air of hostility: "I am a reader and I came to settle accounts with you." I was going to ask something, but he continued in a harsh tone: "For two reasons: the first is that you excluded me from your romance novel. The second is the more serious one. You killed my father in that same romance novel." I...

Petty tyrants who founded kingdoms at the foot of their sorrow Petty tyrants who will never conquer the China Seas or the realms of Manicongo Petty tyrants who climb the roofs of their shacks and survey the waning world from on high Petty tyrants tear the shoes off speeding runners who illuminate their messengers' way and produce clandestine plans of action in sealed portfolios. They blindfold sparkling eyes letting no light enter and whisper proclamations in...