tenho pavor de festinhas
aparo as arestas da farsa
visto minha roupa nova
mas hoje não saio de casa
i dread little parties
i smooth the rough edges of farce
i put on brand new clothes
but today i don’t leave the house
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.