Search results for ""Author Mark De Brito""

This pan-African anthology of poetry in translation is unrivalled in its historical, geographic and aesthetic scope. The material ranges from the time of the ancient Nubian King Piankhy to the contemporary Cuban poet Nancy Morejón. Much of the unique selection appears in English translation for the first time in this work. These are outstanding new translations, both precise and literary, which clearly reveal the beauty of the originals.The Trickster's Tongue contains poetry from continental Africa and from the diasporas of the Caribbean, Brazil and Hispanic America: poetry in a variety of genres, both oral and literary, ancient and modern, from the lyrical to the philosophical, and from sacred incantations to verse by former slaves and poetry of anti-colonial protest. The book is both representative and fresh: it contains the work of well-known writers such as Nicolás Guillén and Léopold Sédar Senghor, as well as important but little translated poets such as the Brazilian João da Cruz e Sousa and the Mozambican José Craveirinha.The author provides a scholarly introduction, which examines changing ideas about writing and identity. Each translated poem or excerpt is discussed in a critical commentary, which explains context, allusion, and poetic technique. The book includes a guide to further reading, biographical notes on translated authors, and a comprehensive bibliography.Poet, critic, translator, and musician, Mark Angelo de Brito was born in London in 1963 into a family originally from Trinidad. He studied music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Mark de Brito has published two books of original verse: Heron's Canoe (Peepal Tree, 2003) and Bigistong (Darengo, 1996). He co-edits the journal Seshat: cross-cultural perspectives in poetry and philosophy.

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Heron's Canoe explores the intersections and folds within the history of the collision between the cultures of Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Focusing on the journey the Yoruba gods made with slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean, on resonances with Amerindian myths concerning the scattering of their gods, and on the transformations of each within the creolising, hybridising culture of the Caribbean, Mark De Brito's poem is a highly original meditation on the both the nature of the African diaspora and the nature of history. He makes imaginative use of found text from historical sources, translations of Yoruba prayers and invocations, but there is always a deeply personal tone to these carefully crafted poems.Heron's Canoe is the English translation for the Carib name of a constellation that lies in the region of Ursa Major, significant to Amerindian myths of origin, which Mark De Brito's poem connects to other myths of origin, particularly those of West Africa which reached the Caribbean in the submerged belief systems and religions of the African slaves. De Brito joins that small group of Caribbean poets and novelists whose work explores the existence of a distinctive Caribbean cosmology as the root of a nativist literary aesthetic.De Brito's approach is both personal and intellectual: as a Black British person who has explored his Trinidadian family roots and through them the manifestations of Africa in Trinidad in the Orisha chapelles, but also as a writer inspired by the work of Wilson Harris in his emphasis on the importance of the broken and buried legacies of the Caribbean.Mark De Brito was born and lives in the UK. His family originated in Trinidad.

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