Ana Cristina Cesar
Edited by Katrina Dodson
Translated by Brenda Hillman and Helen Hillman. With Sebastião Edson Macedo.
Free Verse Editions
Edited by Jon Thompson
Information and Pricing
978-1-60235-485-2 (paperback, $14); 978-1-60235-486-9 (PDF, $11.99). © 2013, 2018 by the Heirs of Ana Cristina Cesar. Published in Brazil by Companhia das Letras, São Paulo. Translation © 2018 by Brenda Hillman. 114 pages. In Portuguese and English
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Reviews
Clara B. Jones in I am not a silent poet, 30 Jan. 2019.
John Keene, "The Hillmans' New Translation of Ana Cristina Cesar's At Your Feet + Poems: Ana Cristina Cesar." J's Theater, 23 May 2018.
Description
Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1983) has posthumously become one of Brazil's best known avant-garde poets. After her suicide in 1983, her innovative, mythic, and dreamlike poetry has greatly influenced subsequent generations of writers. At Your Feet was originally published as a poetic sequence and later became part of a longer hybrid work— sometimes prose, sometimes verse—documenting the life and mind of a forcefully active literary woman. Cesar, who also worked internationally as a journalist and translator, often found inspiration in the writings of other poets, among them Emily Dickinson, Armando Freitas Filho, and Gertrude Stein. Her innovative writing has been featured in Sun and Moon's classic anthology Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain—20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets (2000). Poet Brenda Hillman and her mother Helen Hillman (a native speaker of Portuguese) worked with Brazilian poet Sebastião Edson Macedo and translator/editor Katrina Dodson to render as faithfully as possible the intricately layered poems of this legendary writer. At Your Feet includes both the English translation and original Portuguese.
About the Editor and Translators
Katrina Dodson (b. 1979) is a writer and translator based between San Francisco and New York. Her translation of the Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector won the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, among other awards. Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
Brenda Hillman (b. 1951) is a poet, educator, editor and activist; she is the author of ten collections of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, most recently Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days, forthcoming in 2018. Hillman serves as the Filippi Professor of Poetry at St. Mary's College of California.
Helen Hillman was born in 1924 São Paulo, Brazil, and came to the United States in the 1940s, where she lived and worked in Tucson, Arizona as a homemaker, gardener and translator. Her co-translations of Ana Cristina Cesar's At Your Feet will be her first published book. She is a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, and currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Sebastião Edson Macedo is a Brazilian poet and scholar (b. 1974), author of three collections of poetry. He has collaborated with literary magazines in Brazil, translating Allen Ginsberg, Lee Harwood, Yehuda Amichai, Konstantino Kavafi, Alejandro Crotto, among others. Macedo holds a PhD in Brazilian literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
Contents
Preface
[Soundtrack in the background]
[A storm closes in]
[Second quick story about happiness]
Lock and Key
European Winter
Carioca Night
Ivory
Independent Youth
[EXTERIOR. DAY]
Primer for a Cure
[I need to go back and take another look]
Ladies' Talk
Summary
[The story is complete: wide sargasso sea]
[Without you I'm really a lake, a mountain]
Behind the Eyes of Serious Girls
Behind the Eyes of Serious Girls
Haunting Encounter at the Cathedral
This Book
Two Old Ones, I and II
Vacillation of Vocation
[My mouth is]
[setting you free]
[she loved]
[it's very clear]
[When between us there was only]
[Used to reappear suddenly]
Bedside
Adventure in the Stocky House
Public Man #1 (Anthology)
Pour Mémoire
Good Friday
What Slides
Samba Song
Travelling
Out There
[Now and then I dig through this black bag]
[I wanted to speak of death]
Holy Saturday
[Ever since I came back I jump]
[Everything I never told you, inside these margins]
Final Fire
Onomastic Index
Acknowledgments
Notes
Free Verse Editions
About the Editor and Translators
