The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture and Department of Portuguese, announced a bilingual poetry reading by distinguished Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão, accompanied by the translator Alexis Levitin.

The event will take place on Monday, September 17, 2012 at 10:00am in LARTS 397D, parking lot 7. There will be opportunity for questions for both the poet and translator. Free and open to the public.

Salgado Maranhão is a leading contemporary Afro-Brazilian poet. Salgado’s white father was descended from a wealthy family whose plantations in the past had been worked by slaves. His mother was a black field laborer who sang to him from a folk tradition tracing back to the lyric poetry of the medieval troubadors.

Maranhão describes himself as “born both to slavery and the manor house.” He received Brazil’s prestigious Prêmio Jabuti in 1999 for his book Mural of the Winds (1998) and most recently received Brazil’s highest literary award, the Brazilian Academy of Letters Prize, for his collection, The Color of the Word (2011). Maranhão has also written song lyrics and made recordings with some of Brazil’s leading jazz and pop musicians.

Alexis Levitin has been translating Brazilian and Portuguese poetry since 1974. His thirty-two books include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm (1989) and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words (2003), both from New Directions. His most recent book is Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012). Levitin has received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency and is currently a professor of English at SUNY-Plattsburgh. He is currently completing Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales for Tagus Press.

Via UMD/Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture