Tiger Fur
AUTHOR
Salgado Maranhão
TRANSLATOR
Alexis Levitin
A bilingual collection from one of Brazil's most prominent Afro-Brazilian poets and a major figure in contemporary Brazilian literature (ThriftBooks). Born in poverty in northeast Brazil, Salgado Maranhão has won every major literary award available in Brazil, including the prestigious Jabuti Prize and honors from the Brazilian Academy of Letters (AbeBooks). His poetry explores, via metaphor, the various kinds of devastation we bring upon our lands and thus upon ourselves (Thereadingwarehouse), blending Pre-Columbian, Amazonian, and Yoruba influences with jazz-like rhythms. Translated by renowned translator Alexis Levitin, this White Pine Press edition captures the fierce beauty and experimental richness of a poet whose work sings with lyrical intensity and deep cultural resonance, earning him recognition as one of the best known poets of his generation in Brazil.
Reviews
"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 Maranhão'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 Maranhão's deft expression of the tonality of this people and land."
—Gregory Rabassa
Alexis Levitin has translated over thirty collections of Portugese poetry and prose into English, including Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord, Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun, Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm, Eugénio de Andrade Forbidden Words. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Gulbenkian Foundation, and Columbia University’s Translation Center, which awarded him the Fernando Pessoa Prize. As a translator, he has benefitted from residencies at the Banff International Translation Centre in Canada, the European Translators Collegium in Germany, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center at Bellagio, Italy. A Distinguished Professor at SUNY Plattsburgh, he has given readings and lectures on translation at well over one hundred colleges and universities in the USA, as well as institutions in Brazil, Portugal, Ecuador, the Czech Republic and France.
Salgado Maranhão is the author of nine collections of poems. Blood of the Sun previously appeared in English translation.