Education by Stone

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João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poetry was at its strongest between 1950 and 1980, and the selection presented here is weighted accordingly. His last book, Sevilha Andando, was published in 1989. João Cabral said he imagined writing poems that could only be read silently, and he claimed to be incapable of writing poetry without seeing the words on the page. In fact he quit writing it after he went blind, in the 1990s, and he described himself to reporters as an “ex-writer.”

Rather than offering excerpts from the author’s various long narrative poems, two such poems are presented in their entirety. Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of sections from Morte e Vida Severina [The Death and Life of a Severino] are included in her The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969) and in João Cabral’s Selected Poetry, 1937–1990 (Wesleyan, 1994).

The Afterword examines João Cabral’s poetics and discusses a number of the poems translated here. Lest readers imagine that some words were accidentally left out, let it be noted that a few poems —“The Dog without Feathers,” “Weaving the Morning” and “Banks and Cathedrals” are examples — employ syntactical ellipses, a device that I have usually tried to replicate in the translation.

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