casino

by Angélica Freitas

você prefere o cru

ao creme:

boca ostra língua

lago lua lugar

paisagem com pinheiros

ao fundo. você sempre

preferiu o cru

ao ecrã, insônia a

barbeiro de sevilha.

paisagem de pinheiros

com abismo

por trás.

você precisa

habitar as elipses

precisa dissecar

o sapo da poesia

– não abole o poço.

salta saltador

o grande salto.

a maresia come

as rodas do carro.

você prefere o cru

nem precisava

ter dito.

cassino

by Angélica Freitas

you prefer the raw

to the refined:

mouth oyster tongue

lagoon moon taste

landscape with pine trees

in the background. you always

preferred the raw

to the reel, insomnia to

the barber of seville.

landscape of pines

with the abyss

behind.

you need

to live in the ellipses

need to dissect

the frog of poetry

—not abolish the well.

leaper, leap

the great leap.

the salt air eats

car wheels.

you prefer the raw

you did not need

to speak.

translated from Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan

Angélica Freitas (b. 1973) is the author of Rilke shake (Cosac Naify, 2007) and Um útero é do tamanho de um punho (Cosac Naify, 2012), which was a finalist for the Portugal Telecom Prize. Her graphic novel, Guadalupe (2012), published by Companhia das Letras, was illustrated by Odyr Bernardi. Freitas’s poems have been translated and published in German, Spanish, Swedish, Romanian, and English. She was awarded a Programa Petrobras Cultural writing fellowship in 2009. Freitas co-edits the poetry journal Modo de Usar & Co. and lives in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Brazil.

Hilary Kaplan is the translator of Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas (forthcoming from Phoneme Media), for which she received a PEN Translation Fund award, and Ghosts by Paloma Vidal (2014). Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 4 and in Modern Poetry in Translation, PEN America, The White Review, and elsewhere. Her writing on Brazilian poetry and poetics appears in eLyra, Jacket2, Rascunho, and the collection Deslocamentos Críticos. She holds an M.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.F.A. from San Francisco State University.