Ten young poets

As I’ve smoothed back into U.S. life over the last few months, many people have asked me which “new” Brazilian poets I’d recommend reading. I love to introduce readers to poets such as Angélica Freitas, whose Rilke Shake I’m translating, Marília Garcia and Ricardo Aleixo, both of whom I’ve written about in these commentaries, among others. And I love to discover new poets to read. Luckily, just the other week, the books editor of the Porto Alegre newspaper Zero Hora selected ten poets in their 20s and 30s “destined to keep poetic creation alive in the Brazilian literary universe” (“Jovens poetas: Uma aposta contra o tempo” by Carlos André Moreira, Zero Hora, Cultura section, p4-5, 2 June 2012). A good half of them have at least a few poems translated into English.

Moreira’s list includes several poets whose work I look forward to discovering: Lorena Martins, Mariano Marovatto, and Diego Grando.

The poets whose work I am getting to know better include Fabrício Corsaletti, Alice Sant’anna, and Ana Guadalupe, whose self-translations done with Jeremy Spencer went up on The Scrambler in March.

And the poets whose work I often point people to are Marília Garcia, whom I translated recently for Rattapallax; Ismar Tirelli Neto, here translated in Jacket2 by Farnoosh Fathi; Ricardo Domeneck, translated on Lyrikline by Charles A. Perrone; and Angélica Freitas (here is the short and snappy “versus me” / “versus eu”).

If you read Portuguese, or want to look at poems in Portuguese, here is a reprint of the article in A Notícia (Joinville, Santa Catarina) on June 10. If you scroll to the bottom of the article, you’ll see a red box labelled “Multimídia.” Click the link next to the PDF symbol to get a pdf with sample poems and photos of the poets. (Nb: Here and in the original article, some of the poems are erroneously cut short, including Freitas’s “Família Vende Tudo.”) You may also be interested in Moreira’s interviews with Guadalupe, Corsaletti, Martins, Domeneck, and Tirelli Neto, posted on his blog, Mundo Livro.