Search results for ""Author Alexis Levitin""

"The wildly imaginative poems of Tiger Fur read like burning transcripts of one possessed with the rare gift of pure poetry. The collection is a hymn to desire, and to the ecstasy and pain of love, each poem aching with the yearning for connection. It's also a hymn to the imagination, and Maranhao's love of linguistic play and paradox makes these poems difficult to translate. Levitin's finely nuanced, inspired renderings are, however, as wondrous as the originals. One cannot read this collection without being marked, eyes ablaze and singed with the poet's vision."-Sheryl St Germain "Alexis Levitin has given us a perfect English rendering of Salgado Maranhao's deft expression of the tonality of this people and land."-Gregory Rabassa Salgado Maranhao is the author of nine collections of poems. Blood of the Sun previously appeared in English translation. Alexis Levitin has translated thirty-one books of poetry.

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In poems brilliantly textured and layered, Salgado Maranhao integrates socio-political thought with subjects abstractly metaphysical. Concrete collides with conceptual--butcher shops, sex, and machine guns in conversation with language, absence, and time--resulting in a collection varied as well as unified, an aesthetic at once traditional and postmodern. Writing in forms both fixed and free, Maranhao's language suggests a jazz-like musicality that rings true in Alexis Levitin's masterful translations. For readers who enjoy the complexity of Charles Simic, or the stylistically innovative syntax of Cesar Vallejo, Maranhao's Blood of the Sun is a sensually provocative amalgamation of both.

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This vital collection is as eclectic and electric as Brazil itself. These stories -- ranging from vignettes, sketches, and prose poems to traditional narratives -- cover a wide geography, physically, thematically, and stylistically. Tales of nature and magic, humor and tragedy, brutality and delicacy, sex and violence are played out against every corner of this vast and diverse land: the Amazon, the Northeast, the Central West, and the South, as well as in Brazil's two metropolises, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The earliest story, Machado de Assis' "The Wallet," was written at the end of the nineteenth century. The most recent were written especially for this book. Brazil is noted for its vibrant music and celebrations; this book shows an equally rich literary scene for the traveler or fan of world -- and world-class -- fiction.

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Eugenio de Andrade is the author of twenty-nine volumes of poetry as well as numerous children's books, collections of prose writings, and translations into Portuguese of Sappho, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Yannis Ritsos. Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugenio de Andrade, is based on the poet's own retrospective Antologia Breve ("Brief Anthology") of 1998, expanded and edited for English-speaking readers by his longtime translator, Alexis Levitin. Marguerite Yourcenar spoke of "the well-tempered clavier" of Andrade's poems, Gregory Rabassa of his "succinct lyricism...summing things up in a moment, much like haiku." His verse, deeply rooted in the rural landscapes of his childhood and in the ancient Greek lyric, have the clarity of light on sand, radiating pagan intimations of immortality.

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Love. Sex. Death. Meat. Traffic. Pets. In Cattle of the Lord, Rosa Alice Branco offers a stunning poetic vision at once sacred and profane, a rich evocation of daily life troubled by uneasy sacramentality. In a collection translated by Alexis Levitin and presented in both Portuguese and English, readers find themselves in a world turned upside down: darkly comic, sensual, and rife with contradiction. Here, liturgical words become lovers' invitations. Cows moo at the heavens. And chickens are lessons on the resurrection. Over the course of the collection, Branco's unorthodox -- even blasphemous -- religious sensibility yields something ultimately hopeful: a belief that the physical, the quotidian, and the animalistic are holy, too. Writing at the boundaries of sense and mystification, combining sensuous lyrics and wit with theological interrogation, Branco breaks down what we think we know about religion, faith, and what it means to be human.

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